John D. Eshelby
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Through World War II
Early life and education
Eshelby was born at Puddington, Cheshire, the son of Captain Alan Douglas Eshelby and Phoebe Mason Hutchinson. He was educated at St Cyprian's School, Eastbourne and was due to go to Charterhouse School but developed rheumatic fever and received his secondary education privately at home. At about this time the family moved to Manor House at Farrington Gurney, Somerset where his tutors were the village schoolmaster and a local clergyman. He relied extensively on self-instruction and obtained a place in the Physics Department of Bristol University and was awarded a first class honours in physics in 1937. He then worked in a research laboratory under H W B Skinner and W Sucksmith on magnetism and the soft X-ray spectra of solids.
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Research and career
In World War II Eshelby began working for the Admiralty on the degaussing of ships, but on 4 May 1940 he joined the Technical Branch of the Royal Air Force. His work from February 1941 to June 1942 was for the Coastal Command Development Unit conducting performance trials of air-to-surface-vessel radar and other operational devices in all types of aircraft. He was then involved in radar work, from August 1942 to February 1943 with 76 signals wing and from February 1943 to September 1944 at the radar establishment at Malvern. He was then transferred to disarmament work and then to the Air Historical branch in September 1945. He left the RAF as a squadron leader on 4 October 1946.
After the war Eshelby returned to Bristol University to study for a PhD and taught himself the theory of elasticity for his thesis on "Stationary and moving dislocations". He obtained his PhD in 1950 under Nevill Mott. In 1951 he moved to the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign as a Research Associate, where he stayed until 1953 when he was appointed a lecturer at the University of Birmingham, where he taught from 1953 to 1964 at the Department of Metallurgy. During this time, he worked on point defects and dislocations, developing the method of 'transformation strains' and studying the Eshelby inclusion problems for the first time, as well as the study of forces on elastic singularities.
In 1964 he moved to the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge University at the behest of Neville Mott, and was a Fellow of Churchill College from 1965 to 1966. He was then appointed Reader in the Faculty of Materials (Theory of Materials) at the University of Sheffield, where he became Professor in 1971.
Personal life and Death
Eshelby was clear and amusing as a lecturer, and prepared his lectures with great care, but was not keen on doing experimental work. He was well versed in Sanskrit (among other classical languages) and was an avid second-hand book buyer.
Eshelby died on 10 December 1981.
Legacy
Eshelby work helped shape the fields of defect mechanics and micromechanics of inhomogeneous solids for fifty years, including the controlling mechanisms of plastic deformation and fracture.The scientific phenomenon called Eshelby's inclusion is named after this scientist, and points at an ellipsoidal subdomain in an infinite homogeneous body, subjected to a uniform transformation strain.