Cyril Smith (1903 - 1992)

Cyril Smith was born on October 4, 1903, in Birmingham, England. He received is Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1926. He became a naturalized American citizen in 1939. In 1942, during World War II, he was called into service at the War Metallurgy Committee and in April of 1943, he joined the Manhattan Project as the head of its Metallurgy Group. His groups' tasks were to purify, cast and shape uranium and plutonium into bomb-usable forms.

He was present at the Trinity test in July 1945 and later wrote: "At the instant after the shot, my reactions were compounded of relief that 'it worked'; consciousness of extreme silence and a momentary question as to whether we had done more than we intended."

After the war, he went to the University of Chicago and founded the Institute for the Study of Metals. He was also one of the original nine members of the United States Atomic Energy Commission's General Advisory Committee and a member of the President's Science Advisory Committee. In 1961, he returned to MIT as an Institute Professor with appointments in both the Departments of Humanities and Metallurgy. In part, due to his wife, Alice Kimball Smith, who was a historian, he also had a keen interest in the role of teaching the history of science. He died on August 25, 1992, in Cambridge, Massachusetts.