A graduate of the University of Birmingham and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Smith worked for many years as a research metallurgist at the American Brass Company.

During World War II he worked in the Chemical-Metallurgical Division of the Los Alamos Laboratory, where he purified, cast and shaped uranium-235 and plutonium, a metal hitherto available only in microgram amounts, and whose properties were largely unknown.

He read metallurgy at the University of Birmingham, having not met the requirements in mathematics to study his first choice, which was physics, and was awarded a second-class BSc in 1924.

[3][4] He married Alice Marchant Kimball, a student of English social history at Yale University, from which she earned a PhD in 1936, on 16 March 1931.

[7] Smith's metallurgists found ways of fabricating boron, producing beryllium bricks, and heat-treating steel.

[10] But by far the biggest challenge for Smith and his group was plutonium, a metal hitherto available only in microgram amounts, and whose properties were largely unknown.

[13] The metallurgists figured out how to purify the plutonium, and found that heating it to 250° allowed them to work it in the malleable γ phase.

[17] From 12 December 1946 to 10 January 1952, Smith served on the influential General Advisory Committee of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC).

[18] Chaired by Robert Oppenheimer, the wartime director of the Los Alamos Laboratory, the General Advisory Committee provided policy as well as technical advice to the commissioners.

[21] In common with other members of the General Advisory Committee, Smith opposed the development of the hydrogen bomb on technical and moral grounds.

His focus was to transplant the techniques of metallurgy into the study of the production methods used to create artefacts discovered by archaeologists such as samurai swords.

In his role of teaching the history of science, he argued that important advances were often the result of curiosity rather than the pursuit of defined goals.

[4] In 1981, Cyril Stanley Smith received the Dexter Award for Outstanding Achievement in the History of Chemistry from the American Chemical Society.

[27] His collection of antiquarian metallurgical texts was left to the Burndy Library at the Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology.