The history of A.H. Lundberg Systems dates back to the 1920s, when Alerick Halvar Lundberg began his career with a sulfite pulp manufacturer on the East Coast of the United States. Lundberg later joined the J.D. Jennsen company, a prominent designer and supplier of acid manufacturing and recovery systems for the sulfite pulp industry, and in the early 1930s relocated to Seattle to become their West Coast representative.

During this period, the pulping industry in general was moving from the sulfite process to the kraft pulping process, with many new, large mills being built in the Southern states. The West Coast was home to several sulfite-based pulp mills, and in order for them to survive, they needed to modernize and upgrade their equipment. Lundberg was quite successful in obtaining a large amount of this business for the J.D. Jennsen Company and came to be known as “Mr. Sulfite“ all along the West Coast.

In the 1930s, it was clear that the kraft pulping process was the future of the industry. He began to develop relationships with the Scandinavian companies supplying equipment for the kraft process, eventually becoming the West Coast representative of Paper Machinery Ltd. (PML) and Svenska Flaktfabriken (SF). PML was the exclusive North American licensee of Karlstad Merkanske Werkstad (KMW), a company that would become one of the parties forming the company “Kamyr.” Although Lundberg was becoming more active in the kraft pulping industry, he continued to serve the sulfite pulping industry, eventually developing a series of technical papers that were ultimately published in hardcover format as Acid Making in the Sulfite Pulping Industry in the mid-1940s.