Sir Charles Sykes CBE, FRS (27 February 1905 – 29 January 1982) was a British physicist and metallurgist.
[1] He was born in Clowne, Derbyshire, the only son of Samuel Sykes, the local greengrocer and was educated at the Netherthorpe Grammar School and Sheffield University, where he gained a BSc in physics in 1925.
He stayed on there to do a PhD course in physics but after one year accepted an invitation by Metropolitan-Vickers of Manchester to complete an unfinished project on the alloys of zirconium.
Based on his work on alloys at Metropolitan-Vickers he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1943, his application citation referring to his original investigations into the order-disorder transformation in alloys, the use of x-rays for analysis and his developments of X-ray tubes, continuously evacuated valves and diffusion pumps, and his work on production of hard metals.
In 1944 he was appointed director of the Brown–Firth research department in Sheffield, contributing his large knowledge of special materials and alloys to the development of high temperature gas turbines.