Charles Palache

Charles Palache (born July 18, 1869 in San Francisco , California , † December 5, 1954 in Berkeley , California) was an American mineralogist and crystallographer . In his time he was considered one of the most important mineralogists in the USA.

Life

Charles Palache came from a family of Sephardic Jews . His grandfather had a plantation in Jamaica , but his father was born in New York and settled as a merchant in San Francisco. Palache attended Berkeley High School , was interested in natural history from an early age, and studied mining at the University of California from 1887 . In 1894 he received his doctorate in geology with Andrew C. Lawson . He geologically mapped the San Francisco Peninsula and Berkeley area and became interested in mineralogy. In 1894 he went to study in Germany , to Ferdinand Zirkel in Leipzig and mineralogy and Ernst Weinschenk in Munich . The following year the stay in Heidelberg with the petrographers Harry Rosenbusch and Alfred Osann as well as with the crystallographer Victor Mordechai Goldschmidt was formative . In the fall of 1895 he returned to California and soon after became assistant to the petrograph John E. Wolff at Harvard University . In 1902 he became Assistant Professor of Mineralogy and in 1910 Professor. In 1922, after Wolff's retirement, he took over the faculty and the important Mineralogical Museum, which he himself greatly enriched through his collecting activities. In 1941 he retired.

Palache dealt mainly with crystallography, the geometric shape of crystals, where he expanded the methods of Goldschmidt using his two-circle goniometer . At Harvard, Martin A. Peacock and Harry Berman (who introduced X-ray crystallographic methods at his institute) were important assistants. With Berman and Clifford Frondel he published the 7th edition of Dana's System of Mineralogy in 1944.

In 1937 he received the first Roebling Medal . He was President of the Mineralogical Society of America in 1921 and its Honorary President from 1950. In 1937 he was President of the Geological Society of America . He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1903), honorary member of the Mineralogical Society of Great Britain and the New York Academy of Sciences, and the Belgian Geological Society. In 1941 he received an honorary doctorate from the University of California.

He was associate editor of the Journal of Crystallography and the American Journal of Science.

Web links

• National Academy of Science: Charles Palache (pdf)
• Mineralogical Society of America: Memorial of Charles Palache (pdf)