John Oliver Arnold

Professor John Oliver Arnold (1858-1930) of Metallurgy, Sheffield University College.

1897 read a paper to the Iron and Steel Institute on permeability to furnace gases of clay crucibles.

1911 Living at Broomfield, Sheffield: John Oliver Arnold (age 52 born Fletton, Hunts.), University Professor (Metallurgy). With his wife Adelaide Victoria Arnold (age 50 born Liverpool), Married 27 years with three children. Also two servants.

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1930 Obituary

Professor JOHN OLIVER ARNOLD, F.R.S., Emeritus Professor of Metallurgy in the University of Sheffield, died at Oxford on March 27, 1930, in his seventy-third year.

Born at Peterborough in 1858, he was educated at King Edward's School, Birmingham; he then joined H.M.S. Conway, intending to take up a seafaring career. However, after a voyage to India, he entered the Sheffield Steel and Iron Works (Brown, Bayley and Dixon's), where he actively pursued the study of metallurgy. He held several appointments in the laboratory and testing departments at local works, and was awarded a Telford Medal by the Institution of Civil Engineers in 1887.

In 1889 he was appointed Professor of Metallurgy at the Sheffield Technical School, and remained on the staff when that body was absorbed by the University; he effected, revolutionary changes in his department by giving increased attention to the science of metals, in which his investigations were of the greatest practical value. He remained at the head of the metallurgical laboratories of the Department of Applied Science of the University of Sheffield from its opening until he resigned his Professorship in 1920, and himself designed the metallurgical laboratories and steelworks.

He accompanied the British Association to South Africa as a special lecturer on steel in 1905; he was a member of the Standing Committee on Metallurgy of the Advisory Council of the Privy. Council, and was frequently consulted by the Admiralty.

In 1900 Arnold carried out at the instance of the late A. F. Wiener a systematic series of tests to determine the influence of vanadium on steel, and great merit is certainly due to him as a pioneer in making known the value of vanadium as an alloy constituent in steel and in the development of its use. Yet Arnold's claim to have been the discoverer of the influence of vanadium cannot be substantiated, as he was anticipated by four years by the Frenchman, K. Helouis, whose first systematic tests, in 1896, on the effect of vanadium in steel had attracted much attention at the time (Journ. I. and B.I., 1896, No. II. p. 418).

Arnold's subsequent researches at Sheffield on the molecular constitution of alloy steels and on the influence of all the principal metals used in the production of such steels led to notable improvements in the qualities of high-speed steels.

During his career as Professor of Metallurgy at Sheffield University he contributed fifteen papers to the Proceedings of the Institute, of some of which he was the sole author, while some were written by him in collaboration with others, notably the late Professor McWilliam. Of these papers he was accustomed to regard his first as perhaps the most important, namely, "The Physical Influence of Elements on Iron," published in 1894. A later paper on "The Microstructure of Hardened Steel," presented jointly with McWilliam in 1902, led to what was perhaps the most heated controversy ever witnessed at a meeting of the Institute. Professor Arnold was elected to Fellowship of the Royal Society in 1912, and was a Doctor of Metallurgy of the University of Sheffield. In February 1919 his health broke down and he was ordered complete rest for a year.

He was elected a member of the Iron and Steel Institute in 1901, a Member of Council in September 1916, and an Honorary Vice-President in June 1925.

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