In 1934, Orowan, 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. Though the discovery was neglected until after World War II, it was critical in developing the modern science of solid mechanics.
After working for a short while on the extraction of krypton from the air for the manufacture of light bulbs, in 1937 Orowan moved to the University of Birmingham, UK where he worked on the theory of fatigue collaborating with Rudolf Peierls.
