The Preston of the Guinier-Preston Zones. Guinier
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; PRESTON’S LAW
GEORGE Preston’s father, Thomas Preston (1860– 1900), was himself a distinguished physicist and a fellow of the Royal Society of London (1898). Specialist in light and heat, he studied the magnetic perturbations of spectral lines after the discovery of the Zeeman effect. Parallel with Albert Michelson in the United States, he found in 1898 more complex splittings, which soon came to be called ‘‘anomalous Zeeman effects.’’[2] He also tried to discover some regularities among these phenomena and stated a general law, now known as ‘‘Preston’s law,’’ namely that all spectral lines of a given series type yield the same kind of Zeeman splitting.[3] Thomas Preston had a professorship in Dublin and wrote two famous textbooks for undergraduate students: Theory of Light[4] and Theory of Heat.[5] He was awarded the Boyle medal of the Royal Dublin Society just before his early death. II.
YOUTH
Born on August, 8, 1896, George Dawson Preston was only three years old when his father died. He was educated from 1909 until 1914 at Oundle School.1 When O.B.M. HARDOUIN DUPARC, Senior Researcher, is with the Laboratoire des Solides Irradie´s, E´cole Polytechnique, 91128 Palaiseau Cedex, France. Contact e-mail: [email protected] This article is a significantly enlarged version of a paper I wrote in French in 2001.[1] Manuscript submitted May 11, 2010. Article published online June 22, 2010. 1 Oundle School was founded in 1556 and is one of the largest independent schools in Great Britain; it occupies buildings throughout the small and attractive market town of Oundle located about 80 miles north of London.
METALLURGICAL AND MATERIALS TRANSACTIONS B
World War I started, Preston served in the 7th Battalion, Alexandra Princess of Wales’ own Yorkshire Regiment until a severe leg wound ended his active service and left him with a permanent disability. He then studied natural philosophy at Gonville & Caius, one of the oldest existing colleges (1348) within Cambridge University.2
III.
SCIENTIFIC BEGINNINGS AND CAREER AT NPL
A. X-Ray Investigations on Metals and Metallic Alloys After graduation in 1921, George Preston joined the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) in Teddington (southwest of London) as a junior assistant. He worked in the Department of Metallurgy and Metallurgical Chemistry (DMMC), which had been led by Walter Rosenhain since 1906. Rosenhain (1875–1934) was famous for having convinced the scientific community of the crystalline nature of metals. Following the advice of Alfred Ewing (1855–1935), he was able to explain in 1900 the plastic properties of metals in terms of gliding of atomic planes. Rosenhain had then spent five years working on glasses for industrial research before he took over as Department Director at NPL. It was thus probably intentional that Rosenhain first asked the young Preston to establish a satisfactory method of determining the ‘‘thermal endurance’’ of any given kind of glass. Preston unfortunately found no such satisfactory method and concluded that empirical tests—
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