There may be some debate about the parentage of modern ceramics in
American universities, in which there is no doubt that faculty at Penn
State, Ohio State, and Illinois played major roles. However, there is perhaps
no contest in identifying (Leslie) Eric Cross as the father of modern
electroceramics. Since the birth of electrical machinery, mica, a natural
single crystal mineral (not a polycrystalline ceramic), dominated the
world of insulating oxide materials in all electrical systems (In 1945 I
was sent to the United States to Penn State to save India’s export market
in mica!). In that very year the seeds of its replacement were sown simultaneously
all over the world by the discovery of BaTiO, the ceramic
dielectric with a k one thousand times greater than mica (see Ref. 1). I
have shown elsewhere that this was possibly the greatest step-function
discovery in the history of materials science. High Tc superconductors
pale in significance compared to this.