William Malcolm Corse
William Malcolm Corse (c1878-1944)
1944 Obituary [1]
Mr. W. M. Corse, Corresponding Member to the Council for the United States, died at his farm at Westmoreland, N.H., on June 3, 1944, aged 66 years.
After graduating from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1899, Mr. Corse was chemist first to the William S. Merrill Chemical Company, Cincinnati, and subsequently to the Detroit White Lead Works.
In 1903 he became foundry superintendent and later assistant superintendent of the Detroit Lubricator Company. Mr. Corse afterwards was connected with the Michigan Smelting and Refining Company and from 1909 to 1913 was works manager of the Lumen Bearing Company, Buffalo.
During the war of 1914-18 he served at the Portsmouth, N.H., Navy Yard as a special consultant on problems of brass foundry practice.
In 1922 Mr. Corse moved to Washington, D.C., where he was connected with the National Research Council and where he later established his own firm of consulting metallurgical engineers. Ill health forced him to relinquish active participation in this firm some time before his death.
While with the Detroit Lubricator Company, Mr. Corse played a leading part in promoting and organizing the American Brass Foundrymen's Association, which was formed during the American Foundrymen's Association meeting in Philadelphia in 1907.
Five years later, largely through Mr. Corse's influence, it was decided to broaden the field of the Association to cover all the non-ferrous metals and to rechristen it the American Institute of Metals. Mr. Corse was secretary first of the American Brass Foundrymen's Association, and subsequently of the American Institute of Metals. After a few years the latter became affiliated with the American Institute of Mining and Metallurgical Engineers, forming the Institute of Metals Division. Mr. Corse was elected chairman of the Division, and subsequently served as secretary-treasurer (1920-25), secretary (1926-29), secretary-treasurer (1930-32), and treasurer (1933-40). He was also for 21 years secretary of the advisory committee on non-ferrous alloys of the National Bureau of Standards.
Mr. Corse was the author of many articles and papers and was at one time a frequent correspondent on papers published in this Journal. He also published (in 1930) a book on "Bearing Metals and Bearings" in the American Chemical Society Monograph Series. He was a member of the American Military Engineers, American Institute of Chemical Engineers, American Society for Testing Materials, and American Chemical Society. Mr. Corse was an Original Member of the Institute of Metals and, in his capacity as Secretary of the American Brassfounders' Association, he sent a message of greeting on the formation of the Institute which was read at its first meeting, held in Birmingham in the autumn of 1908. In 1924 he delivered the Institute's third Autumn Lecture on "Recent Developments in Non-Ferrous Metallurgy in the United States" (Journal, 1924, 32, 455).
He was Honorary Corresponding Member to the Council for the United States from 1922 until the time of his death.