Chemist and ceramist, director of the British Refractories Research Association.

Early education 

• Joseph Mellor was born in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, England in 1869.

• When he was ten years old his family emigrated to New Zealand.    

• In 1899 Mellor graduated from Otago University with a first class honours degree in Chemistry. There is a Mellor Park and Mellor Street, named after him, in Dunedin, Otago.

• Mellor married in 1899 and moved back to England, being awarded a research scholarship at the University of Manchester.

Joseph Mellor attended the University of Otago - He completed his B.Sc. in 1897, winning the senior scholarship in chemistry. 

Twelve months later he took first-class honours and, as the preeminent science student of his year, was awarded the 1851 Science Exhibition Scholarship. This research scholarship was at Manchester University, England.

In 1899 Joseph Mellor moved back to England, being awarded a research scholarship which he carried out at the University of Manchester. 

During his full time research Mellor published a series of papers on the reaction between hydrogen and chlorine, wrote his first textbook, and gained the D.Sc. degree from the University of New Zealand.

Around 1902 he took a teaching appointment at the grammar school in Newcastle-under-Lyme - this first brought him into touch with the Staffordshire pottery industry. 

Soon he was giving lectures to evening classes on ceramics, amongst other subjects. 

In 1905 he took charge of the County Pottery Laboratory, Tunstall, and became secretary and editor to the Ceramic Society. 

His academic reputation was such that in 1908 he was offered (but declined) the chair of chemistry in the University of Sydney, Australia.

In 1905 Joseph Mellor took charge of the County Pottery Laboratory which had been established in the Queen Victoria Institute, Tunstall, he also became secretary and editor to the Ceramic Society. 

Mellor continuing investigations covered a broad field, ranging from individual factory problems over such matters as the performance of fire bricks, the nature and behaviour of glazes, and the constituents of clays. 

During the First World War his chief work concerned the improvement of refractory linings of steelmaking furnaces. This was because German and Austrian materials could no longer be obtained.  

By 1920 almost a hundred papers, the majority bearing Mellor's name, had appeared from the Tunstall Laboratory. 

Thereafter this laboratory was merged within the newly formed British Refractories Research Association, where Mellor remained as director until his retirement in 1937, though pressing on at the same time with the writing of his monumental Comprehensive Treatise on Inorganic and Theoretical Chemistry.

Mellor was a prolific writer of text books on such subjects as chemistry, clays & pottery, refractories, iron & steel.

Between 1921 and 1937 he wrote a 16 volume work "A Comprehensive Treatise on Inorganic and Theoretical Chemistry" which, in part, led to his election as a Fellow of the Royal Society.

Certificate of a Candidate for Election

Name and Title: Joseph William Mellor, D.Sc.
Profession: Inorganic, Physical and Technical Chemist
Usual Place of Residence: Sandon House, Regent Street, Stoke-on-Trent

Director of the British Refractories Association and Principal of the Pottery School, Stoke-on-Trent; Honorary Secretary of the Ceramic Society.

Distinguished as the author of 'A Comprehensive Treatise on Inorganic and Theoretical Chemistry' ultimately extending to at least twelve volumes, of which six are now published - a reference work so valuable to chemists that its importance can hardly be over-estimated. Also author of several textbooks. Is the leading authority on the scientific principles underlying the Pottery Industry and the author of some fifty original publications on the Chemistry and Physics of ceramics.

Obituary Notices of Fellows of the Royal Society, Vol. II, 1936–38 (1939).

'MELLOR, Joseph William, C.B.E., F.R.S.', from An Encyclopaedia of New Zealand, edited by A. H. McLintock, originally published in 1966.

Footnote on ceramic reasearch in Stoke-on-Trent

The British Refractories Research Association was formed in 1920 under Mellors direction. 

The pottery industry was required by the Import Duties Advisory Committee in 1937 to create a research association, so the British Pottery Research Association was formed in 1937. 

The two combined in April 1948 as the British Ceramic Research Association and a new building was opened in Penkull in 1951.