Gustav Rose
The Berlin mineralogist who sorted meteorites into families in 1863 and coined the names chondrite and howardite.
Key facts
- Born
- 1798
- Died
- 1873
- Nationality
- German
- Field
- Mineralogist and curator
Gustav Rose spent his working life in Berlin, where he taught mineralogy at the university and looked after its mineral collection. In 1829 he travelled with the explorer Alexander von Humboldt across the Ural Mountains and into Siberia, describing the minerals they found on the way.
The Berlin collection held a growing number of meteorites, and Rose studied them with the best tools of his day: the goniometer for measuring crystal angles, chemical analysis and the polarising microscope. In 1863 he published a classification of the 181 meteorites in his care. It was the first system based on what meteorites are made of rather than simply on whether they were stone or iron.
Rose noticed that most stony meteorites were full of small round grains, and called those stones chondrites, from the Greek word for a grain. Stones without them he grouped by their minerals, and he named the howardites after the English chemist Edward Howard and the eucrites from a Greek word meaning easily told apart. All these names are still in use.
A year earlier, in 1862, Rose had shown that the brassy grains in meteorites were a simple iron sulphide, not pyrite, and named the mineral troilite after Domenico Troili. His careful work laid the foundation on which later classifications in Vienna, and eventually the modern system, were built.