Background
Hume-Rothery was born the son of lawyer Joseph Hume-Rothery in Worcester Park, Surrey, but spent his youth in Cheltenham and was educated at Cheltenham College.
Hume-Rothery was born the son of lawyer Joseph Hume-Rothery in Worcester Park, Surrey, but spent his youth in Cheltenham and was educated at Cheltenham College.
He also attended the Royal School of Mines and was awarded a Doctor of Philosophy.
In 1917 he was made totally deaf by a virus infection. Nevertheless, he entered Magdalen College, Oxford, and obtained a first class Honours degree in chemistry. During World World War II, he supervised numerous government contracts for work on aluminum and magnesium alloys.
After the war he returned to Oxford "to carry on research in intermetallic compounds and problems on the borderland of metallography and chemistry" and remained there for the rest of his working life.
In 1938 he was appointed lecturer in metallurgical chemistry. In his research, he concluded that the microstructure of an alloy depends on the sizes of the component atoms, as well as the valency electron concentration, and electrochemical differences.
He founded the Department of Metallurgy (which is now the Department of Materials) at the University of Oxford in the 1950s, and was a fellow of Street Edmund Hall, Oxford. He retired in 1966 and died in 1968.
The has since 1974 been awarded annually by the Minerals, Metals & Materials Society.
Hume-Rothery was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in May, 1937.
Royal Society]
He was a member of the Oxford Philatelic Society.