Votes Determine Greatest Materials Moments in HistoryTop 10 to be Revealed
Voting is complete for the top 50 greatest materials moments in history as conducted by JOM, the journal of The Minerals, Metals & Materials Society (TMS). The top 10 moments will be announced at the TMS 2007 Annual Meeting & Exhibition in Orlando, Florida, on Monday, Feb. 26 at 8 a.m.
More than 900 professionals from the materials science community and the public at large voted online between Nov. 1 and Dec. 31 of last year to determine the 50 greatest materials moments. The "honorees" range from the invention of electroplating in 1805 (No. 47) to the manufacture of the earliest fired ceramics in 28,000 B.C. (No. 12). Others include creation of the first "superalloy" ; crafting of the first porcelain; discovery of superconductivity; beginning of metallurgy; development of the first microchip; discovery of nanotubes; development of glass blowing; building of the first electron microscope; development of iron casting; splitting of a uranium atom; vulcanization of rubber; discovery of radioactivity. (See complete list of moments 50 through 11.)
The top 10 list will be unveiled at the TMS 50th Anniversary Plenary Series in which speakers from industry, academia and government will make presentations on 50 years of technological progress in materials and the future of the field. For information about the plenary speakers, visit http://www.tms.org/annualmeeting.html and click on 50th Anniversary Events from the menu. More than 3,800 professionals from 60 countries are anticipated to attend this 136th annual meeting of TMS, held Feb. 25 through March 1 at the Walt Disney World Resort. Nearly 2,500 presentations will be made throughout the week covering the latest research in light metals; structure, extraction, processing and properties; and emerging materials.
TMS is the professional organization encompassing the entire range of materials science and engineering, from minerals processing and primary metals production to basic research and the advanced applications of materials. Included among its professional and student members are metallurgical and materials engineers, scientists, researchers, educators and administrators from more than 70 countries on six continents. -30-
Greatest Materials Moments in History
Rankings: Moments 50 to 11
No. 50: A.A. Griffith publishes "The Phenomenon of Rupture and Flow in Solids," which casts the problem of fracture in terms of energy balance. 1920No. 49: Adolf Martens examines the microstructure of a hard steel alloy and finds that, unlike many inferior steels that show little coherent patterning, this steel had many varieties of patterns, especially banded regions of differently oriented microcrystals. 1890No. 48: Richard Feynman presents "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom" at a meeting of the American Physical Society. 1959No. 47: Luigi Brugnatelli invents electroplating. 1805No. 46: Wallace Hume Carothers, Julian Hill, and other researchers patent the polymer nylon. 1935No. 45: Henry Clifton Sorby uses light microscopy to reveal the microstructure of steel. 1863No. 44: Paul Merica patents the addition of small amounts of aluminum to Ni-Cr alloy to create the first "superalloy." 1926No. 43: Leo Baekeland synthesizes the thermosetting hard plastic Bakelite. 1909No. 42: Potters in China craft the first porcelain using kaolin. (estimated) 1500 BCNo. 41: Kammerlingh Omnes discovers superconductivity while studying pure metals at very low temperatures. 1911No. 40: Friedrich Wöhler isolates elemental aluminum. 1827No. 39: The earliest form of metallurgy begins with the decorative hammering of copper by Old World Neolithic peoples. (estimated) 8000 BCNo. 38: Jack Kilby integrates capacitors, resistors, diodes and transistors into a single germanium monolithic integrated circuit or "microchip." 1958No. 37: Alfred Nobel patents dynamite. 1867No. 36: Sumio Iijima discovers nanotubes, carbon atoms arranged in tubular structures. 1991No. 35: Russell Ohl, George Southworth, Jack Scaff and Henry Theuerer discover the existence of p- and n-type regions in silicon. 1939No. 34: Hermann Staudinger publishes work that states that polymers are long chains of short repeating molecular units linked by covalent bonds. 1920No. 33: Abraham Darby I discovers that coke can effectively replace charcoal in a blast furnace for iron smelting. 1709No. 32: Sir Humphry Davy develops the process of electrolysis to separate elemental metals from salts, including potassium, calcium, strontium, barium and magnesium. 1807No. 31: Glass blowing is developed, probably somewhere in the region of modern Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Israel—most likely by Phoenicians. (estimated) 100 BCNo. 30: Georgius Agricola publishes De Re Metallica. 1556No. 29: Metal workers in the Near East develop the art of lost-wax casting. (estimated) 1500 BCNo. 28: Max Knoll and Ernst Ruska build the first transmission electron microscope. 1933No. 27: Leon Guillet develops the alloying compositions of the first stainless steels. 1904No. 26: Cambridge Instruments introduces a commercial scanning electron microscope. 1965No. 25: Charles Martin Hall and Paul Héroult independently and simultaneously discover the electrolytic reduction of alumina into aluminum. 1886No. 24: Chinese metal workers develop iron casting. (estimated) 200 BCNo. 23: Egon Orowan, Michael Polyani and G.I. Taylor, in three independent papers, propose that the plastic deformation of ductile materials could be explained in terms of the theory of dislocations. 1934No. 22: Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann find that they can split the nucleus of a uranium atom by bombarding it with neutrons. 1939No. 21: Augustin Cauchy presents his theory of stress and strain to the French Academy of Sciences. 1822No. 20: Niels Bohr publishes his model of atomic structure. 1913No. 19: Johannes Gutenberg devises a lead-tin-antimony alloy to cast in copper alloy molds to produce large and precise quantities of the type required by his printing press. 1450No. 18: Metal workers in the region of modern Syria and Turkey discover that addition of tin ore to copper ore before smelting produces bronze. (estimated) 3000 BCNo. 17: Werner Heisenberg develops matrix mechanics, and Erwin Schrödinger invents wave mechanics and the non-relativistic Schrödinger equation for atoms. 1925No. 16: William Roberts-Austen develops the phase diagram for iron and carbon. 1898No. 15: Charles Goodyear invents the vulcanization of rubber. 1844No. 14: Pierre and Marie Curie discover radioactivity. 1896No. 13: Iron smiths forge and erect a seven meter high iron pillar in Delhi, India. (estimated) 400No. 12: The earliest fired ceramics—in the form of animal and human figurines, slabs, and balls—(found at sites in the Pavlov Hills of Moravia) are manufactured starting about this time. (estimated) 28,000 BCNo. 11: J. Willard Gibbs publishes the first part of the two-part paper "On the Equilibrium of Heterogeneous Substances." 1876
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