Cyril Stanley Smith: The Structure of Everything

While the Cyril Stanley Smith Award recognizes achievements in materials structure, to former DMSE colleague John Cahn, materials structure doesn’t fully encompass Prof. Smith’s interests, which included, in short, the structure of everything. After joining the MIT faculty in 1961, Prof. Smith became as much a historian as a metallurgist.

“He spent his entire time at MIT on the structure of everything---not only on metallurgy history, but on the ideas in science. He really considered the structure of society, of knowledge. Everything had structure,” said Prof. Cahn, now at the University of Washington. “He could look at the surface of a two-dimensional section of something opaque and not only see what it looked like in three dimensions, but he could also infer a fourth dimension. His ideas of history are exactly like that. He would see the evolution of a society or an idea in time or space.”

Professor Smith started his career as a research metallurgist at the American Brass Company in 1927 and later joined the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, where he directed the preparation of the fissionable metal for the atomic bomb and other materials for nuclear experiments. At the University of Chicago, he founded the Institute for the Study of Metals. “It was the first interdisciplinary lab, to the best of my knowledge,” said Prof. Cahn. “He had come from Los Alamos where he was head of metallurgy and he had his eyes opened that physics, chemistry, and math could have an enormous impact on metallurgy. . . . That the field has become so much bigger is because of Smith.”

excerpted from Journal of Materials column on new TMS awards, Kelly Zappas, Oct. 2010