Tipper, Constance (1894–1995)
Tipper, Constance (1894–1995)
English metallurgist. Born Constance Figg Elam in 1894; died on December 14, 1995, in Penrith, in northwest England; obtained doctorate from Cambridge University; married George Tipper (a geolo-gist), in 1928 (died 1947).
During World War II, Britain began searching for a reason as to why some Liberty merchant vessels were cracking like glass while at sea. These vessels, used to replace American ships that had been sunk by the Nazis, were floating Russian roulette games. Some would sink, others would not, and there seemed to be no rhyme or reason. Members of the merchant marine were beginning to refuse to work on the ships. The military suspected the flaw was in the engineering design or the welding. Constance Tipper disagreed. The problem was brittle steel, she said, and set about to create the "Tipper test," a way to determine the brittleness of metal. As a researcher at Cambridge at the time, she was one of the few women working in the field of metallurgy. Because of Tipper, the British merchant marine's Liberty vessels remained afloat. She died in 1995 at age 101.