AGM 2009 Dr Laura Galvin (nee Buckley), Honorary Secretary

The 2009 AGM was accompanied by ‘Xmas Lectures’ where over 30 people attended in all – a record for recent years AGM’s.

The lectures were entertaining and light-hearted introspectives on areas of corrosion dear to us all and given the response from the attendees it is planned that this style of event be repeated at next years AGM. In my bid to include as many Institute members as possible in ICorr business the AGM will move around the country: London, 2008; Manchester, 2009. It was proposed that the 2010 event be hosted by the newly formed Midlands branch: Details will be posted on the website nearer the time. I hope to see you there! Maybe Aberdeen, Ireland or Yorkshire for 2011?

Manchester 2010

Dr Nicholas Stevens gave a tongue in cheek presentation titled ‘Alcoholic Materials Science’ highlighting the role of the production of alcoholic beverages in the history of the development of the sciences.

Prehistoric cultures took advantage of fermentation as a way of creating drinks that served as a safe store of calories and energy that could be preserved without spoiling far longer than water, but possibly also for their use in different cultural or religious practices. The early written history of the use of alcohol in civilized societies began with the Greek idea of the Symposium as a drinking party at which science and philosophy might also be discussed, obviously a distant ancestor of the modern conference.

In the development of ways of transporting wines, the history of sparkling wines is particularly influenced by technological progress. Before the development of strong glass from coal fired glassworks, first pioneered in Newcastle-on-Tyne by Sir Robert Mansell, any wine which was bottled before fermentation had completed would simply cause the bottle to explode and be wasted. The bottles from the English glassworks were the first ones strong enough to allow any wine to re-ferment in the bottle and become fizzy, and it has even been rediscovered recently that English coopers importing still wine from Champagne in barrels would add sugar as they bottled the wine, allowing it to re-ferment in the bottles as early as the 1660s, a technique not widely adopted in the Champagne region until the early 1800s.

The final part of the talk touched on the contribution made to the development of thermodynamics by James Prescott Joule, a prominent Manchester brewer whose expertise in precise temperature measurements was informed by the technical expertise necessary for his trade, and whose name has now become immortal as the unit of energy.

President Paul Lambert’s presentation entitled ‘Rust – for fun and profit’ was a brief history of the corrosion profession and Paul’s personal introduction to it. Having chosen (probably wisely) between media and metallurgy, he found himself in the first year of a new materials degree course at Aston University. While the fledgling course was a mish-mash of metallurgy, physics, mechanics, chemistry and, less understandably, technical drawing (a skill he is still proud to lack to this day) it did introduce him to the world of construction materials and, more specifically, the corrosion of reinforced concrete.

While he has periodically escaped concrete matters for those of a more mainstream nature, it is still the area where he works most and with concerns over bridges in the USA, his own encounters with Albania infrastructure and the local authorities in the UK kindly spreading hundreds of thousand of tonnes of salt every time there is bit of a ‘cold snap’, it looks like remaining a good source of both fun and profit for Paul and other members of the Institute for many years to come.

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