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Prof. GEORGE C. KUCZYNSKI was born in 1914 in Poland, and taught high school math and physics up to the 1939 invasion by Germany. He moved to the United Kingdom and obtained a degree from University of Swansea, then immigrated to the USA and obtained employment at Washington State University in 1943 on alloying to improve corrosion resistance. In 1944, he was admitted to the doctoral program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in metallurgy. His early employment consisted of short stays at several sites. He taught at Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute with Henry Hausner, where Kempton Roll was one of his students.
At the Sylvania Electric Bayside Laboratories he focused on nuclear energy and replicating Coolidge’s process for sintering tungsten lamp filaments. Kuczynski heat treated spherical copper powder in a copper dish and observed necking of the particles. He disagreed with Frenkel’s viscous flow idea saying “Frenkel was solving physical problems in his head. This is dangerous. He thought that metals flow like viscous glass. This was obviously a mistake.” Instead, Kuczynski developed the concept of neck growth by volume and surface diffusion. His model for volume diffusion used the particle surface as the mass source, which gave no shrinkage contrary to observation. After leaving USA he arrived at Notre Dame University where he remained for 27 years, initiated several sintering conferences which were later moved to other universities in USA. Professor Kuczynski can be regarded as one of the founders of the solid state sintering theory. No scientific library anywhere in the world is without his name in the catalogue. To him, sintering was a secret—not a science—before him we knew thet sintering occurred, but did not know how. His broad classical education, training in mathematics and physics, and his keen mind enabled him to cut through the complex to simple, clear, unambiguous truth. He died on 16 May 1990 in South Bend, Indiana.
Тaken from “Sintering Science: An Historical Perspective" by R. German,
Science of Sintering by H. Palmour III, R.M. Spriggs, D.P. Uskoković