Jim Gordon

James Edward Gordon was born in 1913 and died 25th July 1998.

The term Biomimetics is believed by some to have been coined by Jim Gordon, a graduate from the University of Glasgow.

Professor James Gordon, had a long and distinguished career in Materials Science and worked for many years in the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough. Recognised by many as one of the founders of materials science, he made a major contribution to public understanding of Materials Science through two outstanding and highly readable books which became best-sellers. ' The New Science of Strong Materials or Why You Don't Fall Through the Floor ' was published in 1968 and its sequel 'Structures or Why Things Don't Fall Down' published in 1978. In these books he attempted to encapsulate his life's work on new materials into prose which avoids the fatal flaw of most technical books, dullness, which was for him an inexcusable sin. The books, both published by Penguin, were translated into some 20 languages and are still widely used in both schools and early years of undergraduate courses.

During the Second World War he worked on composite materials and later worked at the Explosives Research and Development Establishment at Waltham Abbey, where a quest for fibres with a high stiffness to weight ratio led to the building of a pilot manufacture and processing plant for silicon carbide whisker crystals. He accepted the chair of materials technology at Reading University in 1968, where he worked on such diverse problems as the toughening mechanism in wood and the bursting of blood vessels.

The Gordon Laboratory at the University of Cambridge, opened in 1999, is named after him.

Links

biographical sketch of his life and works

detailed look at his work