WILLIAM ERNEST STEPHEN TURNER
1881-1963
William Ernest Steph en Turner was born on 22 September 1881 at Wednesbury, Staffordshire. He was the second of seven children and the eldest son of William George and Emma Blanche Turner. His father was self-educated and shared in the precariousness of employment of those times being successively railway porter, signalman, iron works labourer, morning postman and industrial insurance agent. Throughout these varying hardships he served as deacon and elder in a community known as the Church of the Baptist Brethren in Smethwick.
At the age of 12 Turner was awarded a Staffordshire County minor scholarship from the Crocketts Lane Board School, Smethwick, and when he was 13 gained admission to King Edward VI Grammar School, Five Ways, Birmingham. Tremendous sacrifices must have been demanded of the family to make it possible for Turner to continue his education. He was, apparently, a brilliant pupil and won many prizes while at school. He entered the then Mason University College in 1898 with a school leaving scholarship and graduated with the London degree of Bachelor of Science with honours in chemistry in 1902. He was awarded a Birmingham University Research Scholarship and began research work under Dr Alex Findlay. He became M.Sc. (Birmingham) in 1904 and was awarded the Erhardt Research Prize.
Turner was appointed in 1904 to the post of junior demonstrator and assistant lecturer in physical chemistry in the University College of Sheffield.
He was the first member of staff appointed by W. P. Wynne, who had recently succeeded W. Carleton-Williams as Professor of Chemistry. Turner has recorded that there was no stock-book in existence when he arrived in the Department and as he was left very much to his own devices he spent two or three whole days with the lab. boy, in the basement, assessing stocks of chemicals and apparatus and peeping into nooks and corners to ascertain where things were stored. The stock-book which he concocted pleased Wynne immensely. Perhaps here was already a foreshadowing of Turner’s flair for organizing which characterized so much of his later life’s work.
One of the earliest tasks which Turner undertook at the suggestion of Wynne, was to frame a course of lectures on physical chemistry specifically for metallurgical students and he began to deliver this course at the beginning of
1905. A request from metallurgists engaged in Sheffield laboratories in the day-time for a similar evening course of lectures led him to repeat them on
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Monday evenings throughout the winter; later on, this evening work in
creased to an additional evening. In 1914 T urner was elected President of the Sheffield Society of Applied Metallurgy.
These early activities make it quite clear how ready Turner was from the very beginning of his career to apply his science to the problems of industry.
During the months of March and April 1909 he published a series of articles in the Sheffield Daily Telegraph discussing the employment of the scientist in industry, a subject apparently nearly as topical then as it is today, for the first article comments on the number of addresses which had been delivered on the subject during the previous ten years by scientists, especially chemists, to various learned societies. Today, the calling of the speakers and their audiences have altered. These were serious articles containing much factual information about the employment of science graduates in this country and in Germany, and of the financial advantages some firms were prepared to attribute to scientific procedures; for example, Messrs Crosfield, the soap- makers, had, by employing an able chemical staff, effected a saving of £25 000 per annum on their expenditure on fuel. His accomplished style of writing was already developed; for example, from an article in this series on ‘Scientific research, does it pay in business?5, comes the following quotation:
‘O f course scientific research pays. By every additional mind which has cultivated the power of thinking out problems scientifically, by every additional person who, by research, has discovered new facts, and classified them, though they be of academic interest only, a nation is greatly enriched.’
Methods of co-operation between industry and science departments of universities were considered in the last two articles and here can be seen the seeds of much of T urner’s subsequent achievement.
Applied science was not, however, to be his prime preoccupation until some years later. In 1908 an honours school in physical chemistry was estab
lished and he began to supervise a stream of research students working on such topics as solubility, surface tension, the viscosity of mixed liquids and the relationship between ‘molecular weight’ in solution and the dielectric constant of the solvent. By 1915 some two dozen papers had been published as well as a monograph entitled ‘Molecular association’. In a prefatory note to this monograph the help of his students G. J. Peddle, C. G. Bisset, S. English, C. T. Pollard is acknowledged. These, together with P. Haller and J. D. Cauwood, also students of that same period, were to co-operate with
him later in his work in glass technology.
Through Turner’s contact with local industry, particularly in connexion with his work with the Sheffield Society of Applied Metallurgy, he realized soon after the outbreak of the 1914-1918 war that difficulties were arising in local manufacturing circles through the shutting off of supplies of many metallurgical products which had hitherto been imported from Germany and Austria. As the Telegraph articles had foreshadowed, he saw this as a challenge which must be accepted. He made representations to the then
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Vice-Chancellor of the University, H. A. L. Fisher, that the University should consider setting up a technical advisory committee; the outcome was the formation, at the end of September 1914, of a University Scientific Advisory Committee with Professor W. Ripper, Dean of the Faculty of Applied Science, as Chairman, and Turner as Secretary.
Among the questions which reached this Committee after its formation had been advertised were some connected with the manufacture of glass. No member of the University staff had any special knowledge in this field and Turner tried to help by meeting the inquirers and discussing their problems in detail. These contacts, and the problem of the supply of laboratory glass
ware which several Sheffield industries had raised, set Turner on making further inquiries about the extent of glass-making in the West Riding of Yorkshire. Eventually he drew up a ‘Report on the glass industry of York
shire’, which he submitted to the Council of the University of Sheffield. The report was dated 21 May 1915 and dealt, not only with technical questions, but also gave a statistical account of the industry including such things as the numbers employed and the amount of glassware produced. Turner pointed out that the industry was run on rule-of-thumb methods, that there was very little trustworthy literature on the subject of glass manufacture and that there was need for research into glass-making processes; he appended schemes for instruction and research. He recommended that the University of Sheffield should establish a centre for instruction in the manufacture of glass.
Wynne gave strong support to Turner’s proposals as did the Vice-Chancellor and in June 1915 the University Council approved the report and decided to set up a special department charged with the duty of providing courses of instruction in glass manufacture and with facilities for research.
The department was first known as the Department of Glass Manufacture;
after a few months, however, Turner introduced the term ‘Glass Technology’, feeling, no doubt, that glass manufacture was too limited in its scope. Turner recorded in a speech which he made some twenty-one years later, that in his endeavours to see such a department established, he had no personal wish to take responsibility indefinitely for its future, but having argued so strongly for the creation of the new Department he was unable to resist the argument that the least he could do was to undertake its organization. He soon became fascinated by the subject of glass and, in the early stages, by the joy of teaching students who, as adult men, clamoured for information. His contacts with industry, the initiation of researches, the foundation of the Society of Glass Technology, soon were so much occupying his time and interest that thought of relinquishing the Department at the end of the W ar passed away. He had in his own words, ‘become for better or worse, part and parcel of the glass industry’.
From 1916 onwards the Department of Glass Technology, the Society of Glass Technology and its Journal and later the International Commission on Glass were completely absorbing activities which were not always easy to distinguish one from another; for convenience, however, they will be described
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consecutively in this memoir and so there will result some retracing of steps chronologically.
The Department of Glass Technology
The circumstances of what has appeared to many to be a rather extra
ordinary development, the creation of the Department of Glass Technology must be seen in the context of its time. On the one hand Turner was a member of a very small and very new University, on the other hand, the glass industry was extremely primitive, run on recipes handed down from father to son, each being remarkably similar in the different factories but regarded as closely guarded secrets. There was no measurement of temperature, little control of raw materials. Here was an activity very far removed from the laboratory investigations of molecular association on which a promising young chemist was engaged. No doubt Turner’s upbringing made it easy for him to realize how much the application of science to industrial processes could contribute to the well-being of the industry and the people working in it and his family surroundings would have undoubtedly conditioned T urner’s approach to life to make him eager to be of service in this way. He had already revealed in the Telegraph articles and his work with the Sheffield metallurgists, his enthusiasm to apply science to industrial problems. In urging the foundation of the Department of Glass Technology, and thus associating himself with an industry which with one or two exceptions completely lacked scientific assistance, he did a great service for the glass industry of this country and one wonders how his career might have developed if he had become less devoted to glass technology but more interested in the general subject of using science to improve the understanding of industrial processes. As it turned out Turner’s concepts proved to be not in accord with the general pattern eventually adopted for the national encouragement of the application of scientific methods which developed between the wars, but it was not until 1955 that considerable changes in organization were made to bring the Government support into line with the Research Association move
ment and the University work was brought to conform to the usual structure of University departments. This we shall return to later, but for the moment we must consider the growth of the Department of Glass Technology.
A special body known as the University Glass Advisory Committee was set up in November 1915 charged with the responsibility for the welfare of the new Department and with establishing contact with the glass industry.
For some time discussions went on with the Committee of the Privy Council set up to stimulate industrial research; early in 1916 that Committee was willing to make a grant towards the provision of buildings and equipment and an annual grant to support the work of the Department on the condition that industry also gave financial support. The agreement drawn up between the Committee of the Privy Council for Scientific and Industrial Research and the University laid it down that the funds made available for the purposes of the Department should be administered not by the University Council,
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although the latter was ultimately responsible, but by a separate body known as ‘The Delegacy for the Promotion of Research in Glass Technology’, which came to be described more usually and more briefly as ‘The Glass Research Delegacy’ with an executive committee composed of about equal numbers of industrialists and members of the Senate, with the Registrar as Secretary.
This arrangement undoubtedly gave Turner a good deal more room for manoeuvre than he might have had if the organization of the Department had been formulated strictly along University lines. The use he made of this facility did not always endear him to his academic colleagues but then orthodoxy would have been a serious handicap to a man of Turner’s foresight and drive for innovation.
The earliest teaching efforts of the Department were directed towards setting up courses of instruction in the local centres of glass-making. The first of these was begun in September 1915 in Mexborough and other classes followed in Barnsley, Castleford and Knottingley. During the next two or three years, similar courses were conducted in Derby, Alloa, Glasgow and London. Courses of this type persisted in Sheffield as ‘Saturday Afternoon Classes’ until 1959, and many ‘Saturday students’ now hold important posi
tions in the industry. M. Parkin, who was a devoted servant of Turner and the Department, bore the brunt of this work for many years; he joined the Department in 1920 and stayed, apart from four years in industry, until 1959.
In his retirement he still serves as Editor of Abstracts for the Society of Glass Technology.
At first the work of the new Department was carried out in a laboratory of the Chemistry Department of the University. Glass melting operations on a very small scale were conducted in a tiny room ‘in the roof’ of that Depart
ment, to the discomfort of those below as the small furnace was very noisy.
Undoubtedly the introduction of this high-temperature technology into the University brought a greater realization of the revolutionary steps which Turner was taking, but quickly, the claims made on the new Department resulted in new premises being built in 1916 in Badger Lane, behind a part of the Applied Science Department. A large glass-melting room with storage space for chemicals and refractory materials was provided and also a work
shop, a small testing laboratory and a room used as a lampworking school in connexion with the rehabilitation of disabled ex-servicemen. The laboratory teaching work still remained in the Chemistry Department of the University until the return of students at the end of the war made it no longer possible to retain the laboratory for this purpose. The first full-time day student was enrolled in 1917 and at the end of the war there was a considerable influx of students. Plans had been drawn up in 1918 for a considerable extension of the Badger Lane premises, but these were held up by the Rent Restrictions Act making it impossible to obtain possession of the old cottage property occupy
ing the site of the proposed extensions.
At this stage, the first separate Glass Research Association was formed, and the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, as the supporting
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Government agency had now become, withdrew its grant to the Department.
The Glass Research Association was formed in 1919 but it was not until the summer of 1920 that the Glass Research Delegacy received any assurance that this new body would provide support in the form of a research contract with the Department at Sheffield. When this money came it was attached to a request for the melting of glasses on a scale which could not be done at Badger Lane. As a result a disused bottle works was purchased at Darnall Road in the heart of the industrial area of Sheffield and about three miles from the University. An appeal for funds coincided with the post-war slump and money was very short. This circumstance provided an early example of Turner’s talent, often exercised throughout his life, for extracting willing ser
vices from his colleagues which far exceeded any limits which might have been defined for the scope of their official duties and responsibilities. The whole long vacation was spent by students and staff in demolition, site clearing and removal and re-erection operations on the Darnall Road premises. The location of these premises so far from the main University buildings put a considerable burden on the students, who had to attend lectures in other University departments and it involved great difficulties of transport and time
tables, while the staff were isolated from their fellows in the other departments and from the University library.
The Glass Research Association had not been an unqualified success and in February 1925 it was wound up. There followed a change in the constitution of the Glass Delegacy and the D.S.I.R. offered to contribute an amount equal to the contributions from the manufacturers up to a limit for the Government of £2500 on the conditions that the teaching and research work of the Department should be continued on at least the same scale as before.
There followed a period of gradually increasing prosperity for the Department and before long Turner had plans for a return to a site near to the University.
In September 1935 his attention was drawn to an advertisement in the local paper offering for sale, a substantial house known as ‘Elmfield’. This house stood on a slight eminence overlooking a reservoir, one of a chain of small reservoirs carrying compensation water for the River Don descending towards its valley. On the other side of the reservoir, which has now been filled in to form part of the Bramley Playing Fields of the University, the tower of the University buildings on Western Bank could be seen through the trees of the intervening Weston Park. The banks of the reservoir were covered with rhododendrons and the site must have appeared absolutely delightful to one coming from the grim situation of the Darnall Road premises. Turner immediately saw this place as the future home of his Department and was soon canvassing support from the industry for its purchase. The Vice-Chancellor was not, however, very favourably disposed to the project and although the Glass Delegacy was easily persuaded to recommend to the University Council that the site be acquired for the Department from the ample reserve funds which the Glass Delegacy possessed, the usual prompt approval of a Delegacy proposal from the next following Council meeting was not forthcoming.
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After some months Turner enquired of the Vice-Chancellor the reasons for the delay and was told that it was felt that when the Department left Darnall Road it should find a home in the block occupied by the other Departments of Applied Science. The Vice-Chancellor stressed the importance of keeping together Departments pursuing similar subjects, a very real point, but Turner was not easily to be put off and, some three Council meetings later, after a deputation from the Delegacy had appeared before Council, the recommenda
tion was finally approved. The troubles, however, were not over. The next problem was to obtain the approval of the City Council under the Town Planning Act. The City Council had laid down that the amenities of the area were to be preserved by the exclusion of the speculative builder and
‘offensive occupations’ and someone in the Town Clerk’s Department had discovered that the offensive trades included tanning, fish frying and glass
making. With his usual finesse Turner succeeded in assuaging the fears of the City Council and justifiably so, for in the twenty-five years of its existence at Elmfield the Department has received no complaints.
Next came the problem of raising money for the building; when Turner’s plans were put before the Delegacy the industrial members were horrified by the sum of money required. Turner solved this problem in a typical way.
He opened the subscription list with a donation from his own meagre private resources—a donation which obviously involved some sacrifice on his part.
He then wrote to the Chairman of the Delegacy telling him what he had done and asked for a subscription from the Chairman’s firm of £1000.
Proceeding in this way by personal approach to people in the various firms who would have to make the final decision about a donation, £27 000 was raised in a very short time and by 4 March 1937 the fund had reached over
£34 000. During the period in which this money was being raised the Univer
sity had a general appeal operating in Sheffield and the area within twenty- five miles radius, on behalf of all its Departments and Institutions. This fund, during the same period, reached £120 000. Turner on his own initiative eventually raised £41 000 for the ‘Elmfield’ fund.
The house was modified and the best part of it retained as the conference room, Professor’s room, visitors’ room and library, while the architect, H. B. Leighton, added chemical and physical laboratories, research rooms and a museum—on which Turner lavished particular care—so skilfully as to preserve the general style of the building. One wall is decorated with a beautiful glass mosaic depicting the history of glass manufacture in Europe;
this is dedicated to the memory of his first wife Mary Isobel Turner. Various plaques record the donation of funds to furnish and equip various rooms.
One such fund, contributed by the staff and students, furnished the Professor’s room in a style considered by the donors to be appropriate, although he never really understood why a soft armchair was considered necessary.
The buildings were opened on Monday 12 June 1939 by Lord Riverdale, then Chairman of the Advisory Council for Scientific and Industrial Re
search. The occasion was marked by a degree congregation for the award of
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honorary degrees. These were bestowed upon Stanley Bagley, Chairman of the Delegacy for many years, representative of a well-known firm of glass m anu
facturers of Knottingley, and on Bernard P. Dudding, a past President of the Society of Glass Technology, who had presided over the International Congress on Glass held in England in 1936. Dudding was a senior member of the Research Staff of the General Electric Co. Ltd, and had been a devoted lieutenant to Turner in his endeavours in the international field.
Teaching and research in the Department
It was not until 1919 that plans could be made for the award of a first degree in glass technology; this was to be the Bachelor of Technical Science.
This was originally conceived as a three-year course, based on a first year which should be an intermediate course in chemistry, physics and mathe
matics, followed by two further years in which the following subjects would be studied: glass technology, physical chemistry of glass, fuel, refractory materials and pyrometry, geology and mineralogy of glass-making materials together with economics of the glass industry. In addition there were courses in electrical and mechanical engineering. This type of course served its purposes well for a number of years and stood with only minor modifications until the 1950’s. As a fair proportion of the earlier students had connexions with the glass industry many of them were not particularly interested in anything approaching an academic career.
The research programme of the Department was, at its inception, very closely related to problems facing the industry; it is recorded for example that the first investigation was concerned with a difficulty in the manufacture of lead-crystal glass for tableware. This was traced to the presence of con
siderable amounts of potassium chloride and sulphate in the potassium carbonate employed; this problem was readily solved. The second subject tackled in the new Department, that of the resistance of different types of chemical glassware to the most important reagents likely to come into contact with it, launched the Department on a programme of studying the reactions of glasses with water and other reagents and with the development of more resistant glasses which has persisted at intervals, until the present day.
Electrically heated laboratory furnaces had to be developed and refractory parts for these were made in the Department. Such developments accompanied work on refractories for the glass industry and helped with the introduction of sillimanite refractories for glass tank furnaces. Many years later (1957) in the first J. W. Mellor Memorial lecture Turner said, ‘. . . in many industries it is, I hold, wiser to tackle the immediate problems first and then let the need for the long dated, fundamental problems grow out of the imperative need for more information or for sounder basic principles’—a precept which he had successfully practised.
Quite early on, however, Turner sought to establish investigations into fundamental principles of the subject and he started a programme of work on
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the relationship between the chemical composition and the physical proper
ties of glasses. He decided that a systematic examination of the variation of the physical properties with composition would provide a valuable foundation for the development of the subject and a series of glasses were melted of two, three and four components and such properties as the density, thermal expansion, Young’s modulus and refractive index were measured, along with the resistance to chemical attack.
By 1926 S. English had measured the viscosities at high temperatures of many families of glasses, of simple and systematically varied composition, over a wide range of temperatures.
Similar work had been going on in other places; Abbe and Schott at the be
ginning of the century had studied the optical properties, thermal expansion and thermal endurance of glasses of many compositions; Corning Glassworks had produced new borosilicate glasses with low coefficients of expansion;
in the Bureau of Standards, the stress of war had prompted a great deal of work on optical glasses and the classical studies of annealing by Adams and Williamson were proceeding in the early 1920’s. However, in G. W. Morey’s outstanding book on the Properties of glass first published in 1938 there are far more references to Turner and his colleagues than to any other group of investigators.
Traditionally in the glass industry small quantities of materials other than the main batch constituents are added to assist in melting and in control of the colour. Another programme of long-term research was based on the measurement of the effect of small quantities of this type of minor additive on the properties of simple glasses melted under laboratory conditions. By the 1930’s the staff had grown sufficiently to enable work to begin on the funda
mental glass-making reactions. Studies of the decomposition of sodium carbonate by heat were followed by investigations of the reaction between silica and sodium carbonate, silica, sodium carbonate and calcium carbonate.
Early too in the 1930’s was started a programme of work on the breaking strength of glass and by 1937 the interests of the electrical industry, which demanded special glasses to resist the attack of alkaline metal vapours and for glass-to-metal seals, had prompted Turner to begin a programme of work on glasses of very novel compositions. The electrical industry had also set up departments for research in glass in its industrial laboratories and Turner always maintained the friendliest relations with these organizations. Turner began to collect younger workers about him who were anxious to probe more deeply into the structure and properties of this challenging material, glass.
E. Preston and E. Seddon had published discussions of viscosity-temperature relationships in glasses. G. O. Jones first worked on the strength of glass and its variation with temperature and then turned to the problems of delayed elasticity. A. J. Holland was determining with painstaking care the ultra
violet, visible and infra-red transmission of glasses over a range of tempera
tures. R. Halle and J. Boow were investigating the transmission of heat in glass tanks (in the last ten years this has come to be understood as a complex
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phenomenon involving the absorption and emission of thermal radiation in the glass itself).
Many of the older colleagues had left the Department to occupy im portant posts in industry. They would all like to have their names associated with Turner’s in this memoir and I hope that they will forgive a relative newcomer to the Department for his arbitrary selection of names and topics. Most of their names will be found recorded as joint authors in the accompanying biblio
graphy prepared so carefully by Miss V. Dimbleby, a steadfast colleague of Turner’s from 1918 onwards who finally retired from the Department in 1956.
The outbreak of war prevented many of these plans for expanding the research work from reaching fulfilment. F. G. West-Oram was already a member of the Territorial Army and was called up a few days before the declaration of War. G. O. Jones (now Professor of Physics in Queen M ary College London) was asked for by Sir Edward Appleton so that he might join the British Nuclear Energy team about to travel to the U.S.A. in 1942
and E. Preston left to take up a post with the General Electric Company.
Turner was very much an internationalist at heart and he had been much concerned to help victims of the persecutions in Europe. For a time he lost the services of one of these friends, Robert Halle, who, with other persons of German origin, was interned as an alien when Hitler started his aerial assault on this country. After much patient endeavour Turner obtained his release.
The Department suffered during the bombing raids which destroyed much of the centre of Sheffield. On the morning of 12 December 1940, the Department was found to have lost most of its glass; a portrait window of M r Frank Wood in the Wood Library, a large decorative window filling the east end of the entrance hall and a well-executed sand-blasted window with the decorators’
theme, ‘Glass through the ages’ at the entrance to the museum, were all blown to pieces.
In 1941 Turner suffered a tremendous loss by the retirement of George S.
Duncan who for years had been his assistant, and who, with great efficiency, looked after many tasks in the administration of the Department, of the Society and in the publication of the Journal. Duncan had loyally served Turner throughout years of intense activity; he was irreplaceable. In 1942 Turner himself had to seek six months’ recuperation from over-strain but, in fact, after two months he was back in the Department. During the W ar the number of students increased from 8 in 1940 to 20 in 1944 and at this time Turner persuaded the Ministry of Education that glass technology should be included among subjects for which State Bursaries should be made available.
Seven of these were awarded in 1944.
An activity which has not previously been mentioned explicitly was continued much as usual during the war. This was the service to members of the Glass Delegacy, that is the firms in industry contributing to the finances of the Department, both by the regular visits to their works, in which Turner, M. Parkin, F. Winks and E. Seddon took part, in response to numerous inquiries which came by post, and also by carrying out experimental tests in
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the laboratories. During the W ar publication continued, the number of Department publications had risen to 406 by 31 July 1939 and it reached 524 by the end of 1945. Other activities were to stimulate a survey of sands, suitable for glass-making, to be found in the British Isles. A Committee with Turner as Chairman surveyed all likely British sources. Visits were paid to numerous sites in England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland, mainly by Turner himself and much analytical work was carried out particularly by Miss Dimbleby. In 1941 again at T urner’s instigation, a joint Fuel Efficiency Committee was formed between the Society of Glass Technology and the Glass Delegacy to ensure, as far as possible, that fuel was used in the glass industry as efficiently as possible. A panel of lecturers was set up from members of the Society so that in each glass-making area someone competent could lecture, and give advice on the latest and most efficient designs of furnace equipment.
In addition to the Journal of the Society of Glass Technology to which more detailed reference will be made in a moment, there was also published a monthly bulletin called the Glass review which was circulated to members of the Glass Delegacy. Accounts of the Department’s work and descriptions of researches going on in other laboratories were given in simple terms. Each December number contained detailed surveys of papers published during the year within the ambit of glass technology; all this was prepared by the staff of the Department. A Fuel-efficiency supplement to the Glass review appeared for several years under the editorship of R. Halle until the restoration of more normal conditions made it less necessary. Another activity of the Department during the war years was the revival of the lamp-working training school and E. J . Gooding, a former post-graduate student, was seconded from the industry to supervise its activities. However, lack of students caused the school to be closed in March 1943.
In 1943 Turner began to plan for an exhibition to demonstrate new uses for glass. This was arranged in a small way following a lecture he gave to the Royal Society of Arts in January of that year and subsequently it was transferred to the Building Centre in London and finally set up in the De
partm ent at Sheffield. In the three years 1943-1946 it was shown at various places in the provinces, usually with an opening ceremony at which Turner gave an address. Another wartime activity of T urner’s was to lecture to the workers engaged in making radio valves and specialized glass apparatus and he prepared a small booklet, mentioned in the bibliography, containing the substance of these lectures.
The Society of Glass Technology and its Journal
Writing in 1937, twenty-one years after the first meeting of the Society of Glass Technology, Turner noted that the local centre courses of instruction which he set up in 1915-1916, were attended by persons of varying ages from 18 to upwards of 60 and enthusiasm was the key-note of their work. At the close of the normal teaching courses held during the winter of 1915-1916 it
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was suggested that some contact between students and teachers should be maintained during the interval before the next winter’s work. The idea was supported by industry and several visits to glass works were arranged. This sowed in Turner’s mind the germ of the idea of forming a Society of Glass Technology, and, on 9 November 1916, an inaugural meeting was held. In T urner’s characteristic style, the stage was well set.
The Vice-Chancellor of the University, H. A. L. Fisher, was present to welcome the formation of the Society. At the end of the meeting, not only had the Society been formed, it had a President, Frank Wood, a local m anu
facturer, a list of Vice-Presidents including in addition to representatives of the industry, Sir William Crooks, A. S. Esslemont (Controller of the Optical Munitions Branch of the Ministry of Munitions), Professor Sir Herbert Jackson, F. J. Cheshire (President of the Optical Society), M. W.
Travers and W. Rosenhain. There was a Council, a Treasurer, W. E. S.
Turner was Secretary and C. J. Peddle was nominated as Assistant Secretary.
By the end of 1917 there were about 250 members on the roll and by 1920 the membership was about 600 of whom 100 were overseas members. Soon technical committees were formed from members of the industry and these discussed the various subjects such as specifications for raw materials, methods for testing, refractories and furnaces. The meetings of these technical com
mittees were usually called immediately prior to the afternoon on which one of the monthly meetings of the Society was held during the autumn and winter periods, and thus they served a dual purpose in providing a semi
captive audience to attend the reading of papers at the Society’s meeting.
Turner saw that in addition to these meetings a journal would be necessary to provide a vehicle of communication throughout the industry, and the first volume of the Journal appeared in 1917. It was designed with transactions and abstracts very much along the lines of the Journal of the Chemical Society of those times. The glass industry throughout the world would acknowledge its debt to the abstracts which have appeared in the Journal since its inception.
The task of preparing these abstracts largely fell upon the members of staff of the Department and this is another example of the devotion which enabled Turner to extract such work willingly from his colleagues. With the exception of two periods as President, Turner was Secretary of the Society from the beginning until 1946 and he edited its Journal until 1951.
When he first began to know the industry there was virtually no co-opera
tion between firms and the traditional recipes and methods were jealously guarded secrets. The formation of the Society did much to encourage friendly interchange of information and it soon acquired an international member
ship. Very early in the history of the Society, Turner arranged visits to other countries. The undeveloped state of the machine side of our glassworks made it natural that the first overseas visit should be to the U.S.A. in 1920 where the great contributions of the American engineers to the machine
forming of glass ware made such a visit extremely profitable; thirty members took part in a tour lasting three to four weeks. Other visits were paid to
Biographical Memoirs
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France in 1923, Belgium in 1924, Germany in 1928, Denmark in 1937 and return visits in 1924 were made by the French glass manufacturers and in 1928 by members of the American Ceramic Society, while in 1930 the Deutsche Glastechnische Gesellschaft visited this country.
During the meetings in Germany in 1928 joint meetings of the technical committees of the Society and the Deutsche Glastechnische Gesellschaft were arranged and in 1933 the first International Congress on Glass and Ceramics was held in Italy. This led Dr Heinrich M aurach to suggest the formation of an International Commission for Glass Technology with Turner as President and representatives of America, France, Germany, Italy and Spain forming an Executive Committee. Turner remained as President of the International Commission until 1953. The Commission has been responsible for initiating international congresses in glass which have been held in Britain in 1936, Italy in 1953, France in 1956, Germany in 1959 and the U.S.A.
in 1962.
Turner had a great sense of style and formality for all such occasions.
It was the same sense of style which prompted him to publish the first volume of the Journal of rather impressive format on what must have appeared to other people such delicate foundations. This was one of his guiding prin
ciples which enabled him to accomplish what he did; he would create a framework, and ensure that the key points were occupied by people of sufficient eminence to ensure that the edifice would be completed to the standard which he had had in mind from its conception.
As time went on Turner obviously felt that perhaps the Society was not fulfilling all that was needed in communication with the financial side of industry, and in 1928 he was instrumental in arranging joint conventions with the Glass Manufacturers’ Federation, when papers covering aspects of the glass industry other than technological problems were usually presented.
Suitable choice of meeting place and programme encouraged the business side of industry to meet under the auspices of the technological Society.
Joint meetings were held with other Societies from time to time: the Faraday Society in 1917, the Physical Society in 1929 and the Ceramic Society at Stoke on Trent in 1930. It might perhaps be wondered why joint meetings with the Ceramic Society were not more frequent but it should be remem
bered that there was the example of the U.S.A. where glass is counted as a part of the general subject of ceramics both in the American Ceramic Society and in the university schools of ceramic engineering. Turner undoubtedly saw so clearly his own lines of advance that he would be quite sure that his Society should stand on its own feet.
William Ernest Stephen Turner
Turner in retirement
In 1945 Turner retired; he had not quite reached the age limit. He soon found what he saw as another opportunity for service and, with his friend and supporter of many years standing, Edward Meigh, set up a consulting
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firm, Glass Technical Services Ltd. In announcing this new venture he wrote ‘with the object of providing independent advisory services on all matters relating to the manufacture and use of glass including materials, equipment, operating processes, design, administration and patents. Its activities are intended to supplement and not to compete with existing agencies and it will consistently advocate and support those co-operative research and technical organizations which have done, and are doing, most valuable work in building up the glass industry. Experience in this country reinforced by the results of American practice shows that there is abundant room for technical service to meet the individual manufacturers’ needs in regard to control and equipment.’ In the event, the clients of Glass Technical Services came almost entirely from overseas and the manufacturers in this country who had welcomed Turner into their works and had enjoyed the open discussion with him on all matters concerning the welfare of their industry resented this action of his. Turner I think, never understood this reaction; the consulting activity had been just another step in his vision of placing science at the service of industry. His internationalist outlook probably made the opportunity look all the more worth while because he could serve in countries which had greater difficulties to contend with than his native land.
After his retirement Turner developed his interest in the archaeology of glass and a series of papers appeared in the succeeding fifteen years dealing with many aspects of the history of glass. One of his last acts on an inter
national scale was to formulate elaborate plans for the co-operative investi
gation of the chemical composition of ancient glasses. The six papers published between 1954 and 1959 under the general title ‘Studies of ancient glass and glass-making processes’ make a very valuable contribution to the subject.
The investigations, with H. P. Rooksby, of the ancient opal and coloured glasses were carried out principally by X-ray diffraction studies on minute fragments of museum pieces particularly of the Portland Vase. He became a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries and lectured to that Society on the Portland Vase immediately after his election to the fellowship.
T urner’s last publication appeared in December 1962 in the Journal Glass Technology entitled ‘A notable British seventeenth century contribution to the literature of glassmaking’, and this discussed the translation of Neri’s VArte Vetraria published in 1662 by Christopher Merrett, one of the Founder Members of the Royal Society.
The end of the Delegacy
After his retirement many changes which Turner could not enthusiastically support took place at Elmfield and in the Society. He found it very difficult to step down from his positions of influence in the organizations which he had founded. His willingness to offer advice and his persuasive charm sometimes resulted in younger men feeling that at all costs they must insist
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on their own line, but if he came to be reconciled with one of these indepen
dent lines it was graciously accepted and encouraged as a good idea. For example, towards the end of the 1950’s there was considerable criticism of the Journal of The Society of Glass Technolog)), on the one hand from parties in the industry who felt that much of what was being printed was unintel
ligible to them and on the other hand from the young men in the laboratories who wanted their work to appear in a journal which would be read for its scientific content. There was no compromise possible between the two parties and it seemed that the right step to be taken was to recommend publication of two journals and the cessation of the publication of the Journal in the form then existing. As Editor of the , having reached this opinion, I felt it only right to tell Turner of my decision before making it public. He listened with a very solemn face to the arguments in favour of the change for about twenty minutes. He then asked me one or two searching questions and finally said he was glad that somebody was at last thinking of the future of the Journal, and from then on, gave me unreserved support to the project. O f course, with his backing, everybody else was behind us and he took great pleasure in the Journal and its new forms. One of his last letters to me mentioned his joy in reading the latest number in bed that morning.
In 1955 it was decided that the functions of the Glass Delegacy—as Turner had conceived and organized them—were no longer in accord with the trend of the times. Here was a truly anomalous situation; a university department that undertook co-operative research for industry, that had members of staff whose duty was divided between teaching and ‘trouble shooting’ in the industry. The decision was taken that the Department must be split into the British Glass Industry Research Association, to be organized along the lines of the forty odd other Research Associations and a Department of Glass Technology which really would be a University Department to be run along traditional lines. Turner never became reconciled to this although he gradually began to express a great delight in the progress of the new Department and was always keen to see what was going on there.
He was very pleased when he heard of plans to extend the laboratories at Elmfield. He was interested to the last to hear of the development of the curriculum and the increase in the time to be spent particularly by honours students on physics, chemistry and mathematics; such things he gladly acknowledged as steps in the right direction and I think he felt satisfied that the foundations which he had laid down were being built on.
Journeys abroad
He had always been a great traveller and besides the visits with the Society of Glass Technology which have already been mentioned, he made a tour round the world in 1935, and visited the United States on several occasions. It was his delight on such tours, whenever possible, to travel on a cargo boat as one of a small complement of ten or a dozen passengers.
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Although he had no hesitation in travelling by air, he regarded it as the most boring form of travel that could have been invented.
When he was about three years old he had suffered an attack of polio
myelitis, which of course was then not so described. This led to the atrophy of certain muscles of the right arm and shoulder and the general retardation of development of the right side from the abdomen upwards. This was a handi
cap which hardly affected Turner at all, as witness the joy he found in his Alpine walks. He was a member of the Swiss Alpine Club and derived tre
mendous enjoyment from his expeditions to the mountains; he could always delight his listeners with accounts of such adventures which ranged from the mountains of New Zealand and the Alps to the moors near Sheffield where he found so much pleasure. I found among his papers, a story of how he took his first wife, when she was approaching her 58th birthday, for a walk over the Col d ’Herens. It describes the unceasing avalanches falling over the cliffs of the Zmutt face of the M atterhorn and the strange opalescence of the air of the Zmutt valley. Leaving soon after daylight they made steady pro
gress though rendered anxious by the onset of snow flurries; they traversed the Tete Blanche at 12 400 feet in heavy snow, but fortunately the clouds broke and a long and difficult journey followed until they reached, 14 hours after the start, a little Inn at Ferpecle.
Turner and his family
Turner was twice married, his first wife, Mary Isobel Marshall, was a little lady of much practical sense and energy, vivacious and lovable, who attracted to herself friends wherever she went. She died in 1939. Their four children have found their vocations—two in the Church and two in academic or scholastic work. The elder son, Ernest, is the Rector of Eyam, a village in Derbyshire near to Sheffield. The younger daughter, Joan, is a certificated Church Worker who has spent much time in the less prosperous parishes of Sheffield as well as London. The second son, Eric, is Professor of Papyrology, University College London, and was until a year or so ago, Director of the Institute of Classical Studies of the University of London. Margaret, the elder daughter, is the wife of J. H. Woodroffe, the Senior Science Master of Shrewsbury School.
In 1943 Turner married Annie Helen Nairn Monro in St Giles’ Cathedral, Edinburgh. As Helen Monro, Mrs Turner had already some reputation as an artist when in 1938 she decided to take up glass engraving and went to Stutt
gart to study under Professor Wilhelm von Eiff. In 1941 she was encouraged to take charge of a class on glass decoration at the College of Art, Edinburgh;
here in the course of the years, her work and that of the body of able students she has trained, have brought much distinction to themselves and to the College.
The beautiful Presidential Badge which Turner presented to the Society of Glass Technology was designed by Mrs Turner. This is a lead crystal glass disk, on which is engraved the badge of the Society, in a heavy silver mount
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embodying in the design the essential tools of the old glass craftsmen. Incor
porated in the mount are pieces of turquoise glass made in approximately 1400 b.c.
In his early manhood, Turner was an active church worker, and social welfare interested him throughout his life. The adult school movement developed by the Society of Friends, attracted him, and before the First World W ar he had been President of two such schools. For some years after this war, he was a Member of the Council of the Sheffield Educational Settlement.
Most of the time which he gave to social welfare however, was devoted, from 1905 and for the remainder of his life, to the settlement, which, when he first knew it, bore the name of the Neighbour Guild, becoming the Rutland Hall Settlement when it moved to its new headquarters at R utland Hall, Neepsend in 1905-1906, and later the Helen Wilson Settlement which it became in the 1940’s at the time of his Chairmanship of the Committee of Management. For many years he and his first wife were active class leaders, while he was an original trustee of the Rutland Hall and in his closing years, a Vice- President and Chairman of the Trustees.
Many honours were bestowed upon Turner. He was an Officer of the Order of the British Empire, awarded in 1918, a Commendatore en Merito of the Republic of Italy, holder of the Silver Medal of the City of Paris. He was made an Honorary Doctor of Technical Science of the University of Sheffield in 1954 and created an Emeritus Professor very soon after his retire
ment. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1938, he was a Founder Fellow of the Institute of Physics, an Honorary Fellow of the Society of Glass Technology and of the Institute of Ceramics, an Honorary Member of the American Ceramic Society and of the Deutsche Glastechnische Gesell- schaft, a Foreign Member of the Masaryk Academy of Prague, an Honorary Member of the Glass Sellers’ Company of the City of London, an Honorary Member of Keramos. He held the Silver Medal of the Royal Society of Arts and was the only person outside Germany on whom the Deutsche Glas
technische Gesellschaft had conferred the Otto Schott commemoration medal.
Turner was a scholar and at the same time a great organizer and promoter.
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about his career was his single-minded devotion to glass technology. His early work in physical chemistry suggests that he would have had a successful career as a chemist: instead his interest in the application of science led him to devote his efforts to the glass industry.
As he himself said at the end of his Mellor memorial lecture:
‘Institutions of this kind and the persons who man them, carry industries forward along new paths to destinies which often cannot be foreseen; but it is certain that scientific principles, steadfastly and honestly applied, increase industrial efficiency and thereby the material welfare of the community whilst they also develop initiative and resilience in industries to meet such changed circumstances as from time to time confront them. By the nature of their work these institutions must be far-seeing; and since they seek no
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material profit for themselves they need to have idealism sufficient to carry them through those periods when industrial management seems unresponsive.
If it is to be fruitful, the work of such institutions must rest largely on their enthusiasm, their sense of purpose and of mission.’
Turner’s institutions lived up to these standards. He wrote in 1960 to J. R. Clarke, an old colleague of his and a lecturer in physics in the University of Sheffield, ‘. . . and as I get older and look back over the course of events and my profound increasing ignorance, I doubt greatly why I should be called a man of science, all that I can claim to have done is to have made a track which perhaps other more scientific persons will follow’.
This will appear to be a very modest statement of his achievement to those, throughout the world, who have benefited from the work of the Department, from the meetings of the Society of Glass Technology, from the pages of its Journals and from the International Congresses on Glass; it will appear
particularly modest to those who are privileged now to work in Elmfield.
R . W. Douglas
BIBLIOGRAPHY Sections I
II III IV V
Papers from 1905 to 1914. Physical chemistry.
Papers from 1917 to 1954. Mainly on glass technology.
Selected surveys; reports, addresses, etc.
Papers on the history of glass and glassmaking.
Books and brochures.
I Papers from 1905 to 1914. Physical chemistry
1905. (With A. Fin d l a y.) The influence of the hydroxyl and alkoxyl groups on the velocity of saponification. Trans. Chem. Soc. 87, 747.
1908 and 1910. (With A. N . Me l d r u m.) The molecular complexity of amides in various solvents. I, II, and III. Trans. Chem. Soc. I. 93, 876. II. 97, 1605. III. 97, 1805.
1909. (With A. Fin d l a y and Ge r t r u d e E. Ow e n.) Affinity constants of hydroxyl- and alkyloxy-acids. Trans. Chem. Soc. 95, 938.
1909. Chemists in industry. Sheffield Daily Tel. March 23, 26, and 30, p. 6. April 2,6, and 9, p. 6.
1910. A study of the Landsberger-Sakurai boiling-point method of determining molecular weights. Trans. Chem. Soc. 97, 1184.
1910. (With E. W. Me r r y.) The molecular complexity, in the liquid state, of tervalent nitrogen compounds. Trans. Chem. Soc. 97, 2069.
1911. (With G. J. Pe d d l e.) Molecular association in water. Trans. Chem. Soc. 99, 685.
1911. Molecular association and its relationship to electrolytic dissociation. The molecular complexity of halogen-containing compounds. Trans. Chem. Soc. 99, 880.
1912. The molecular condition of some organic ammonium salts in bromoform. Trans. Chem.
Sor. 101, 1923.
1912. Complexity moleculaire dans l’etat liquide. J . Chim. Phys. 10, 467.
1913. (With C. C. Bis se t t.) A simple and efficient method of dehydrating substances by electrical heating in a vacuum. Proc. Chem. Soc. 29, 233.
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1913. (With C. T. Po l l a r d.) An improved apparatus for the determination of molecular weight by the Landsberger-Sakurai method. Proc. Chem. Soc. 29, 34 9 .
1913. (With G. J. Pe d d l e.) Solubilities of salts of ammonium bases in water and in chloro
form. I. Solubility as a constitutive property. Trans. Chem. Soc. 103, 1202.
1913. (With C. C. Bis s e t t.) The solubilities of alkali haloids in methyl, ethyl, propyl, and isoamyl alcohols. Trans. Chem. Soc. 103, 1904.
1914. (Witii E. W. Me r r y.) The viscosities of some binary liquid mixtures containing formamide. Trans. Chem. Soc. 105, 748.
1914. (With G . C. Bis s e t t.) The connexion between the dielectric constant and the solvent power of a liquid. Trans. Chem. Soc. 105, 9 3 4 .
1914. (With E. W. Me r r y.) Viscosities of mixtures of formamide with the alcohols. Trans.
Chem. Soc. 105, 1656.
1914. (With C. T. Po l l a r d.) The influence o f solvents on molecular weights. I . Salts.
Trans. Chem. Soc. 105, 1751.
1914. (With C. G. Bis s e t t.) The molecular weights of some salts of the alkali metals and an account of the compounds of these salts with the alcohols. Trans. Chem. Soc. 105, 1777.
1914. (With S. En g l is h.) The nature of molecular association. Its relation to chemical combination. Trans. Chem. Soc. 105, 1786.
II Papers from 1917 to 1954. Mainly on glass technology
1917. (With J. D. Ca u w o o d.) The influence of chlorides and sulphates in producing opalescence in glass. J. Soc. Glass Tech. 1, T. 87.
1917. (With G. W. W. Wa y and J. D. Ca u w o o d.) The action of sodium hydroxide solution on glass at different temperatures. J . Soc. Glass Tech. 1, T. 144.
1917. (With J. D. Ca u w o o d and S. En g l is h.) The attack of chemical reagents on glass surfaces, and a comparison of different types of chemical glassware. J . Soc. Glass Tech.
I, T. 153.
1917. Some common problems in melting and working glass. I. The substitution of salt cake by soda. II. The relative sizes of gas and air ports. J . Soc. Glass Tech. 1, T. 210.
1917. A bibliographical contribution towards the study of the durability of glass. J . Soc.
Glass Tech. 1, T. 213.
1918. (With J. D. Ca u w o o d and D. We b b.) The resistant power of heavy lead-potash glass to chemical agents. J . Soc. Glass Tech. 2, T. 88.
1918. (With S. En g l is h.) Some notes on the annealing of glass. J. Soc. Glass Tech. 2, T. 90.
1918. (With J. D. Ca u w o o d.) The resistant properties of some types of foreign chemical glassware.^. Soc. Glass Tech. 2, T. 219.
1918. (With J. D. Ca u w o o d.) The effect of the continued action on chemical glassware of water. J . Soc. Glass Tech. 2, T. 235.
1918. (With J. D. Ca u w o o d.) The effect of temperature on the rate of corrosion of glass.
J . Soc. Glass Tech. 2, T. 260.
1918. (With J. H. Da v id s o n.) Note on the solubility of clay in glass. J . Soc. Glass Tech. 2, T. 280.
1919. (With S. En g l is h.) The annealing temperatures of the lime-soda glasses. J . Soc. Glass Tech. 3, T. 125.
1919. (With Co n s t a n c e M. M. Mu ir h e a d.) Further investigations on chemical glassware.
J . Soc. Glass Tech. 3, T. 129.
1919. (With J. H. Da v id s o n.) The properties of the lime-soda glasses. J . Soc. Glass Tech. 3, T. 222.
1919. (With J. D. Ca u w o o d and Ot h e r s.) The durability of lime-soda glasses. J . Soc. Glass Tech. 3, T. 228.
1919. (With S. En g l is h.) The heat expansion of soda-lime glasses. J. Soc. Glass Tech. 3, T. 238.
1919. (With J. R. Cl a r k e.) The influence of lime on the value of Young’s modulus of elasticity for the lime-soda glasses. J . Soc. Glass Tech. 3, T. 260.
