Horatio S. Greenough

Horatio Saltonstall Greenough (born May 11, 1845 in Bad Graefenberg, today Lázně Jeseník ; † April 2, 1916 in Neuilly-sur-Seine ) was an American zoologist and the initiator of the Greenough type of stereo microscope named after him .

Life

The place of birth Bad Graefenberg - today located in the Czech Republic - was then part of Austrian Silesia . His parents were from Boston in the US state of Massachusetts . The father Horatio Greenough (1805-1852) was the first important sculptor in the USA. The mother was Louisa (Eliza) Ingersoll Gore (1812-1891). Both lived in Florence for a few years to study ancient and renaissance sculpture . To relax, they stayed several times in the water cure sanatorium operated by Vincenz Priessnitz in Bad Graefenberg, where their son Henry Saltonstall, who later became Horatio S. Greenough, was born. During the first few years of life, the family had to go through health problems. It was not until October 1851 that Henry came to the USA with his parents and younger siblings Mary Louise (1847-1854) and Charlotte (1850-1919). The father died a year later. Henry now received the first names of his father and an uncle from his mother: Horatio Saltonstall.

Since the family lived in Cambridge near Boston near Harvard University , Henry, alias Horatio Saltonstall, met university teachers such as the zoologist Louis Agassiz , who aroused his interest in the natural sciences and especially in zoology. There are no reliable sources about his school days and early years of study in Europe. It is known that in 1866 he returned to Boston, presumably with a school leaving certificate, and took courses at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT, then Boston Tech) in various subjects (civil engineering, chemistry, mineralogy, astronomy, experimental physics, etc.), but without a degree. He then worked as a bank clerk and real estate seller.

From 1886 Horatio S. Greenough lived in Paris. He trained there first in histology, studied various marine organisms on the Atlantic coast and improved optical instruments.

Act

Horatio S. Greenough founded in 1883 together with the astronomer Percival Lowell and his brother and later President of Havard University Abbott Lawrence Lowell the Mathematical and Physical Club in Boston, in which scientists from Havard University around the mathematician who died three years earlier and astronomer Benjamin Peirce gathered. Horatio S. Greenough was lifelong friendly with A. Lawrence Lowell.

However, Horatio S. Greenough's main interest was zoology. In the summer of 1885 he stayed in Cotuit, a district of Barnstable on the Cape Cod peninsula . He described his observations there in his first scientific publication, "Observations on Young Humming-Birds", published in 1886 in The American Naturalist .

From 1887 to 1889 he worked in the histological laboratory and studied at the French national natural history museum, Muséum national d'histoire naturelle (MNHN). In 1889 he was a student at CH Georges Pouchet (1833-1894), professor of comparative anatomy at the MNHN. Here he got to know additional devices for microscopy and from Laurent Chabry (1855-1894) the way of working that is important for his decisive achievements: that the experimenter should be able to modify his instruments and occasionally also construct them himself. Laurent Chabry's ideas led him to his prototype of the capillary rotator, which allowed him to rotate early stages of development of marine organisms around an axis and observe them through a monocular microscope with high magnification. His own idea of ​​the prism rotator made it possible to observe larger organisms at low magnification without having to grasp or move them mechanically.

In 1892 Horatio S. Greenough wrote to the physicist Ernst Abbe of the Carl Zeiss company with the request for a two-tube microscope that reproduces the object true to space. After a personal meeting in Jena in 1893, a first prototype of the Greenough microscope was manufactured in Jena and sent to Paris in 1894. The Zeiss company was considered a leader in the manufacture of microscopes.

Ernst Abbe was world famous as a professor at the Jena University and for the scientifically based manufacture of microscopes. As a scientist, Abbe was not only able to understand and develop the concept of Horatio S. Greenough, but as managing director and co-owner of the Zeiss company he was also in the position of being responsible for the technical development of this new type of microscope together with his personal assistant Siegfried Czapski to effect.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Horatio S. Greenough: Observations on Young Humming Birds . In: The American Naturalist . tape 20 , no. 6 . The University of Chicago Press for The American Society of Naturalists, June 1886, pp. 528-532 , JSTOR : 2450365 .
2. ↑ H. Braus, L. Drüner: About a new dissecting microscope and a method to preserve larger animals in total histologically . In: Jenaische Zeitschrift für Naturwissenschaft . tape 29 . Jena 1895, p. 440-441 .
3. ^ Siegfried Czapski, W. Gebhardt: The stereoscopic microscope according to Greenough and its auxiliary devices . Message from the Carl Zeiss optical workshop in Jena. In: Journal for Scientific Microscopy and Microscopic Technology . tape 14 , 1897, p. 289-312 .

literature

• Horatio Saltonstall Greenough: Observations sur les larves d'oursin . In: Bulletin de la Société zoologique de France . tape 16 , 1891, p. 239 .
• Horatio Saltonstall Greenough: Sur les homologies des premières stades suivant la segmentation chez les batraciens . In: Bulletin de la Société zoologique de France . tape 17 , 1892, p. 57-59 .

swell

• Klaus Sander: An American in Paris and the origin of the stereomicroscope . In: Roux's Archives a Century in Developmental Biology . tape 203 , 1994, pp. 235-242 .
• Klaus Sander, Karl Peter Ohly: Horatio S. Greenough, initiator of the stereomicroscope. In: Armin Geus, Thomas Juncker, Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, Christa Riedle-Dohrnm, Michael Weingarten (eds.): Forms of representation in the biological sciences. Contributions to the 5th annual meeting of the DGGTB in Vienna 1996 and the 7th annual meeting in Neuburg ad Donau 1998 . VWB-Verlag, Berlin 1999, p. 245-248 .
• Berndt-Joachim Lau, R. Jordan Kreindler: Who was Horatio Saltonstall Greenough? (pdf; 2.5 MB) Part 1. In: Microscopy-UK. February 2018, accessed May 3, 2020 . 
• Berndt-Joachim Lau, R. Jordan Kreindler: Who was Horatio Saltonstall Greenough? (pdf; 3.9 MB) Part 2. In: Microscopy-UK. January 2019, accessed May 3, 2020 . 
• Berndt-Joachim Lau, R. Jordan Kreindler: Who was Horatio Saltonstall Greenough? (pdf; 3 MB) Part 3. In: Microscopy-UK. March 2020, accessed on May 3, 2020 . 
• Anna Simon-Stickley: Image and Imagination of the Life Sciences . The Stereomicroscope on the Cusp of Modern Biology. In: NTM Journal for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine . tape 27 , May 6, 2019, p. 109-144 , doi : 10.1007 / s00048-019-00211-0 .