Wilhelm von Blandowski

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Wilhelm (William) von Blandowski (born January 21, 1822 in Gliwice , today Poland ; † December 18, 1878 , Bunzlau ) was a German mining engineer and zoologist with a focus on researching fish species in Australia .

William Blandowski

origin

Memorial plaque for Wilhelm von Blandowski at Bankowa 4 in the old town of Gliwice

Blandowski came from an aristocratic family who came to Upper Silesia from Poland in the 18th century. They were originally Roman Catholic, converted to the Evangelical Lutheran Church when they entered Prussia and entered the Prussian civil service. He was the youngest son of eleven children of Felix von Blandowski - lieutenant colonel in the Prussian army, knight of the order pour le mérite and most recently commandant of the 2nd Silesian Landwehr Infantry Regiment in Gleiwitz - and his wife Leopoldine, née Woyrsch , a German nobility from southern Bohemia , which was in the Silesian Opava ( Austrian Silesia ) from around 1500 . From 1839 to 1840 Wilhelm von Blandowski went to the mining school in Tarnowitz near Gleiwitz , then he worked in the Königsgrube in Königshütte .

Australia

Native scenery of the natives (etching by the animal painter Gustav Mützel 1857 after a drawing by Blandowski; see also the partial view of Marn Grook : Name of the early Australian football game).

Blandowski went to Australia in 1849 and on his ship voyages he came to Adelaide , Sydney and Cape York Peninsula . He found gold at Castlemaine and improved the technology of a water pump there, which thereby achieved a higher performance.

He was one of the founders of the Geological Society of Victoria in 1852 and the first scientist to be appointed to the Victorian Museum on April 1, 1854 . From 1856 to 1857 he led the 12-month Blandowski expedition - a scientific expedition - to the confluence of the Murray River and Darling River in the Murray-Darling Basin with his assistant Gerard Krefft , a Brunswick native. In doing so, he collected a number of species of mammals, birds and fish for the Natural History Museum of Victoria. Three of Blandowski's exhibits are in Berlin.

To mark the 150th anniversary, an exhibition was held in Australia in 2007, with pictures being exhibited. The first illustration of a football game by Aborigines in Australia was discovered on a 150-year-old watercolor by Krefft . The picture also shows that the Aborigines were fishing with nets. The watercolor was only available as a copy of a photo in Australia because the original was lost during the Second World War and there are only two original photos left in Berlin and Cambridge. Blandowski lived with the Aboriginal tribe of the Nyeri Nyeri for about nine months , who helped him to find great success in his search.

Blandowski was a member of the Royal Society of Victoria commission that prepared Burke and Wills' expedition .

A heated controversy arose around him because, in a Royal Society publication, he named two newly discovered fish after well-known members of the Royal Society of Victoria , one was a member of a major religious community and another was a physicist in Melbourne . One of them was called Slimy, whom he described as a slippery fish that lives in the mud (Slimy, slippery fish. Lives in the mud). It was then requested that the entire publication be destroyed. Because of this dispute, he lost interest in Australia and returned to Europe in 1859.

return

Blandowski published a photo album "Australia in 142 photographic images" in 1862 at the Gleiwitz printing house Gustav Neumann, one of which is in the Berlin State Library. Around 1865 he also joined the Société française de Wothlytypie , from which he received a license to produce pictures using the new Wothlytypie process.

He died in Bunzlau in 1878 in a mental hospital.

Dedication names

The fish species Blandowskius and the pikeperch Blandowskiella, which occurs in the Murray River , are named after him .

Web links

Individual evidence

Commons : William Blandowski  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files
  1. a b New Prussian Adels Lexicon . tape 5 . Reichenbach brothers, Leipzig 1839, p. 42 .
  2. ^ Gothaisches genealogical pocket book of noble houses: Deutscher Uradel . tape 41 . Justus Perthes, 1942, p. 620 .
  3. a b c Information on the gliwiczanie.pl website , accessed on May 28, 2010
  4. ^ A b L. K. Paszkowski (1969): Blandowski, William (1822-1888) , Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 3, Melbourne University Press, pp. 182-183 , accessed May 28, 2010
  5. First image of footy comes home to the Murray on abc.net.au from September 24, 2007 , accessed 28 May 2010
  6. Science and the making of Victoria - Philosophical Institute of Victoria, Australian Science and Technology Heritage Center and The Royal Society of Victoria, online on the Australian Science and Technology Heritage Center website , accessed May 28, 2010