William Charles Redfield
William Charles Redfield (born March 26, 1789 in South Farms, Connecticut , † February 12, 1857 in New York City , New York ) was an American entrepreneur and self-taught scientist , who was mainly through his contributions in the fields of meteorology and geology and paleontology is known. He is the father of geologist, paleontologist and botanist John Howard Redfield .
Live and act
Redfield came from a family of English immigrants who had lived on the east coast since the 1630s . He grew up in modest circumstances and was largely self-taught while completing an apprenticeship as a mechanic and working as a ship mechanic. From around 1820 he dealt with the steamships , which were becoming more and more important for passenger and freight traffic, and after an initial failure he built a successful steamship company, the Steam Navigation Company . After several steam boiler explosions, Redfield came up with the idea of accommodating passengers on the Hudson on barges that were towed at a safe distance from the steamship ( safety barges ). This was soon abandoned in passenger traffic, but remained in Redfield's company in the transport of goods with barges .
After a hurricane that hit Connecticut in 1821, Redfield discovered the vortex character of these storms (although not the first, as Harvard professor John Farrar had already recognized this after a storm in 1815, and before him seamen in the 17th century; Redfield probably did not know anything about it and is mostly named as the discoverer of this phenomenon): In the area of his former residence Middletown , which is located in central Connecticut, the storm wind had blown from the southeast, and accordingly the trees there had been bent or uprooted to the northwest. In northwest Connecticut and in the adjacent part of Massachusetts, however, they were turned in the opposite direction, which meant that the wind there must have been blowing with similar strength, but in the opposite direction. He also recorded the migration of the hurricane (1854). Refield and James Pollard Espy conducted debates about the correct theoretical description of the hurricanes , which journalist Peter Moore (2018) describes as a "war of attrition".
In the last years of his life, Redfield dealt extensively with the geology of the east coast states, especially with the sand , silt and clay stones , which are now summarized under the name Newark supergroup , in particular with the fossils they contain . In 1856, in his last treatise, Redfield introduced the name Newark Group for these layers, which until then were often referred to as New Red Sandstone . Based on the work of his son John Howard, he believed that he could use the tail fin of fossil fish to prove that the sequence , which at the time was mostly considered to be largely the same as that of the Permian - Triassic New Red Sandstone of Great Britain , was in fact of subjura age. This had already been speculated by some other geologists at the time. Although this assumption has only proven correct for the younger part of the sequence of layers, the name Newark used by Redfield prevailed. Redfield is also considered to be the first American specialist in the knowledge of fossil fish, paleoichthyology. In honor of his achievements as well as that of his son in this field, the genus Redfieldius was named in 1899 , the type species John Howard had once first described under the name Catopterus gracilis , and which played the key role in Redfield's age classification of his "Newark Group".
In 1848, Redfield was the first president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science .
Web links
literature
- Denis Olmsted: Address on the scientific life and laboratories of William C. Redfield, AM New Haven 1857, online
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c Thomas Meehan: Memoir of John Howard Redfield. Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia. Vol. 47, 1895, pp. 292-301, JSTOR , p. 298
- ↑ Patrick J. Fitzpatrick: Hurricanes: A Reference Handbook. 2nd Edition. ABC-CLIO, 2006, ISBN 1-85109-647-7 p. 108 f.
- ↑ Peter Moore: The weather experiment: From the pioneers of meteorology. Piper, 2018, ISBN 9783492977883 , p. 194 ff .
- ^ William Gaylord Simpson: The beginnings of vertebrate paleontology in North America. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society. Vol. 86, No. 1 (Symposium on the Early History of Science and Learning in America, February 1942), 1942, pp. 130-188, JSTOR , p. 167
- ↑ Oliver Perry Hay: On some changes in the names, generic and specific, of certain fossil fishes. The American Naturalist. Vol. 33, No. 394, 1899, pp. 783-792, JSTOR , p. 789
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Redfield, William Charles |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American amateur meteorologist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | March 26, 1789 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Middletown , Connecticut |
| DATE OF DEATH | February 12, 1857 |
| Place of death | New York City , New York |