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Cyril Stanley Smith
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Professor Cyril Stanley Smith had a long and distinguished career as an industrial metallurgist, professor of metallurgy and historian of technology and science at the University of Chicago and at MIT. Although dedicated to active research in physical metallurgy, early in his career he developed a deep interest in the history of his discipline, as well as in the historical interactions of science, technology and art.

As a result of his interest Professor Smith built up a collection of some 2500 books dealing with the science, technology and history of materials. In 1992 Professor Smith graciously donated his collection to the Burndy Library.

The collection began in the 1920's as the working library of a practicing metallurgist. However, it rather quickly grew to include historical sources, particularly those related to the crafts and decorative arts, as well as those related to the non-mathematical sciences dealing with matter and mechanism, which Professor Smith felt had been neglected by historians.

It was Professor Smith's opinion that the advance of scientific theory can only be understood against a backdrop of discoveries recorded in technical works, punctuated by rare but critical moments when a person of intellectual curiosity becomes intimately acquainted with the realities of practice and is forced to a modification of the established frameworks of explanation. Accordingly, despite the apparently specialized nature of this collection, the items it contains are highly diverse, reflecting the fact that metallurgy has interacted with almost all aspects of human activity and thought.

There are several 16th century "how-to" books for the artisan describing the hardening, softening and etching of steel, the assaying of precious metals, and the general techniques of casting, forging and shaping metals for use. Notable among these 16th century works are many little Probier buchlein and every edition of the highly important De la Pirotechnia (1540) of Vannoccio Biringuccio.

From the 17th century come the works of great English scientists such as William Gilbert, Robert Hook, Robert Boyle, as well as the works of the German author Rudolph Glauber-all critical landmarks in the advance in understanding the nature of matter and its changes.

The rise and decay of Cartesian corpuscular philosophy is represented in the collection through Rohault's popularization. The beginnings of the phlogiston theory may be seen in the works of Becher and Stahl. Further extensions of corpuscular philosophy are present in Emanuel Swedenborg's important Philosophia (1734) and in Raumur's 1722 book on iron and steel, with its fine mix of thoery and practice.

The 18th century contributed finely illustrated encyclopedic accounts of crafts, ending with portentous works by Haiiy and Rome de Lisle on mathematical crystallography and De Analysi Ferri by Sven Bergman, which established precise compositional reasons for the mysterious differences between steel, cast iron and wrought iron.

The 19th century saw the gradual replacement of the old techniques by more modern ones, but not before they were well described in terms of the newer chemistry. By the century's end, excellent microscopic studies of the structure of iron and steel from England, France, Germany and the U.S. had opened the way to the modern science of materials, based on understanding the relationships between composition, structure and properties. Through it all, steel stands out as the most interesting metal and the one that leads to deeper understanding, no doubt urged by its growing economic importance.

One of the great values of this collection is that it illustrates the prehistory of the modern sciences of condensed matter, containing many essentially unnoticed works will take on importance when historians reexamine the background of the present. But the making of works of art has also inspired much search for and discovery of interesting properties of materials, and many of the books would be equally at home in an art history library. This is especially true of the many beautiful books on Chinese bronze casting contained in the collection

Professor Smith's many books and articles include a History of Metallography (1960), From Art to Science (1980), and A Search for Structure (1981). In 1983 Professor Smith wrote an illuminating introduction to the Burndy Library's facsimile edition of the Kodu Zuroku by Masuda Tsuna, a Japanese book on the smelting of copper, first published ca. 1801 in Osaka.

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