Dr. Alfred Stansfield (1871-1944) of McGill University, Montreal
1944 Obituary [1]
Dr. A. Stansfield, Emeritus Professor of Metallurgy at McGill University, died at Westmount, Montreal, on February 5, 1944.
Born at Bradford, Yorks., in 1871, Stansfield was educated at Ackworth School, Bradford Technical College, and the Royal School of Mines, London.
In 1894 he was appointed assistant to the late Sir William Roberts-Austen, F.R.S., at the Royal Mint and lecture assistant in metallurgy at the Royal School of Mines. He also took part in the researches that Roberts-Austen was then conducting for the Alloys Research Committee of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, and was awarded the D.Sc. degree of London University in 1898.
In 1901 Stansfield was appointed Birks Professor of Metallurgy and Head of the Department of Metallurgy at McGill University, Montreal, a position which he held until his retirement in 1936. Soon after his appointment, he conducted researches on the electric smelting of iron and zinc ores, and in 1914 visited Sweden, on behalf of the Canadian Government, to report on the methods used there in the electric smelting of iron ores.
In 1915 Stansfield served on a commission appointed by the Canadian Minister of Militia and Defence to investigate the feasibility of producing refined copper and zinc in the Dominion. During the war of 1914-18 he began the electrolytic production of magnesium at Shawinigan, and in 1918 submitted a report to the Government of British Columbia on the possibilities of electrically smelting the magnetite iron ores found in that province.
Early in this century Stansfield published a book on the electric furnace which was subsequently revised and enlarged, and in 1916 he published a paper in this Journal on "Electric Furnaces as Applied to Non-Ferrous Metallurgy" (1916, 15, 277). Most of his other publications were also on electric furnaces and electric smelting.
Besides being an Original Member of this Institute and Honorary Corresponding Member to the Council for Canada from 1915 to 1940, Stansfield was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and of the Chemical Society, and a member of the Iron and Steel Institute, the American Institute of Mining and Metallurgical Engineers, and the Electrochemical Society. He was awarded the Plummer Medal of the Engineering Institute of Canada in 1921.
1944 Obituary [2]