Josiah Dwight Whitney ( born Josiah Dwight Whitney ; November 23, 1819 , Northampton (Massachusetts) - August 15, 1896 ) is an American geologist named after Mount Whitney and Whitney Glacier on Mount Shasta . The representative of the Dwight family, who gave many famous scientists, military and public figures, the brother of the linguist William Dwight Whitney .
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He graduated from Yale University (1839), where he studied astronomy, chemistry and mineralogy. A year later, he entered the New Hampshire State Geological Survey as an assistant to Charles Thomas Jackson . Impressed by the lecture by Charles Lyell, he decided to devote himself completely to geology and in 1842-1847 studied geology in Germany and France.
Returning to the United States, for three years he was engaged, together with John Wells Foster , in the geological survey of Lake Superior . The experience gained through this allowed him to write the study “Ore Wealth of the United States” ( Eng. Metallic Wealth of the United States ; 1854), which for many years was considered exemplary. In 1855, Whitney became the chief chemist of Iowa and a professor at the State University , in collaboration with James Hall, prepared a geological survey of the state in 1858-1859. In 1862, also with Hall, he published an overview of lead deposits in the upper Missouri River .
In 1860, Whitney became the chief geologist of the state of California . To work on a comprehensive geological survey of the state, he created an impressive group of major researchers, including including William Henry Brewer , James Graham Cooper , Clarence King . The work was started and took on a large-scale nature, but their first printed results were related to the field of paleontology , and this disappointed state politicians, who were expecting primarily mineral exploration. As a result, the financing of the project was curtailed in 1867, and Whitney himself from 1865 was primarily involved in the organization of the Exploration School at Harvard University . In 1875, the university abandoned the idea of a separate independent unit of this orientation, and Whitney until the end of his life served as a university professor of geology.
The story with the so-called Calaveras skull , a fake that made him announce the existence of a human population in California during the Pliocene era, brought Whitney specific fame outside his professional environment.
- ↑ 1 2 SNAC - 2010.