Carl von Schreibers
The director of the imperial natural history collections in Vienna, who built one of the world's first great meteorite collections.
Key facts
- Born
- 1775
- Died
- 1852
- Nationality
- Austrian
- Field
- Naturalist and museum director
Carl Franz Anton von Schreibers trained as a physician and naturalist and in 1806 became director of the imperial natural history collections in Vienna. He ran them for more than four decades and was especially interested in meteorites, which were then a brand new subject of science.
Under Schreibers, Vienna collected meteorites systematically, buying and exchanging specimens from falls across Europe and beyond. The imperial collection already held the Hraschina iron, seen to fall near Zagreb in 1751, and Schreibers added stones such as Stannern, which fell in Moravia in 1808 as a shower of some 200 or more pieces. He wrote a detailed study of that fall himself.
In 1820 he published a large illustrated book on meteorites. It included prints of etched iron meteorites, made by inking the etched surface and pressing it directly onto paper, so that the Widmanstätten pattern was printed by the meteorite itself.
His collection became the foundation of the meteorite collection of today's Natural History Museum in Vienna, one of the oldest and largest in the world. The mineral schreibersite, an iron-nickel phosphide found in iron meteorites, is named in his honour. In the revolution of 1848, fire destroyed his home and library in Vienna, a heavy loss at the end of his career.
On the timeline
- 26 May 1751Hraschina: two irons fall near Zagreb
- 22 May 1808Stannern: a shower of basalt from Vesta
- 1820Meteorites print their own pictures
See more
The Stannern meteoriteHraschina in the catalogue