THE INSTITUTE FOR THE STUDY OF METALS:
the first fifteen years

On August 9, 1945 (Nagasaki Day), Chancellor Robert M. Hutchins announced in a press release that "Research which led to the invention of the atomic bomb will be continued at The University of Chicago through two new institutes devoted to the study of nuc lear physics and metals." A third unit, the Institute of Radiobiology and Biophysics, was also created to focus on industrial health.

The new institutes, characterized by Hutchins as outgrowths of the university's major role in war research, were to bring a number of famous scientists to the university. Among the new members of the faculty of the Institute for Nuclear Studies were Enric o Fermi (Columbia University, Los Alamos), Harold C. Urey (Columbia University), Edward Teller (Los Alamos) and Joseph E. Mayer and his wife, Maria Goeppert Mayer (Columbia University). This institute was to be headed by Samuel K. Allison, professor of ph ysics at the university, but temporarily on leave at the Los Alamos Laboratory.

As new members of the faculty of the Institute for the Study of Metals, Hutchins gave only two names: Cyril Stanley Smith (Los Alamos), who would be director of the Institute for the Study of Metals and professor of metallurgy at the university and Claren ce Zener (in war work at the Watertown Arsenal) who would be a professor of physics. With 15 years of research experience in the metallurgical industry, Smith was unique among the senior personnel at the new research institutes, and he proved extremely v aluable to the university in its effort to obtain financial support from industry for the interdisciplinary institutes.

Four days after Hutchins' announcement, Smith submitted a plan for the organization of the new institute to Dr. Walter Bartky, the Dean of the Division of Physical Sciences. With regard to the research program, Smith's vision of the institute was stated as follows:

In accordance with the policy of the University as well as my own wishes, the Institute will concern itself primarily with research into the fundamental aspects of metallurgy and will not, except indirectly, develop its technology. In particular it is proposed to encourage those phases of metallurgy bordering on physics. The research staff of the Institute will be composed of metallurgists, physicists andchemists, selected because of their interest in various fundamental phases of metallurgical science and they will be given every encouragement to follow their studies without regard to commercial considerations. It is hoped at the outset to work in each of the following subjects i n the fields of physical metallurgy: elasticity, plasticity, and fracture, including high velocity strains; structure of pure metal and alloy phases; ferromagnetism; nature and mechanism of allotropic transformation and precipitation; and the theory of th e metallic state. In addition to these physical fields it seems highly desirable to cultivate work on the physical chemistry of corrosion and of metal reduction; the latter in particular has been neglected by scientific workers, and developments in the fi eld for many years have been almost entirely of a practical industrial nature.

To avoid the necessity of scientists becoming adept in the whole art of metallurgy, there will be a staff of professional metallurgists, graduate students, and technicians who (on approved request) will undertake the preparation of samples of any specifie d composition and treatment required by the scientific staff or designed to meet requirements specified by them. This 'Metals Technology Section' will also institute its own studies of fabrication methods and will aim in particular at the development of m ethods of purification, reduction, and fabrication of those rare and little-known metals which cannot be satisfactorily procured commercially and of unusual combinations of common substances. The availability of metals and alloys selected for their suitab ility for the particular scientific studies in mind instead of for their commercial importance or availability should greatly aid the work of the fundamental research group. The new metals and methods should eventually be of great value to industry, but t he primary aim of the staff of the Institute will be an increased understanding of metals, not immediately useful applications.

With respect to the planned professional staff of the new institute, Cyril Smith wrote:

At the moment only two men are committed to the Institute. It is essential that we build up the staff as rapidly as possible. The men needed, divided into proper category and specific fields of interest are listed below together with some suggested names. In practically every case men listed know nothing whatever about the Institute or the fact that they are being considered....

Research Section:

Metallurgist - interested in crystal structure, metallography
Metallurgist - steel transformation, age hardening etc.
Metallurgist - allotropy, transformation, solid solution structure
Physicist - elasticity, 'anelasticity', plasticity and fracture
Physicist - structure of intermetallic phases, solid state theory
Physicist - structure of intermetallic phases
Physicist - ferromagnetism
Physicist - theory of metallic state
Physicist - high velocity strains
Physical Chemist - metal reduction
Physical Chemist - corrosion

Technology Section:

Metallurgist - to direct work of section
Chemist - preparation and purification of metallic compounds
Metallurgist - reduction (thermal methods)
Electrochemist - reduction (electrolytic methods)
Metallurgist - vacuum casting (special techniques)
Metallurgist - fabrication (rolling, drawing, etc.)
Metallurgist - powder metallurgy
Metallurgist - mechanical testing (metallographer)
Analytical Chemist: 3 needed
Ceramist - experienced in 'super' refractories

Apart from these appointments he visualized a large number of temporary research fellows with a Ph.D. background in the research section, as well as research assistants, technicians and some graduate s tudents in the technology section.

Smith remained at the Los Alamos Laboratory until the end of 1945. However, he pursued the problem of the staffing of the institute very intensely, and he scheduled the first meeting of its professional staff in Chicago on February 11-13, 1946. On April 1 1, 1946 Cyril Smith prepared the first detailed description of the new institute as it was taking shape. This memo was undoubtedly in part intended for publicity purposes. It provided a fairly detailed outline of the planned research and also provided the names of the scientists who were at that time associated with the institute.

Eight years later, in a report dated December 17, 1954, Smith analyzed the personnel situation of the institute:

It is believed that the environment for metallurgical research at the Institute is unique in the world and that it is particularly important to strengthen the Institute in this respect, not only for the sake of the research itself, but al so for the great contribution that the University can make to the inspiration of higher scientific standards in metallurgical research laboratories generally.

The "metals" aspect of the Institute is in danger of disappearing. Currently (omitting the Director who mainly moves paper rather than metals), there is only one full-time tenure metallurgist in the Institute (Barrett) and one assistant professor. An imag inative physical metallurgist... is essential plus one younger man.

The work of the physics section of the institute was seriously retarded by the resignation of Clarence Zener in 1951 and, to some extent, by the fact that the principal remaining physicist, A.W. Lawson, has perforce been partially preoccupied with problem s of the Physics Department" (of which he was then the chairman). "The section which should be the strongest in the Institute and provide the best bridge with solid state physics flourishing elsewhere has consequently somewhat suffered, and the highest pr iority appointment is that of a theoretical physicist of really top-notch quality....

Closely behind this in order of importance is an experimental physicist of top rank.

On the other hand, Smith considered the chemistry section to be "in good shape. As long as a continued influx of good young men can be maintained, no additional top-level appointments are regarded as necessary." He also believed that although the low-tem perature group was "excellently staffed,... the addition of one or more good experimental physicists to the group is highly desireable."

During the first 15 years of its existence the institute made several attempts to bring new distinguished tenure level metallurgists and physicists to the University. These efforts were not successful. However, the institute did bring to the campus a numb er of very distinguished visiting professors for periods of time ranging from one month to one year. While the institute did not succeed in bringing in new tenure level faculty from the outside, it had a great deal of success in attracting promising young scientists as research associates or as junior faculty members.

In his 1945 vision of the new Institute, Smith did not fully anticipate that it would attract a very large number of graduate students from physics and chemistry. In fact, from 1949 to 1960, 31 students from the Department of Physics got their Ph.D. degre es based on work carried out in the institute. Most of these students worked in the High Pressure Laboratory and did their Ph.D. research under the direction of A.W. Lawson. The corresponding number for the Department of Chemistry was 20; for the Departme nt of Geology, it was two. Most of the chemistry Ph.D. students worked in the Low Temperature Laboratory under the direction of J.W. Stout or E.A. Long, or with N.H. Nachtrieb.

In 1955, Smith decided to take a year-long sabbatical leave from the university in order to pursue his long-standing interest in the history of metallurgy. During his absence, the leader of the Cryogenic Laboratory, E.A. Long, served as acting director. On Smith's return to Chicago, he resigned his directorship in 1957 in order to pursue his more historical interests. (In 1961, he left the university to assume a new position at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as institute professor in metallur gy and the history of science.) Long succeeded Smith as director in 1957 and served in that position until the end of 1960, at which time he took an extended leave of absence to work in industry. Long resigned from the university as of July 1, 1962. In 1961, the chair of the Department of Physics, M.G. Ingrhram, served as acting director of the institute. On January 1, 1962, S.A. Rice assumed the directorship.

Very soon after the formation of the three new institutes, the university initiated a major effort to gain industrial support for its new venture through creation of the Industrial Sponsors Program, which invited numberous major industrial companies in t he Unisted States to become sponsors. As sponsors of the three institutes, the companies would contribute $50,000 per year to the university for a period of at least 5 years. They could also become sponsors of a single institute with a contribution of $20 ,000 per year.

The first sponsor of all three research institutes was the Standard Oil Development Company of New Jersey (now Exxon Corporation), the sponsorship of which started January 15, 1946. Meanwhile, a number of metallurgical corporations elected to sponsor the Institute for the Study of Metals, and by August 1952 the institute had 17 sponsors. The total number of sponsoring companies of all three institutes peaked at 24 in 1950. By 1956-57, the number had fallen to 12.^*

To maintain contact with the industrial sponsors, the institutes organized three annual two-day sponsors' meetings. At these meetings, current research at the institutes was highlighted. The first sponsors' meeting was organized in the Fall of 1947. Usual ly, the fall meeting was hosted by the nuclear unit, the winter meeting by the radiobiology unit, and the spring meeting by the metals unit. Typically, the sponsors' meetings were attended by 50-80 industrial representatives; the meetings hosted by the Me tals Institute tended to attract the largest number of visitors.

When the organization of the three institutes began, the system of organized government financial support for fundamental research had not yet been developed. Even so, the role later played by the National Science Foundation was to some extent played by t he Office of Naval Research (ONR). The Institute for the Study of Metals got its first major contract from ONR in 1946 in support of its research on the deformation of metals, which was organized by Clarence Zener and Cyril Smith. The modest first quarter ly report on this program covered the period May 1-June 30, 1946. However, the second and third quarterly reports covering the periods August 1-October 31, 1946 and November 1, 1946-January 31, 1947 were quite voluminous, containing essentially the whole manuscript of Zener's new monograph Elasticity and Anelasticity of Metals, which was published by the University of Chicago Press in 1948.^†

In May, 1947 the Metals Institute got its second major contract from ONR in support of its work on high pressure research, directed by professor of physics A.W. Lawson. This important research project, which lasted until 1960, supported development of ext ensive facilities for high pressure research at the institute. These facilities provided the experimental base for a large number of graduate students, most of them from physics, but also a few from geology. The high pressure facilities were also used by a number of other faculty members in the institute, and by several faculty members from geology. The first Ph.D. thesis completed in the Metals Institute originated in the high pressure laboratory.‡

The Institute for the Study of Metals was created as an interdisciplinary laboratory long before the pressure of modern research and of large scale government financing forced other laboratories of this type to be formed. Indeed, the Institute undoubtedly served as a model for many of the interdisciplinary materials research laboratories which were created at other universities by the Advanced Research Project Agency of the Department of Defense from 1960.

A flexible organization, the institute began with a strong emphasis on the science of metallurgy, and it quickly achieved a position at the forefront of fundamental research laboratories dealing with metals. However, almost from the very beginning the sta ff was equally concerned with research in physics, physical chemistry and crystallography. Over the years, the emphasis on metallurgical research gradually decreased, and the focus on metal physics, solid state physics, cryogenics, physical chemistry and related areas steadily increased.

Key research programs during the institute's first 15 years include (in my opinion, of course) the following. It is largely these programs, rather than the total number of scientific papers published by its faculty, which gave the Institute its name in re search.

Probably no series of studies carried out in the Institute received more world-wide attention and stimulated more research elsewhere than the work on internal friction, which was initiated by Zener. These investigations were pursued by Zener and by his co -workers-Kê, Dijkstra, Wert, Novick-and several graduate students. The work had a powerful impact on diffusion theory and experiments and has been very widely referred to in the metallurgical and solid state physics literature.

Interest in surface phenomena goes back to the very beginning of the Institute and continues to the present. The work of Smith in the field of surface tension, interfaces, and the origin of grain shapes and phase distrubutions had a tremendous impact on t he science of metals and metallography. As A.H. Cottrell says in his Theoretical Structural Metallurgy, "The modern interest in the shapes of grains is due largely to an outstanding paper by C.S. Smith." Smith's lecture on this subject, "Grains, Ph ases and Interphases: An Interpretation of Microstructure"^§ is the first of several papers of his in this field. They launched an avalanche of related research in a number of laboratories. By 1951 interest in the field ha d grown to the point that the annual symposium of the American Society of Metals was devoted to it.

In 1950, R. Gomer joined the faculty of the institute and initiated a series of pioneering applications of field emission microscopy to adsorption and other surface studies. In the course of this work, cryogenic ultra-high vacuum techniques were developed , which contributed to the study of adsorption on clean crystal surfaces of known orientation and perfection. Gomer also developed techniques for obtaining field emission from metal whiskers grown in situ under high vacuum conditions. In a collaboration w ith Inghram in 1954 and 1955, he also combined field emission with mass-spectrometry, allowing detailed studies of field ionization and desorption.

As a result of Zener's prediction that body centered cubic metal structures may become unstable and transform to face centered cubic type structures at low temperatures, Barrett in 1947 initiated an x-ray investigation of lithium metal. He found that this metal undergoes a martensitic transformation to a face centered cubic form near -200°C; later he found a similar transformation in sodium at even lower temperatures. While this transformation has not been found in the other alkali metals, somewhat re lated phase transformations occur in many body centered cubic intermetallic phases in Hume-Rothery type alloy systems. Extensive investigations in this general area were carried out in the Institute by Barrett, J.S. Bowles, T.D. Massaslki, H. Birnbaum, an d others.

X-ray diffraction studies in the Institute also provided valuable information regarding lattice dynamics. Thus, C.B. Walker's x-ray study of the lattice vibrations in aluminum, from which he obtained the dispersion curves for elastic waves and, for these, the general force constants necessary to describe the interactions between the atoms, is a classical study.

Self-diffusion in solid and liquid metals was studied extensively by Nachtrieb and his students. In collaboration with A.W. Lawson, he also pioneered in the use of high pressure techniques in the study of diffusion. These investigations led to a realizati on of the importance of lattice relaxation about vacancies in solids and to the formulation of a principle of corresponding states. In other studies of defect motion, Lawson and co-workers extensively studied ionic conductivity, dielectric relaxation, sel f-diffusion, etc., in ionic crystals.

More than any other part of the institute, the Low Temperature Laboratory in the early days was a meeting place for investigators from different traditional disciplines, and many fruitful collaborations were initiated there.

The first publication from the newly formed Institute was a letter to the editor in the 1946 Physical Review. In this letter, physicist A.W. Lawson and physical chemist E.A. Long proposed the use of the thermal noise in an electrical resistor for low temperature thermometry. However, since the effect depends on kT, it is actually much more suitable for thermometry at high temperatures. In due course, J.B. Garrison and Lawson described a resistance noise thermometer intended for such applications.< P> J.K. Hulm and B.T. Matthias became interested in correlations between the occurrence of superconductivity and other physical properties. They initiated what was to become a systematic search for superconductivity in a large number of intermetallic phases. Originally, they were aided in this work by a graduate student from chemistry, G.F. Hardy. These investigations, and their subsequent developments (carried on further by Matthias at Bell Telephone Laboratories, and by Hulm at Westinghouse) led to the dev elopment of alloys suitable for the construction of superconducting magnets which can produce very large magnetic fields without dissipation of energy through electrical resistance.

Before 1950, J.W. Stout and his student M. Griffel investigated the magnetic properties of single crystal MnF₂ through measurement of the anisotropy of its magnetic susceptibility. Their experiments showed the development of a very large anisot ropy in the susceptibility below the ordering temperature of 66.5 K. These investigations were later extended to other antiferromagnetic fluorides. A large number of other measurements were stimulated by the magnetic anisotropy measurements (e.g., the mag netic structure as determined by neutron diffraction, antiferromagnetic resonance as seen by microwave and infrared techniques, nuclear resonance of both fluorine and metal ion nuclei, and lattice changes associated with the antiferromagnetic ordering). I n many cases these other measurements were carried out elsewhere with single crystals grown at and loaned-out from the institute.

Another experiment of unusual importance was the measurement by Pippard, a visiting professor during 1955-56, of the anomalous skin resistance of single crystal copper. He interpreted his results to yield the shape of the Fermi surface in copper. This stu dy represented the beginning of the experimental determinations of Fermi surfaces in metals.

R.J. Donnelly carried out an extensive program of experimental and theoretical investigation of hydrodynamic flow. His original interest was in the striking flow properties of superfluid helium. However, it soon became evident to him that much was not pro perly understood about the flow of normal liquids. With the theoretical stimulation of S. Chandrasekhar and the help of a number of collaborators, Donnelly performed a number of experiments which have shed light on the onset of turbulence in normal flowin g fluids.

The research concluded at the Institute for the Study of Metals during its first decade was dominated by the faculty members who came to the Institute during its first year. However, the loss of Clarence Zener in 1951, the resignation of Cyril Smith from the directorship in 1957, and, in particular, Smith's departure from the University in 1961, promoted a significant change in the character of the Institute. Although Barrett, a metallurgist, remained on the faculty until his retirement in 1970, no young metallurgist served on the faculty after the departure of H. Birnbaum in 1961.

The research in the Institute during its second decade was dominated by the young faculty members who came to the Institute during the l950s, particularly those faculty members who remained at the Institute in tenure position for a significant period of t ime. The physicists in this group were M.H. Cohen, Walker, R.J. Donnelly, H. Fritzsche and J.C. Phillips; among the physical chemists were Gomer, O.J. Kleppa and Rice.

The reduced emphasis on the science of metallurgy, and the increased commitment to new areas of chemical physics as well as to solid state physics, is reflected by the change of the name of the institute in 1967 to the James Franck Institute. James Franck , who won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1925, was a member of the Department of Chemistry at Chicago from 1938 until his death in 1964.

^* From about 1960, the university attempted to modify the sponsors program so that it would cover all basic research in the Physical Sciences Division. By this time, however, the novelty of the sponsors program had been lo st. Also, competing programs had been started at other leading institutions having a clearly defined engineering orientation. For example, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology initiated a somewhat similar sponsors program in 1948.

† This was the first volume in a series of monographs on metals originally planned by Smith. The second (and last) volume in this series was authored by Smith himself: A History of Metallography. Its first edition was pub lished by the University of Chicago Press in 1960. By 1948-49, the quarterly reports to the ONR became the Institute Quarterly Reports. These reports were issued to all industrial and government sponsors and provided preprints of all scientific m anuscripts submitted for publication by members of the institute. In 1946, institute faculty members published four scientific papers, all in Physical Review. From 1950-60, the number of published papers averaged from 40-60 per year.

‡ D. Lazarus, "The Variation of the Adiabatic Elastic Constants of KCl, NaCl, CuZn and Al with Pressure," Phys. Rev. 76 (1949), p.545.

§ AIME Technical Publication No. 2387, June 1948.

I would like to acknowledge the help of Ms. Ruth Patterson in collecting the data and infomation contained in this document.