Washington, Henry Stevens

Born into a wealthy family in Newark, New Jersey.

In 1886 (according to other sources - in 1888) he graduated from Yale University College, after which he entered Yale University to continue studying physics and chemistry. At the same time, he began to conduct field archaeological and geological studies both in his native USA and in other countries: Brazil, Italy, Spain, Greece and the Ottoman Empire. Additionally studied geology and petrology in Leipzig and archeology in Athens. In 1893 he received his doctorate for his work on the study of the volcanic rocks of Lydia .

Until 1894, he was engaged more in archeology than geology, conducting, in particular, extensive excavations in Greece during this period of his life, he put forward the theory of the death of the Minoan culture due to a major volcanic eruption. In 1895, he became a teacher of mineralogy at Yale University, but a year later he resigned, creating his own petrographic laboratory in his home and devoting his life to the study of minerals and igneous rocks. Since 1906, he periodically acted as a consultant to mining companies, in 1912 he became an employee of the Geophysics Laboratory at the Carnegie Institute , Washington. In 1918-1919 he worked as a scientific attache of the American embassy in Rome, after which he returned to the Carnegie Institute. In 1924 he headed the American Mineralogical Society.

He was the author of a large number of scientific works devoted to the description, methods of conducting and summarizing the chemical analysis of igneous rocks, and became one of the authors of their modern chemical classification. He also wrote about the relationships between various chemical elements, the structure of the Earth and the Sun, meteorites. In addition, he proposed a hypothesis about the penetration of volcanic channels by gases, studied the distribution of chemical elements in the earth's crust (together with Clark), discovered the dependence of the composition of the released lava on the location of the volcano, created his own scheme for dividing the Earth into geochemical zones, its own quantitative classification of igneous rocks and its own a system for converting rock analyzes to regulatory materials. Together with geologists Pearson, Iddings and Cross, he created the CIPW recalculation method.

• Levinson-Lessing F. Yu. , Four luminaries of petrography: Washington, Dupark, Sodergolm, Vogt, “Izv. USSR Academy of Sciences. 7 series. Department of Mathematical and Natural Sciences ”, 1935, No. 3.
• Foreign members of the Russian Academy of Sciences of the 18th – 21st centuries: Geology and mining. / Ans. Editor I. G. Malakhova. M.: GC RAS , 2012 .-- 504 p. ISBN 978-5-904509-08-8 (electronic version).
• Washington, Henry Stevens // Great Soviet Encyclopedia : [in 30 vol.] / Ch. ed. A.M. Prokhorov . - 3rd ed. - M .: Soviet Encyclopedia, 1969-1978.

• Foreign members of the Russian Academy of Sciences of the 18th – 21st centuries: Geology and mining. / Ans. Editor I. G. Malakhova. M.: GC RAS , 2012 .-- 504 p. ISBN 978-5-904509-08-8 (electronic version).

• Biographical sketch with a portrait (English)
• Washington, Henry Stevens on the official website of the RAS