On leaving school at 16 Charles served a four-year Craft Apprenticeship in Mechanical Engineering. During this time he also studied to gain O.N.C. and H.N.C in mechanical engineering at the local Technical College.
On completing the apprenticeship as a Toolmaker, winning a ‘Best student’ award on the way, he entered Loughborough University and studied for a B.Sc. in Materials Engineering. On gaining an Honours degree and a Diploma in Industrial Studies he moved to the Physics Department to research into vacuum deposition processes and went on to gain both an M.Phil. and Ph.D. by research and thesis.
After a period of time as a post-doctoral research scientist at University where Charles also took on consultancy work he was headhunted into Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI plc). His first position in ICI was as a senior research scientist in Surface Engineering within the New Science Group. During his time within ICI he worked for business as diverse as Nylons, Polyesters, Explosives, Imagedata and Flex Products Inc. Projects included taking laboratory processes through to production, the technical input during the company selection process for the acquisition of a vacuum deposition company, troubleshooting a new $45M explosives production line, technology scanning to provide new technologies as part of a route to new markets as well as numerous smaller product development tasks. During this time, work was carried out in the USA and Europe as well as the UK.
In December 1998 Charles elected to return to consultancy work and established his own business, C.A.Bishop Consulting Ltd., offering help on all aspects of vacuum deposition including system design, process development and scale-up, process control, plasma surface treatments and coatings, as well as troubleshooting existing processes and running training courses.
Charles has published over 60 technical papers, has 5 patents and has conducted training courses in the UK, USA, India and Europe. In 2007 his book Vacuum Deposition onto Webs, Films & Foils was published and this was followed in 2010 by a second book Roll-to-roll vacuum deposition of barrier coatings.
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