J. E. Gordon

Gordon graduated in naval architecture at Glasgow University. During World War II he worked at the Royal Aircraft Establishment (RAE); here he studied composite materials, wooden aircraft, plastics and new materials of many types. He designed the rescue dinghies for most bomber aircraft used in the war, and studied the strength and behaviour of reinforcement fibres made of glass, carbon, boron and other materials.

After the war he worked at Tube Investments (TI) at the Group Research Laboratory, Hinxton Hall, near Cambridge.[1]

From 1962 he was head of a new branch at the Explosives Research and Development Establishment (ERDE), Waltham Abbey dealing with completely new structural materials. Some of his discoveries are still applied in the construction of fibre-reinforced parts for aircraft and rockets.

• Industrial Fellow Commoner at Churchill College, Cambridge.
• Professor of Materials Technology at the University of Reading.
• British Silver Medal of the Royal Aeronautical Society
• Griffith Medal of the Materials Science Club

• The New Science of Strong Materials or Why You Don't Fall Through the Floor - Pelican Books, 1968 - ISBN 0-691-02380-8
• Structures: Or Why Things Don't Fall Down - Pelican Books, 1978 - ISBN 0-306-81283-5
• The Science of Structures and Materials - Scientific American Library, 1988 - ISBN 0-7167-5022-8

Wikiquote has quotations related to J. E. Gordon.

• J.E.Gordon's profile on Penguin site.
• Jeronimedis & Gordon's work with wood toughness
• Introduction, by Philip Ball, from J.E. Gordon's "The New Science of Strong Materials"
• Article - Nature as an Engineer" New Scientist 17 Feb 1972 on Googlebooks