Walter Alan Backofen, ’46, Sc.D. ’50, died at home on Dec. 2, 2006. Born in Rockville, CT, on Dec. 8, 1925, he was a son of Walter Paul and Bertha (Pfau) Backofen. In 1943, he graduated as valedictorian from Rockville High School, entered MIT, and enlisted in the U.S. Navy. In 1950 he married Elizabeth (Lib) Wood Warren and was appointed to the faculty in the Department of Metallurgy. During a career of teaching, research, publishing, and consulting to industry and government, he designed new subjects and a new laboratory, found great students and sponsors, became recognized for bridging theory and practice over a wide range of real-life problems, including automotive stampings, orthopedic implants, and the Star Wars defense shield. He belonged to the American Institute of Mining and Metallurgical Engineers and the American Society for Metals and Materials, and was elected to membership in Tau Beta Pi and Sigma Xi. He was the first in his field to receive three principal achievement awards: for teaching (Bradley Stoughton Award, 1958), research (Howe Medal, 1964), and professional leadership (Campbell Lecturer, 1973). He was a popular speaker in his profession and pioneered as a popular-science lecturer on live television for Channel 2 of Boston during its early days of broadcasting from the roller skating rink across Mass. Ave. from MIT.
A 1964 paper on “superplasticity” identified the ability of metals, temporarily given a near nano-size grain structure, to behave like silly putty. At an International Conference on Superplasticity in Chengdu, China, in June 2006, that paper was recognized for its seminal influence on a now burgeoning global industry. A Gordon Conference at Kimball Union Academy introduced him to New Hampshire’s Upper Valley. During a sabbatical at Dartmouth College, he wrote Deformation Processing, on his technical specialty. Upon retiring from MIT, he and Lib returned to NH and together they turned the ca. 1790 William Gage place in East Plainfield into Hill Farm, where they managed a square mile or so of unposted woodlands, preserved a broad cross-section of period outbuildings and accessory structures, and grew about thirty antique varieties of apples, blueberries, and Christmas trees.
Through an American art and antiques business that he ran in partnership with his wife, he uncovered the Bartlett-Kimball Circle of Queen Anne style in New Hampshire furniture-making from ca. 1760 to 1820. To share the eclectic mix of new information this produced, they founded the Lord Timothy Dexter Press in 1988. Studies of recent interest addressed early American feminism and marital fertility in New Hampshire, the New Hampshire limitation on a personal-rights interpretation of the Second Amendment, and mass hysteria in Enfield’s Shaker culture.