Henry Alexander Miers
Sir Henry Alexander Miers (born May 25, 1858 in Rio de Janeiro , † December 10, 1942 in London ) was a British mineralogist .
Life
Miers was born in Rio de Janeiro as the fifth of eight children. His father, Francis Charles Miers, was a civil engineer. The family moved to England just two years after he was born.
In 1872 Miers received a scholarship to Eton College . From 1877 he studied mathematics and crystallography at Trinity College in Oxford with a bachelor's degree in 1881. After three months in Strasbourg with Paul Heinrich von Groth , Miers was employed in the mineralogical department of the British Museum in 1882 , where he worked until 1895. From 1886 to 1895 he also taught crystallography at the Central Technical College in London.
From 1895 to 1908 Miers was Professor of Mineralogy at Oxford, then rector of the University of London until 1915 . From 1915 to 1926 he was Professor of Crystallography at the University of Manchester .
In 1912 he was knighted as a Knight Bachelor . In 1942 Miers died unmarried in London.
He invented a goniometer and wrote an Introduction to Mineralogy 1902. In 1895 he pointed out to William Ramsay a gas that escaped from Cleveit by heating with dilute sulfuric acid. It was later identified as helium .
The mineral miersite is named after him.
literature
- Mary W. Porter: The Diary of Henry Alexander Miers 1858-1942 , 1973.
- Henry Tizard : Miers, Sir Henry Alexander (1858–1942). In: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography . Oxford University Press, 2004, online, accessed September 3, 2008 (fee required)
Web links
- Mineral MIERSIT - named after Miers
- Miers Papers - Miers biography and notes at AIM25
- National Portrait Gallery - Portrait of Miers
- Literature by and about Henry Alexander Miers in the WorldCat bibliographic database
Individual evidence
- ↑ Knights and Dames at Leigh Rayment's Peerage
- ↑ W. Pötsch u. a. Lexicon of important chemists , Harri Deutsch 1989, article Miers
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Miers, Henry Alexander |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | British mineralogist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | May 25, 1858 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Rio de Janeiro |
| DATE OF DEATH | December 10, 1942 |
| Place of death | London |