He received a B.S. in chemical engineering from the University of Washington in 1933. He was with North West Distilleries in Seattle until 1936, when he joined the Application Engineering Dept. of the Taylor Instrument Companies, located in Rochester, N.Y. In 1945, he relocated to Taylor's San Francisco office, and worked there as a Pacific Coast Sales Engineer until his retirement in 1972. He then formed his own company, Zieglar and Associates, to produce specialized monitoring instruments of his own design for the sugar refining industry.

He is best known as the presenter, in 1941, of now classic technical paper, Optimum Settings for Automatic Controllers, which he coauthored with N.B. Nichols, and which proposed the well-known Zieglar-Nichols approach to tuning automatic controllers. Over the course of his career, his technical talks and articles, along his ability to resolve process control problems in the sugar refining, petroleum refining and other industries have distinguished him internationally.           (Bio. from Chemical Engineering magazine May 1994)