Constance Tipper facts for kids

Constance Tipper (born Constance Fligg Elam) was an amazing English scientist. She was a metallurgist and crystallographer. This means she studied how metals behave and how their tiny parts (crystals) are arranged.

Constance Tipper was the first woman to be a full-time teacher at the Cambridge University Department of Engineering. She did important work on how metals break, especially the ones used to build warships. She lived to be 101 years old!

A Young Scientist's Journey

Constance Fligg Elam was born on February 16, 1894, in New Barnet, England. Her father was a surgeon. She went to Saint Felix School and then studied Engineering at Newnham College, Cambridge in 1912. She learned about natural sciences there.

In 1915, Constance started working at the National Physical Laboratory. This lab studies how things work in science. A year later, she moved to the Royal School of Mines. Here, she became a research assistant. She even became a member of the Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining, which is a big deal for someone studying materials.

Constance then worked at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge. In 1924, she received a special research award from the Worshipful Company of Armourers and Brasiers. This award helped her continue her important studies. In 1927, she traveled to Canada and America for a big meeting about mining and metals. She wrote about her travels for a magazine called The Woman Engineer.

Life and Work at Cambridge

In 1928, Constance married George Tipper. He was also a scientist who worked in India. After getting her DSc degree in 1929, she moved to Cambridge. She kept working there for more than 30 years.

During World War II, many male teachers went to help with the war effort. Constance was appointed as a lecturer in the Department of Engineering in 1939. This made her one of the first women to teach at the university during that time.

In 1949, Constance Tipper became a Reader at Cambridge University. This was a very important position. She was the only full-time woman in the Engineering department. She stayed at Cambridge until she retired in 1960.

Even after retiring, Constance continued to work as a consultant. She gave advice on metals used to build submarines in North-West England. When she turned 100 in 1994, her college, Newnham College, Cambridge, planted a special sweet chestnut tree in her honor.

Solving Metal Mysteries

Constance Tipper was an expert in understanding how strong metals are and why they sometimes break. Her research helped solve many engineering problems.

One of her most famous studies was during World War II. She investigated why many Liberty Ships were breaking apart. These ships were built very quickly in the US using a new method called welding. People thought the welding was causing the ships to crack.

But Constance Tipper discovered something different! She found that the problem wasn't the welding. It was the steel itself. She showed that steel can become very weak and break easily at cold temperatures. This is called "brittle fracture." Because the Liberty Ships were sailing in the cold North Atlantic Ocean, the steel became brittle and cracked.

She also found that cracks in older ships (which used rivets) would stop at the edges of metal plates. But in the new welded ships, the cracks could spread all the way across the ship! To help prevent this, she developed a special test called the "Tipper Test." This test makes sure the metal used in ships is strong enough and won't break easily in the cold.

Constance Tipper was also the first person to use a scanning electron microscope (SEM) to look closely at how metals break. She used one of the very first SEMs ever built! Her work was so important that she won several awards. The International Congress on Fracture even gives out a special award, the Constance Tipper Silver Medal, to scientists who make big discoveries in the field of fracture.

Awards and Honours

• 1923 Royal Society Bakerian Medal (a very important science award)
• 1933 Beilby Medal and Prize
• 1936–38 Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship

Works

• "The Production of Single Crystals of Aluminium and their Tensile Properties" (with H. C. H. Carpenter). Proceedings of the Royal Society of London (1921)
• Deformation of Metal Crystals (Oxford University Press, 1935)
• The Brittle Fracture Story (Cambridge University Press, 1962)
• Publication: The fracture of mild steel plate. Report no. R3 (The Admiralty Ship welding Committee) London 1948
• Brittle fracture of mild steel plates (British Iron and Steel Research Association Procs. of a conf at the Engineering Laboratory, Cambridge University, 26 Oct 1945 p. 23–50 abstracted in Journal of the Iron and Steel Institute Oct 1947 p 300)
• The influence of rate of deformation on the tensile test with special reference to the yield point in Iron and Steel (reprinted from Proc. of the Royal Society of London Series A no. 923 vol 165 April 1938)
• The distortion of B-Brass and Iron Crystals (Proc. of the Royal Society of London Series A no. 879, vol. 153 p 273-301 Jan. 1936 [illustr.])
• The distortion of metal crystals (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1935)
• article in Nature http://www.nature.com/nature/iournal/v133/n3367/abs/133723aO.html (Letters to Editor Nature 133, 723–723 (12 May 1934) doi:10.1038/133723aO)
• Slip-bands and Twin-like Structures in Crystals

Images for kids

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  A robot representing engineering and science.