Sir William Chandler Roberts-AustenDied 22 Nov 1902 at age 59 (born 3 Mar 1843).English metallurgist whose research on the physical properties of metals and their alloys had many practical and industrial applications. He established methods to determine the composition of an alloy, invented an automatic recording pyrometer to track the temperature changes of furnaces and their molten contents and. researched diffusion between a sheet of gold and a block of lead. He was a professor at the Royal School of Mines, and from 1882 a chemist and assayer at the Mint, becoming a world authority on the technical aspects of minting coins. He was knighted in 1899. Austenite (a non-magnetic solid solution of ferric carbide or carbon in iron, used in making corrosion-resistant steel) was named after him.« |
