Historical introduction to the development of （历史的发展的介绍）.pdf

Historical Introduction to the Development of Material Science and Engineering as a Teaching Discipline by Clive Ferguson 1 Introduction Metals have long held the dominant position as the most important engineering materials; steel being by far the most significant over the past few centuries. Nevertheless, increasingly in many areas this position is being challenged by other materials such as plastics, ceramics and composites. The relatively recent development of materials science and engineering (MSE) is a merger of metallurgy with polymer science, physical and inorganic chemistry, mineralogy, glass and ceramic technology and solid state physics (Cahn, 2001) to include all structural and functional materials, thus making it one of the broadest of study disciplines. The material science concept developed from metallurgy in the 1950’s almost simultaneously in the GE research laboratories in the USA, the University of California Los Angeles (ULCA), and Northwestern University (Cahn, 2002). The COSMAT report of 1974, written to ostensibly persuade the scientific committee of the existence of MSE (Cahn, 1992), defined MSE as being ‘concerned with the generation and application of knowledge relating the composition, structure and processing of materials to their properties and uses’ (ibid.). Cahn observes that since 1974 the main focus of MSE has moved from structure, and especially structural defects, to the influence of processing variables. From the dawn of human existence materials have been fundamental to the development of civilisation. Anthropologists define the historical epochs by the materials used by the different civilisatio