Michael James Stowell. 10 July 1935—27 February 2022

Abstract

Mike Stowell was a Bristol physicist turned metallurgist who led the development of practical aluminium-based superplastic alloys by showing how to retain grains small enough, at temperatures high enough, to allow almost unlimited shape changes in forming operations. He can be regarded as the father of SUPRAL alloys, as these are now called. At the Tube Investment laboratory in Hinxton Hall, Essex, he led teams that made effective use of the novel electron-optical equipment invented there to solve numerous fascinating problems of technical importance, among them the sequence of growth by evaporation of thin metallic films and the mechanisms controlling the precipitation of graphite in cast iron. He was dedicated to science at the heart of industrial metallurgy, so that when the laboratory closed, rather than retire, he became research director at Alcan, interacting with a laboratory in Italy as well as managing disparate laboratories in England and Canada to develop coatings for the electrodes used in aluminium production. He was a founder member of what we now know as the ‘Cambridge Phenomenon’, the close interaction between innovative, high-tech industry and the university. In connection with these activities, he made long-lasting fundamental contributions to the understanding of precipitation both of two-dimensional islands in the growth of thin films and in three dimensions in the bulk solid state.