Cyril Stanley Smith (1903–1992)

Abstract

Memorial CYRIL STANLEY SMITH (1903-1992) THOMAS P. HUGHES Cyril Stanley Smith lent his scholarly style and his prestige to the Society for the History of Technology when they were sorely needed. His enthusiastic support of the society and his deep interest in the history of technology helped Melvin Kranzberg as he labored imagi­ natively to attract new members into the society and to persuade others to perform the various chores of society affairs. When Cyril accepted the presidency of the society in 1963, he took an active role in shaping policies that helped determine its intellectual and organi­ zational character then and even today. Respectful of the professional historian, he nevertheless believed that engineers and scientists had special and important roles to play by writing the history of science and engineering. They could, he believed, provide authenticity and rigor in their essays and books by stressing intellectual clarity, the deep satisfaction to be gained in manipulating materials and energy, and the aesthetic fulfillment of finding beauty and pattern in the natural and the human made. In 1966 the members of the society recognized his contributions and his intellectual vision by naming him recipient of the Leonardo da Vinci Medal. From then until he died on August 25, 1992, at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Cyril continued to take an active interest and part in the intellectual development of the field and the society. Cyril came to SHOT with a background different from the profes­ sional historians who founded the society. From 1927 to 1942 he worked as a research metallurgist at the American Brass Company, taking out some twenty patents and contributing numerous papers to technical organizations. At Los Alamos during World War II he led the team preparing the fissionable materials for the atomic bombs. For this he was awarded the Presidential Medal for Merit. In 1946 he Dr. Hughes is Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Department of History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania. Permission to reprint a memorial in this section may be obtained only from the author. 716 Cyril Stanley Smith (1903 —1992) became the first director of the University of Chicago Institute for the Study of Metals. He left in 1961 to become Institute Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) with a joint appoint­ ment in the Departments of Metallurgy and of Humanities until he retired as emeritus in 1969. His approach to the history of technology differed from that taken by those of us trained as professional historians. When I was a professor in the Humanities Department at MIT from 1961 until 1965, Agatha Hughes and I were often guests of Alice Kimball Smith and Cyril in their Cambridge home. Through these occasions we became intimately acquainted with the Smiths’ academic style and interests. Alice had the Ph.D. from Yale University in history and was author of a distinguished work, A Peril and a Hope: The Scientists’ Movement in America, 1945—47, in which she described the efforts of leading scientists to inform politicians and the public about nuclear science and politics. Cyril learned much about the historian’s craft from Alice, but his approach to history was essentially that of a highly imaginative materials scientist. While Alice accepted the messy com­ plexity of history, Cyril always looked for the aesthetically satisfying patterns that would bring clarifying order to his world of experience. He found these through his analyses of atomic and microscopically visible structures in solids; he could not rest until he found analogous patterns in the history of technology. In 1979 he wrote: “Almost all fields today are concerned in one way or another with hierarchical structure, and a theory, or perhaps more usefully a metaphor, common to all may emerge if the features of many are compared . . . patterns of communication are common to all, with aggregation leading to diversity or unity, and the clumps of unity themselves serving in turn as units in larger structures based upon more complex but still direct communication” (A Searchfor Structure: Selected Essays on Science, Art, and History [Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1981], pp. vii— viii). Cyril never ceased to be amazed that nature revealed itself to him...