Egon Orowan

[9][7] Soon after Hitler's rise to power in 1933, Orowan, who was of Jewish descent, left his studies and career in Berlin and returned to Hungary.

[8] In 1934, Orowan,[11] roughly contemporarily with G. I. Taylor and Michael Polanyi, realized that the plastic deformation of ductile materials could be explained in terms of the theory of dislocations developed by Vito Volterra in 1905.

In Hungary, he seemed to have experienced some difficulty in finding immediate employment and spent the next few years living with his mother and ruminating on his doctoral research.

[9][7] From 1936 to 1939, he worked for the Tungsram light bulbs manufacturer, where, with the help of Mihály (Michael) Polanyi, he developed a new process for the extraction of krypton from the air.

[9][8] In 1937, aware of the imminence of war, Orowan accepted the invitation of Rudolf Peierls and moved to the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom where they worked together on the theory of fatigue.

In 1944, he was central to the reappraisal of the causes of the loss of many Liberty ships during the war, identifying the critical issues of the notch sensitivity of poor quality welds and the aggravating effects of the extremely low temperatures of the North Atlantic.

[7] He was a visiting professor at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1962, the Boeing Scientific Research Laboratory for a year in 1965–1977, and at the University of Pittsburgh in 1972.