Melvin A. Cook

Content sourced from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Melvin Alonzo Cook (1911–2000) was an American chemist best known for his work with explosives, including shaped charges and slurry explosives. He was born October 10, 1911, in Garden City, Utah. He earned a Master of Arts from the University of Utah in 1934 and a Ph.D. in physical chemistry from Yale in 1937.

Cook worked for DuPont, founded IRECO Chemicals (which later became part of Dyno Nobel), and taught metallurgy and mechanical engineering at the University of Utah. He passed away on October 12, 2000, in Salt Lake City after complications from surgery.

He married Wanda Garfield, and they had three sons and two daughters. Their son Merrill Cook later served as a U.S. representative for Utah. Cook’s explosive research spanned more than five decades and included investigations into the 1947 Texas City Disaster, the worst industrial accident in U.S. history.

In 1956, he created a new blasting agent made from ammonium nitrate, aluminum powder, and fuel oil—an early slurry explosive that was notably safer. He consulted for the Iron Ore Company of Canada, and his slurry technology helped pave the way for the BLU-82 “Daisy Cutter,” a large conventional bomb used in Vietnam to clear helicopter landing zones.

For his work on slurry explosives, Cook received the Nitro Nobel Gold Medal in 1968—the second time the award was given. He was also a devoted creationist. He wrote about his views in Science and Mormonism and argued that the Earth’s age might be interpreted differently by science and faith. He contributed an introduction to Joseph Fielding Smith’s 1954 book Man, His Origin and Destiny.