Albert Foote
The Philadelphia mineral dealer who in 1891 first described the iron meteorites around Meteor Crater and the diamonds inside them.
Key facts
- Born
- 1846
- Died
- 1895
- Nationality
- American
- Field
- Mineral dealer and physician
Albert E. Foote trained as a doctor and taught chemistry and mineralogy before opening a mineral business in Philadelphia. His company sold specimens to museums, universities and collectors across the world and became one of the best known in America.
In 1891 Foote received samples of heavy iron from a railway company and travelled to a remote part of Arizona to see where they came from. Near a great round hole in the plain, then called Coon Butte, he found many more pieces of iron scattered across the ground. He identified them as meteorites and named them after Canyon Diablo, a nearby canyon.
When Foote's colleagues tried to cut one of the irons, the saw blades were ruined by something extremely hard inside. The chemist George Koenig dissolved part of the iron in acid and found tiny black and clear grains that scratched corundum. They were diamonds, the first ever found in a meteorite. Foote reported both the irons and the diamonds to scientists in 1891.
Foote noticed the crater but did not argue that the meteorite had made it. That question was taken up by Grove Karl Gilbert later that year and by Daniel Moreau Barringer a decade later. The Canyon Diablo iron Foote described became one of the most widely shared meteorites in the world.
On the timeline
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The Canyon Diablo meteoriteBarringer Crater (Meteor Crater) crater