Henry Joseph Grayson

Henry Joseph Grayson (9 May 1856 – 21 March 1918) was a British-born Australian nurseryman and scientist, best known as the designer of a machine for ruling diffraction gratings.

Grayson was born in Worrall, near Sheffield, Yorkshire, England, son of Joseph Grayson, a Master Cutler, and his wife Fanny, née Smith. Grayson came of a family of market gardeners, and travelled to New Zealand in the early 1880s. After he returned to England and married Elizabeth Clare on 11 August 1886, the couple soon migrated to Victoria (Australia).

Grayson had by then succeeded in creating 120,000 diffractions lines to the inch (4,700 lines per mm). Grayson described his work on diffraction ruling in a report published for the Report of Meeting, Eighth Meeting of the Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science, held at Melbourne, Victoria in 1900:

Grayson died in 1918 in Clyde as a result of heart disease.