Joseph Paxson Iddings

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Joseph Paxson Iddings (born January 21, 1857 in Baltimore , Maryland , United States , † September 8, 1920 in Brinklow , Maryland) was an American geologist .

Familiar

Joseph Paxson Iddings was the second son of William Penn Iddings (1822-1906), a wholesaler from Philadelphia . His mother Almira Gillet (1826-1896) came from Baltimore. He had a brother, Charles Troy Iddings, and two sisters, Lola and Estelle. His grandfather Caleb Pierce Iddings (1778-1863) was Quaker , who had built the family estate in Brinklow in 1855. The first name Paxson goes back to Joseph S. Paxson (1814–1889), the husband of his aunt Deborah J. Iddings (1815–1877).

life and work

Iddings graduated from the Sheffield Scientific School at Yale University in 1877. He then studied analytical chemistry there and was employed as an assistant for technical drawing and site surveying. He then moved to Columbia University and studied geology under Professor John S. Newberry. He spent the winter of 1879/80 at the University of Heidelberg , where he carried out petrographic examinations under the microscope under the guidance of Karl Heinrich Rosenbusch . In July 1880 he was hired by the United States Geological Survey (USGS) as a geological assistant and assigned to the department under Arnold Hague. In 1892 Iddings left the USGS after losing his post due to job cuts.

In the same year, 1892, he began teaching at the University of Chicago , which had established a chair in petrology for him - the first of its kind in the world. In 1907 he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences and in 1911 to the American Philosophical Society . In 1908 he ended his teaching duties (somewhat drastically) and retired to his country house in Maryland to pursue his own research. Iddings died there unmarried and childless in 1920 of chronic interstitial nephritis .

Field work and travel

Iddings conducted field studies in the following regions:

After his retirement from academic life, he traveled to the South Seas , and then to Sulawesi and Java .

scientific publications

His scientific work was initially published mainly in the American Journal of Science and in the bulletin of the USGS. In the work "Notes on the Volcanoes of Northern California, Oregon, and Washington Territory" in 1883, together with Arnold Hague, he described the volcanic chain of the Cascades. In 1886 appeared "The Columnar Structure in the Igneous Rock on Orange Mountain, New Jersey", a treatise on the formation of columns in igneous rocks. "The Nature and Origin of Lithophysae and the Lamination of Acid Lavas" followed in 1887, an explanation of the formation process of the lithophyses and the causes of fine stratification in acidic lavas.

Textbooks

Iddings has written several petrological and petrographic textbooks:

  • "Microscopical Physiography of the Rock-Making Minerals: An Aid to the Microscopical Study of Rocks" (1888). This is a translation and revision of Rosenbusch's work "Microscopic Physiography of Petrographically Important Minerals"
  • "Rock Minerals. Their Chemical and Physical Characters and Their Determination in Thin Sections ”(1906) and
  • "Problems of Volcanism" (1914)

Outstanding performance

Iddings first introduced the polarizing microscope in the United States. He made a special contribution to the classification of igneous rocks, so he recognized the importance of the overall chemical composition of rocks, especially volcanic rocks, very early on. Together with Cross, Pirson and Washington, he then introduced the CIPW standard in 1902 .

Initial descriptions

Numerous first petrographic descriptions of rocks go back to Iddings. Including more well-known types of rock such as Absarokite (1895a), Banakit (1895a), Hawaiite (1913) and Shoshonite (1895a), but also very rare rocks such as Bandait (1913), Batukit (1917), Kauaiit (1913), Kohalait (1913), Llanit (1904), also Llanoit , a porphyry granite, Marosit (1913), Shastait (1913), Tautirit (1918) and Ungait (1913).

Technical terms

Iddings has coined several geoscientific terms or used them for the first time in the English-speaking world:

Several structural terms for porphyry structures from 1909 also go back to Iddings:

Honors

Andrew Cowper Lawson named the mixed mineral iddingsite after Iddings . Charles Walcott honored Iddings with the trilobite genus Iddingsia (1924), as well as with the trilobite species Peachella iddingsi (1910) and the brachiopod species Orthis iddingsi .

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Member History: Joseph P. Iddings. American Philosophical Society, accessed October 9, 2018 .
personal data
SURNAME Iddings, Joseph Paxson
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American geologist
DATE OF BIRTH January 21, 1857
PLACE OF BIRTH Baltimore , Maryland, United States
DATE OF DEATH September 8, 1920
Place of death Brinklow , Maryland , United States