William Hume-Rothery
British metallurgist (1899–1968)
William Hume-Rothery (15 May 1899 – 27 September 1968) was an English metallurgist and materials scientist who studied the constitution of alloys.
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. His grandmother, Mary Hume-Rothery, a leading campaigner against vaccination, was the daughter of Joseph Hume, a Scottish doctor and Radical Member of parliament. 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.
Career
During World War II, he supervised numerous government contracts for work on aluminium and magnesium alloys.
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.
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This entry incorporates text from “William Hume-Rothery” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.