Alois von Beckh Widmanstätten

Count Alois von Beckh Widmanstätten (sometimes given as Alois von Beckh-Widmannstätten or Aloys Joseph Franz Xaver Beck Edler von Widmanstätten: 13 July 1754 – 10 June 1849) was a printer and mineralogist from the Holy Roman Empire and then the Austrian Empire. He is known for recognizing a unique pattern of cross-hatching lines on the surface of iron-rich meteorites, now called Widmanstätten patterns, resulting from the cooling and crystallization of interstitial minerals. A crater on the Moon is named after Widmanstätten.

Working life

Von Widmanstätten was born in Graz where his family had a printing business and was trained in the printing art by his father. His family owned exclusive printing rights in the Steiermark province, but this was lost in 1784 and Alois sold the business in 1807. In 1804, he ran a spinning mill in Pottendorf, Austria. In 1806 he was invited by the emperor to head a newly founded Imperial Technical Museum or Fabriksproduktenkabinett begun in 1807. From 1808, he was the director of the Imperial Porcelain works in Vienna.

Widmanstätten patterns

While working at the Fabriksproduktenkabinett, he began to examine iron meteorites along with Karl von Schreibers. They polished and etched the surface of iron meteorites with dilute nitric acid and noticed that it revealed a patterning of cross-hatched lines that came to be called Widmanstätten patterns. In a letter of 22 June 1812, German physicist Ernst Chladni told N.A. Neumann, a professor of chemistry in Prague, that Widmanstätten had observed patterns in the surface of a meteorite that had been etched with nitric acid.