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Up for sale "British Physicist" Egon Orowan Hand Signed FDC Dated 1963.
of The Martians. Orowan was
born in the Óbuda district of Budapest. His father, Berthold (d. 1933), was a mechanical engineer and
factory manager, and his mother, Josze (Josephine) Spitzer Ságvári, was the
daughter of an impoverished land owner. In 1920 he went to the University of Vienna,
where he studied chemistry for one year and astronomy for another. After six months of mandatory apprenticeship
done home in Hungary, he was admitted to the Technical University of
Berlin, where he engineering. Eventually
he started his own experiments in physics, where he was adopted as a student by Professor Richard Becker in
1928. In 1932 he completed his doctorate on the fracture of mica.
Soon after Hitler's rise to power in
1933, Orowan, who was of partially Jewish descent, left for Hungary, where
in 1934 he wrote the famous paper on dislocations. He had been doing the experiments, while still
in Berlin, which supported the theory put forward in Becker's 1925 paper. In
1934, Orowan, roughly contemporarily with G. I. Taylor and Michael Polanyi, realized that the plastic deformation of ductile materials could be explained in terms of the
theory of dislocations developed by Vito Volterra in 1905. Though the discovery was neglected
until after World War II, it was critical in developing the modern science
of solid mechanics.In Hungary
he seems to have experienced some difficulty in finding immediate employment
and spent the next few years living with his mother and ruminating on his
doctoral research. From 1936-1939 he worked for the Tungsram light bulbs manufacturer, where, with the help of Mihály (Michael)
Polanyi, he developed a new process for the extraction of krypton from the air.
In 1937, aware of the imminence of war, Orowan accepted the invitation
of Rudolf Peierls and
moved to the University of Birmingham, UK where they worked together on the theory
of fatigue. In 1939 he moved
to the University of Cambridge where William Lawrence Bragg inspired his interest in x-ray diffraction. During World War II, he worked on problems of munitions production,
particularly that of plastic flow during rolling. In 1944, he was central to the reappraisal of the
causes of the loss of many Liberty ships during the war, identifying the critical
issues of the notch
sensitivity of poor quality welds and the aggravating effects of the extreme low
temperatures of the North Atlantic. In 1950,
he moved to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where,
in addition to continuing his metallurgical work, he developed his In the latter study, Orowan
developed the writings of the 14th century Tunisian historian Ibn Khaldun to forecast a supposed eventual failure of
market demand similar to
that claimed by Karl Marx. His ideas found little
acceptance among the majority of economists. Throughout his life, he patented many inventions.