William Hume-Rothery

William Hume-Rothery
William Hume-Rothery
Born	15 May 1899; Worcester Park, Surrey, UK
Died	27 September 1968 (aged 69); Oxford, UK
Education	University of Oxford; Royal School of Mines
Known for	Hume-Rothery rules
Awards	Francis C. Clamer Medal (1947); Fellow of the Royal Society (1937); Beilby Medal and Prize (1934)
	Scientific career
Fields	Metallurgy
Institutions	University of Oxford
Doctoral advisor	Harold Carpenter
Doctoral students	Geoffrey Raynor

William Hume-Rothery (15 May 1899 – 27 September 1968) was an English metallurgist and materials scientist who studied the constitution of alloys.^[1]^[2]^[3]

Early life and education

Hume-Rothery was born the son of lawyer Joseph Hume-Rothery in Worcester Park, Surrey. His grandfather, William Rothery, was a clergyman.^[4] His grandmother, Mary Hume-Rothery, a leading campaigner against vaccination, was the daughter of Joseph Hume, a Scottish doctor and Radical Member of parliament.^[5] William spent his youth in Cheltenham and was educated at Cheltenham College. In 1917 he was made totally deaf by a virus infection. Nevertheless, he entered Magdalen College, Oxford, and obtained a first class Honours degree in chemistry. He also attended the Royal School of Mines and was awarded a PhD.^[4]

Career

During World War II, he supervised numerous government contracts for work on aluminium and magnesium alloys.^{[citation needed]}

After the war he returned to Oxford "to carry on research in intermetallic compounds and problems on the borderland of metallography and chemistry" and remained there for the rest of his working life. In 1938 he was appointed lecturer in metallurgical chemistry. In his research, he concluded that the microstructure of an alloy depends on the sizes of the component atoms, as well as the valency electron concentration, and electrochemical differences. This led to the definition of the Hume-Rothery rules.^{[citation needed]}

In the 1950s he founded the Department of Metallurgy (which is now the Department of Materials) at the University of Oxford, and was a fellow of St Edmund Hall, Oxford.^{[citation needed]} He was also involved in founding the Journal of the Less-Common Metals, which developed out of an international symposium on metals and alloys above 1200 °C that he organised at Oxford University on 17–18 September 1958. The papers presented at the symposium "The study of metals and alloys above 1200°C" were published as Volume 1 of the Journal of the Less-Common Metals.^[6]

He was a member of the Oxford Philatelic Society.^{[citation needed]}

Selected publications

Electrons, atoms, metals, and alloys (1948, 1955, 1963)^[7]
- Polish edition: Elektrony, atomy, metale i stopy (translated by Romuald Romicki, 1955)^[8]
- French edition: Électrons, atomes, métaux et alliages (translated by G. Hilly, 1959)^[9]
Elements of structural metallurgy (1961)^[10]
- Russian edition: Введение в физическое металловедение (translated by V.M. Glazov and S.M. Gorin, 1965)^[11]