John W. Lyons
Credit: NIST
John W. Lyons, a chemist who served as director of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) from 1990 to 1993 and guided the organization as its mission expanded in support of U.S. industry, died on March 14 in Frederick, Maryland. He was 93 years old.
President George H.W. Bush appointed Lyons to be the ninth director of NIST in 1990. He first came to the agency, then called the National Bureau of Standards (NBS), in 1973, following an 18-year career at the Monsanto Chemical Company, where he became known for his expertise in the chemistry and use of fire retardants. The bureau recruited Lyons to lead its newly formed Center for Fire Research.
1973 marked a pivotal year for fire safety in the U.S. The National Commission on Fire Prevention and Control published a landmark report that year, America Burning, that described the devastating toll of lives lost to fire in the U.S. The report criticized what it called the nation’s indifference to the fire problem and called for a comprehensive effort by government, industry and the public to address it. It was against this backdrop that Lyons took the helm of the bureau’s new Center for Fire Research.
“There had been very little research on fire before this time,” said Jack Snell, who worked under Lyons at the center. The researchers there set out to change that. “We wanted to understand why fires behaved the way they did,” Snell said. “What makes a fire ignite? What causes the flames to spread?”
Researchers at the center probed the fundamentals of fire by studying combustion at the atomic and molecular level. ..
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