Harry Berman

Harry Berman (born February 16, 1902 in Boston , Massachusetts , † August 27, 1944 in Prestwick , Scotland ) was an American mineralogist .

Live and act

Berman went to school in Johnstown, Pennsylvania and began studying at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (with interests in engineering and mathematics), but had to drop out after a year for financial reasons. In 1922 he became an assistant in the mineralogical department in the museum of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC and from 1924 at Harvard University with Charles Palache . At Harvard and the Lowell Institute in Boston, he made up his college and university education at the same time.

In 1932/33 he was abroad with John Desmond Bernal in Cambridge and Viktor Moritz Goldschmidt in Göttingen. In 1935 he received his master's degree from Harvard and in 1936 he received his doctorate ( The constitution and classification of the natural silicates ). In 1940 he became an Associate Professor of Mineralogy at Harvard and a curator at the Harvard Mineralogical Museum. There he introduced X-ray crystallographic methods, whereby he had to assemble the necessary apparatus himself with little financial support, and also assisted Esper S. Larsen in his new edition of Microscopic determination of nonopaque minerals . He carried out numerous crystal structure analyzes using the Debye-Scherrer method . He also developed a torsion balance to determine the weights of small mineral grains (up to 5 mg).

From 1936 until the beginning of World War II, he worked with Charles Palache and Clifford Frondel on the 7th edition of Dana's System of Mineralogy , which appeared shortly before his death in 1944.

During the Second World War he was involved in various mineralogical prospecting for military purposes, for example for optical calcite and fluorites . From 1942 he was (like Frondel) at Reeves Sound Laboratories in New York City, where quartz oscillators for electronics were developed. Berman was there as a crystallographer, but also involved in solving a wide variety of technical problems. On a trip to Great Britain, where he was engaged as a consultant on similar projects, his plane crashed near Prestwick in Scotland.

Honors

One from CS Hurlbut, Jr. and LF Aristarain The mineral that was newly discovered in 1936 was named bermanite in his honor .

Web links

• Obituary by CS Hurlbut, Jr., American Mineralogist, pdf

Individual evidence

1. ↑ CS Hurlbut, Jr. and LF Aristarain: Bermanite, and its occurrence in Córdoba, Argentina , in: The American Mineralogist , Volume 53, March-April 1968 ( PDF 954.6 kB )