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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 January 2013
Music, medicine, escape: Austria, Italy, America. As a very young man, Sigmund Weissmann, before he was 18, had seen the prosperous stability and direction of his youth disintegrate, had, through fortunate foresight and mature determination escaped potential disaster, and had found himself, essentially alone, in New York City. That was April 1939. Within 5 years, his early studies completed and military service over, his future had been established with crystallography, and even more particularly, that aspect of it which was related to the “pathology” of metals. He was to establish one of the first laboratories devoted to research of lattice defects and to lay the groundwork for what is now known as Materials Science. Contemporaneous with the operation of this laboratory and as an outgrowth of his own basic connection with the famous “Brooklyn Poly,” Weissmann included, among his manifold teaching, research, and consulting activities, the acceptance of a position as an editor of the Powder Diffraction File, the PDF. The PDF was then just large enough, just important enough and had just that suggestion of an important reach into the future to necessitate an equally important attention from a group of persons schooled and skilled in the most recent techniques of X-ray powder diffraction. Weissmann (metals), Ben Post (organics), of the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute and J. V. Smith (minerals) (University of Chicago) were the first thus crystographically trained persons to oversee the PDF.
1 Brooklyn, it will be recalled, was the most populous Borough of New York City, having almost twice as many inhabitants, well over two million, as the most famous Borough, Manhattan. Brooklyn Poly was located in “downtown” Brooklyn.
2 The name was a reference to a 19th century interest in enumeration of all possible combinations of crystallographic symmetry which could pass through a common point, the origin. The X-ray seminars were facetiously called the Point Group by Fankuchen. This was because there had been insufficient space available to call them “space group seminars” with a straight face.)
3 G.I. was a military acronym for General Issue. Hence GI=soldier. The GI bill provided educational funds for World War II veterans.
4 Relatively recently, papers have appeared in the book Applications of X-ray Topographic Methods to Material Science (Plenum, New York, 1984), edited by Weissmann, S., Balibar, F., and Petroff, J-FGoogle Scholar. This book is based on the proceedings of the French–U.S.A. Seminar held at Snowmass Village, CO, 1983, a meeting organized by Weissmann and his French colleagues. The meeting was jointly sponsored by the French CNSR and the U.S. NSF. The first topographic French–U.S.A. seminar, organized by Professor Authier, of the University of Paris, and Weissmann took place in Paris in 1980 and was co-sponsored by the CSNR and NSF.
In Weissmann's preface to Applications… he notes: In analogy to topography, which is that discipline in geology that concerns itself with a detailed survey and mapping of surface features of a locality, the X-ray topographic methods aim to provide a detailed survey and mapping of lattice defects and inhomogeneities in crystalline materials. They offer, therefore, to the material scientist powerful research tools for the quantitative characterization of materials.
5 ONR was at that time the only government agency that supported fundamental research in physics and chemistry. The National Science Foundation (NSF) was founded with the help of the ONR in 1955.
6 For this work Weissmann was to obtain in 1962 the Henry Marion Howe Medal from the American Society of Metals. This award was given to the “author of the paper of highest merit published in the transactions.”
7 Sig has noted that, in the early days of his laboratory, it was necessary for him and his associates, when they were teaching the lab's techniques, toaddress themselves to a “multiple” audience: To provide a basis for understanding for metallurgists an educational preamble concerning X-ray diffraction was required, while for diffractionists, it was necessary to inform them of the importance of the technique for materials science. In addition to CARCA, these new techniques included the Divergent Beam method, X-ray topography, and intensity measurements of strain gradients.
8 The X-ray topographic work was very much appreciated by the NSF which gave Weissmann the much sought after NSF Creativity Award entailing a 5-year research grant without peer review.
9 Weissmann knew Hirsch quite well, having met him in Oxford in 1952 where Hirsch worked with his colleagues J. N. Keller, A. Gay, and A. Kally on lattice defects in aluminum as induced by heavy cold working. They developed and used an X-ray micro-beam technique. The interest in systematic studies of lattice defects at that time was more pronounced in Europe than in the U.S.A. Weissmann's friendship with Hirsch continued, with Hirsch visiting at Rutgers and Weissmann being invited, in the 1980's to lecture at Oxford.
10 This paper was published in Electron Microscopy and Strength of Crystals, Chap. 5, pp. 231–300 (1963). Dr.Keh, Google Scholar, a talented young electron microscopist, died at an early age.
11 initially the Joint Committee was comprised of three members but soon grew to include seven scientific organizations: American Ceramic Society, American Crystallographic Association, American Society for Testing and Materials, British Institute of Physics, The Clay Minerals Society, the Mineralogical Society of America, and the Institute of Physics.
12 It must be noted here that recognition of Davey's services had been given by the ASTM, and Elizabeth Wood (Bell Telephone Laboratories) has said: “It was through the hard work and personal sacrifice of Wheeler P. Davey of the Pennsylvania State University that this file came into existence and persisted through the difficult early years.”
13 Concerning the earlier sets, Ben Post has furnished this information: “Davey [circa 1939, 1940] convinced the American Society for Testing Materials of the need to publish the original Hanawalt pattern file in the form of printed cards. Soon thereafter the British Institute of Physics merged the Soviet data (1938) together with patterns of many ores published by Harcourt (1942) into the growing Powder Data File…”