Cyril Stanley Smith

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Cyril Stanley Smith
Los Alamos Laboratory
University of Chicago
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Doctoral studentsWilliam W. Mullins

Cyril Stanley Smith (4 October 1903 – 25 August 1992) was a British

Los Alamos Laboratory, where he purified, cast and shaped uranium-235 and plutonium, a metal hitherto available only in microgram amounts, and whose properties were largely unknown. After the war he served on the Atomic Energy Commission's influential General Advisory Committee, and the President's Science Advisory Committee
.

Smith founded the

samurai swords
.

Early life

Smith was born in

BSc in 1924.[1]

That year Smith entered the

copper alloys. He published numerous papers, and was awarded 20 patents.[3][4]

He married

Vannocio Biringuccio's De la pirotechnia (1540).[1]

World War II

Cyril Smith's Los Alamos badge

In 1942, during

Los Alamos Laboratory as the head of its Metallurgy Group. When the laboratory was reorganized in April 1944, he became the Associate Division Leader in charge of metallurgy.[6] His first task was recruiting metallurgists, who were in great demand by the war effort. He also had to arrange for the transport of their metallurgical equipment to Los Alamos under wartime conditions.[7]

Smith's metallurgists found ways of fabricating

Ames Laboratory which was fine for producing tons of feed for the nuclear reactors, but enriched uranium could not be handled in this way, as it would form a critical mass. Smith was initially asked to produce cubes of uranium hydride, which he did, but the 1950s uranium hydride bomb tests were found to be inefficient,[when?] and the idea was set aside for the duration, although further work was carried out after the war.[7][9] By July 1944, they were producing pure uranium metal in 200g amounts with a newly devised process.[10]

But by far the biggest challenge for Smith and his group was plutonium, a metal hitherto available only in microgram amounts, and whose properties were largely unknown.[11] It was initially assumed that plutonium would have properties similar to that of uranium, but this assumption turned out to be invalid. Plutonium proved to be "the most complicated metal known to man".[12] There were found to be six allotropes of plutonium, more than any other metal, and its melting point turned out to be hundreds of degrees lower than uranium.[12] The metallurgists found that at around 125 °C, plutonium expanded in volume by 20 percent, which is unusual.[13]

Plutonium was delivered to Los Alamos in the form of what was found to be a mixture of

Trinity nuclear test by 23 July 1945.[13][15]

Smith was awarded the Medal for Merit by President Harry S. Truman for these activities in 1946.[3]

University of Chicago

The Institute for the Study of Metals was located in the old Stagg Field until 1951

After the war Smith founded the

grain boundaries in metals, and developed theoretical models of them.[16] Perhaps his most influential paper was on "Grain Shapes and Other Metallurgical Applications of Topology" (1952), an explanation of metallic microstructure.[1] He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1955 to study the History of Science and Technology.[17]

From 12 December 1946 to 10 January 1952, Smith served on the influential General Advisory Committee of the

hydrogen bomb on technical and moral grounds.[22] He also served on the National Academy of Sciences' Committee on Science, Engineering, and Public Policy and the President's Science Advisory Committee.[4] Smith was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1950,[23] the American Philosophical Society in 1955,[24] and the United States National Academy of Sciences in 1957.[25]

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

In 1961, Smith moved to MIT as an Institute Professor with appointments in both the Departments of Humanities and Metallurgy. His focus was to transplant the techniques of metallurgy into the study of the production methods used to create artefacts discovered by

samurai swords. In his role of teaching the history of science, he argued that important advances were often the result of curiosity rather than the pursuit of defined goals. He was interested in the scientific aspects of fine arts, and published several works linking the arts with the sciences. He lectured about this at the Smithsonian Institution's Freer Gallery of Art and the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery in Washington, DC.[16]

Smith received numerous awards, including the

Institute of Metals' Platinum Medal in 1970.[4]
In 1981, Cyril Stanley Smith received the
Dexter Award for Outstanding Achievement in the History of Chemistry from the American Chemical Society.[26]
In 1991 he received the American Institute of Physics' Andrew Gemant Award for "pioneering the use of solid state physics in the study of ancient art and artefacts to reconstruct their cultural, historical and technological significance."[4] He was also a member of the editorial board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.[4]

On retirement from MIT in 1969, Smith became a professor emeritus of the History of Science and Technology, professor emeritus of Metallurgy and Humanities and Institute Professor Emeritus, an unusual title "reserved for only a few whose work transcends the boundaries of traditional departments and disciplines".[4] He died of colonic cancer in his Cambridge, Massachusetts home on 25 August 1992.[1] He was survived by his wife of sixty years, Alice Kimball Smith, his two children, Anne Smith Denman, chair of the Department of Anthropology at Central Washington University, and Stuart Marchant Smith, a marine geologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and a sister, Mary Smith.[4] His papers are in the Niels Bohr Library in College Park, Maryland.[27] His collection of antiquarian metallurgical texts was left to the Burndy Library at the Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology.[4]

Selected works

  • Smith, Cyril S. (1952). "Grain Shapes and Other Metallurgical Applications of Topology". Metal interfaces: a seminar on metal interfaces held during the Thirty-third National Metal Congress and Exposition, Detroit, October 13 to 19, 1951; sponsored by the American Society for Metals. Cleveland: American Society for Metals. pp. 65–108.
  • Smith, Cyril S. (1968). Sources for the History of the Science of Steel 1532–1786. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Society for the History of Technology.
  • Smith, Cyril Stanley &
    JSTOR 1006317. Closed access icon
  • Smith, Cyril S. (1980). From Art to Science. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.
    ISBN 0-262-19181-4
    .
  • Smith, Cyril S. (1981). A Search for Structure: Selected Essays on Science, Art and History. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.
    ISBN 0-262-19191-1
    .
  • Smith, Cyril S. (1988). History of Metallography: The Development of Ideas on the Structure of Metals Before 1890. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.
    ISBN 0-262-69120-5
    .
  • Vannocio Biringuccio (January 1990). The Pirotechnia of Vanoccio Biringuccio (in Italian). Dover.
    ISBN 0-486-26134-4
    . 20th Century translation by Cyril Stanley Smith and Martha Teach Gnudi
  • ISBN 0-486-23784-2
    .

Notes

  1. ^
    doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/51320. (Subscription or UK public library membership
    required.)
  2. ^ "Cyril Stanley Smith (1903–1992)" (PDF). American Chemical Society. Retrieved 4 May 2015.
  3. ^ a b c "Cyril Stanley Smith (1903–1992)" (PDF). American Chemical Society. Retrieved 15 March 2015.
  4. ^ a b c d e f g h i "Cyril Stanley Smith Dies at 88". 2 September 1992. Archived from the original on 21 September 2007. Retrieved 15 March 2015.
  5. ^ Hoddeson et al. 1993, p. 209.
  6. ^ Hawkins, Truslow & Smith 1961, pp. 148–149.
  7. ^ a b c Hoddeson et al. 1993, pp. 210–211.
  8. ^ Hawkins, Truslow & Smith 1961, p. 162.
  9. doi:10.1080/00963402.1994.11456528
    . Retrieved 15 March 2015.
  10. ^ Hoddeson et al. 1993, p. 220.
  11. ^ Hoddeson et al. 1993, pp. 126–127.
  12. ^ a b Hoddeson et al. 1993, p. 206.
  13. ^ a b c "Cyril S. Smith's Interview". Manhattan Project Voice. 1986. Retrieved 15 March 2015.
  14. ^ Hoddeson et al. 1993, pp. 281–285.
  15. ^ Hoddeson et al. 1993, pp. 328–331.
  16. ^
    doi:10.1063/1.2808951
    .
  17. ^ "Cyril Stanley Smith". John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Retrieved 15 March 2015.
  18. ^ Hewlett & Duncan 1969, p. 665.
  19. ^ Hewlett & Duncan 1969, pp. 16–17.
  20. ^ Hewlett & Duncan 1969, p. 43.
  21. ^ Weeks, Erin (18 June 2013). "The Cyril Smith Incident: A tale of Cold War jitters". Retrieved 4 May 2015.
  22. ^ Hewlett & Duncan 1969, pp. 380–385, 389.
  23. ^ "Cyril Stanley Smith". American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Retrieved 17 January 2023.
  24. ^ "APS Member History". search.amphilsoc.org. Retrieved 17 January 2023.
  25. ^ "Cyril S. Smith". www.nasonline.org. Retrieved 17 January 2023.
  26. ^ "Dexter Award for Outstanding Achievement in the History of Chemistry". Division of the History of Chemistry. American Chemical Society. Retrieved 30 April 2015.
  27. ^ "Cyril Stanley Smith papers, 1922–1992". American Institute of Physics. Retrieved 15 March 2015.

References
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