Rosenhain Centenary Conference - 4. The future role of physical metallurgy in relation to engineering practice

Abstract

Engineering practice is all about designing, constructing and maintaining structures for the comfort and use of mankind. In order to achieve his purpose the engineer takes materials from the world around him and assembles them into an artefact to meet a defined need. In earlier times need could be satisfied quite simply by gathering materials as they are found in nature and assembling them into useful forms with a minimum amount of modification, such as chiselling rough stones into simple geometrical forms to make walls. The early engineer was his own materials scientist and the great pyramids, cathedrals, aqueducts and the like remain as testimonies to his understanding of the properties of natural materials. The progress of science and technology has changed all that. The improvement of properties made possible by separating metals from their ores opened up entirely new vistas for structural design. But the intricacy and complexity of all the intervening stages from ore in the ground to a useful modern engineering structure are so diverse that engineering practice has to be seen now as only the last step in a long sequence of professional activities encompassing geological prospecting, through mining to smelting, refining and fabrication. Thus engineering practice has come to depend for its successful prosecution on many sciences and technologies among which metallurgy is paramount. But metallurgy itself is now subdivided, as the subtitle of our conference shows, and throughout the papers you will find reference to a variety of sub-subspecies including ‘solid state physical metallurgy’. In reflecting on the scope of my contribution to the conference I was led to seek the origin of this adjectival division of the discipline because I believe it has an important bearing on the future