Richard Oriani

Richard A. Oriani (July 19, 1920 – August 11, 2015) was an El Salvador-born American chemical engineer and metallurgist who was instrumental in the study of the effects of hydrogen in metal. He also made significant contributions to the field of cold fusion.

Biography

Oriani was born in El Salvador in 1920, to a mother of Spanish descent and a father of Italian descent. The family emigrated to the US when he was 9 years old, and lived in Brooklyn, New York with his parents, brother Ernest and sister Elena.

In 1943, Oriani graduated from the College of the City of New York with a degree in chemical engineering. Although he was at the top of his class, Oriani had difficulty finding work because although his father had lived in Salvador for a number of years, he never pursued Salvadoran citizenship. Because of this, Oriani's passport was Italian, marking him as an "enemy alien." However, one of Oriani's professors helped him secure a position at the Bakelite Corporation Research Laboratory, where he worked on the study of adhesion and on the development of a military adhesive, for which he was granted a patent. This work kept him from induction into the Army, and in 1948 he earned his Ph.D. in physical chemistry from Princeton University.

Oriani then went to the General Electric Research Laboratory in Schenectady, New York, where, as a research associate, he studied, among other topics, the thermodynamics of solid metallic solutions, the order-disorder reaction in superlattice systems, nuclear magnetic measurements of hydrogen in metals, and Knight Shift measurements in liquid alloys. As a sideline, Oriani independently verified the high pressure technique developed at the GE Laboratory for the synthesis of a diamond.