Parsons, James Albert Jr.

Impact on the world

Hired by Duriron in 1922 as an analytical chemist after the company's founder funded his engineering education at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Parsons received his first patent in noncorrosive metals in 1929 and spent the following two decades developing Durimet 20, a high-alloy austenitic stainless steel resistant to sulfuric acid and other industrial corrosives that Duriron began commercially casting in 1935; the alloy's corrosion-resistant vessels, pumps, and valves later proved essential to isolating uranium and plutonium solutions during the Manhattan Project, and the formulation remains in wide industrial use today under licensed trade names including Carpenter 20. Rising to chief metallurgist and laboratory manager over an all-Black research staff at a time when such positions were exceedingly rare for African Americans in industrial science, Parsons won the Harmon Foundation's first science gold medal in 1927, presented by Orville Wright, and later chaired the metallurgy department at Tennessee Agricultural & Industrial State University, where he built the first metallurgy curriculum at any historically Black college. He was posthumously inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2023.

Life & background

Born May 30, 1900, in Dayton, Ohio, to a father who worked as a butler for the founder of the Duriron metals company, Parsons turned down an appointment to the U.S. Naval Academy and instead earned an electrical engineering degree from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1922 with Duriron's financial backing. He worked at Duriron from 1922 until the early 1950s, later taught metallurgy at Tennessee State University and Ohio State University, and died in 1989 at age 89, having received an honorary doctorate from Wilberforce University and a spot on the Dayton Region Walk of Fame.

Sources

1. National Inventors Hall of Fame; Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture; Encyclopedia.com; Dayton Region Walk of Fame