Cyril Stanley Smith

Smith trained as a metallurgist and served as chief metallurgist on the Manhattan Project, responsible for the metal components of the first nuclear weapons. After the war he argued that a material's properties, its strength, ductility or conductivity, are governed by structure at a scale between the atomic and the visible, the grain boundaries and defects a microscope can show but a chemical formula cannot, and that this scale of structure was the common ground linking metallurgy, ceramics, polymers and semiconductors into a single field. He helped found the Institute for the Study of Metals at the University of Chicago and later worked at MIT, where the field he had described took the name materials science. In his later career he also wrote on the history of metallurgy and craft technology.