Morris Cohen MIT postwar brittle fracture research

Cohen was the postwar Mr. Steel at MIT studying brittle fracture of welded ships; Krauss was his doctoral student and inherited the Mr. Steel title; *Steels* (Krauss's textbook) is Tom's source for the carbon-vs-hardness curve.

The guy who was Mr. Steel before that was Morris Cohen. He was an assistant professor here after World War II, when they had all the welded ships cracked. There were three places that did the study based on this stay-dry report on Show HBU. One was MIT and Morris Cohen on brittle fracture of steels. Another was the Naval Research Laboratory, a guy named Pellini at the Naval Research Laboratory. We'll talk about Pellini — when he retired from NRL back in the 80s, he came and spent the last couple years as a lecturer here on course 13, which has ended now, and retired on Cape Cod. The third place was started in 1947 or so by a guy Richard Weck, who was a young engineer in England, pedaling through Cambridge. He was riding his bicycle into this little town called Abington — he decided this is where the British welding researchers should go. So the three places in the world that really studied the fracture of steel in the late 1940s, which is one of the things that caused all these ships [to fail], along with poor quality steel.