He married Alice Marchant Kimball, a student of English social history at Yale University, from which she earned a PhD in 1936, on 16 March 1931. Of the marriage, Alice's sister remarked that: "If he didn't go to Oxford or Cambridge, isn't Church of England, and doesn't like sports, you might as well marry an American". He became a naturalized American citizen in 1939. His wife sparked an interest in history, a subject that he had disliked at school. He acquired old texts, and in 1945 he produced a translation of a classic metallurgical text, Vannocio Biringuccio's Pirotechnia (1540).