I have known Joe Cotton for 7 or 8 years. I met him first as the Scientific Head at Imperial Metals Industries in Birmingham, England. Joe exudes a contagious vitality. He is 5 inches shorter than I am and has slightly receding gray-black hair; his bright blue eyes shine at once with a jolly and luminescent quality. Parenthetically, the roses in his backyard bloom with an almost reckless flourish. Virtually, anything he undertakes not only gets accomplished but is also carried out with generous enthusiasm.
I met T. P. (Sam) Hoar several years before Joe. I had, in fact, met Sam Hoar even earlier through his students and publications and had admired his marvelous contribution to corrosion science, emanating from his base in the Metallurgy Department at Cambridge. I have since had very pleasant associations with many of his students: Scully, Slater, Galvele, and others. Sam introduced me to the...
