Sir Henry Alexander Miers, was a British mineralogist, crystallographer, and university administrator. He was Professor of Crystallography at the Victoria University of Manchester 1915-1926 and Vice-Chancellor of the University during the same years.
Background
Henry Alexander Miers was born on May 25, 1858, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He was the third son and fifth of the eight children (three of whom died in infancy). His father, Francis Charles Miers, was a civil engineer of distinction, and his grandfather, John Miers, also a professional engineer, traveled widely in South America and attained distinction as a botanist before he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1843. An elder brother, Edward John Miers, was a zoologist on the staff of the British Museum. His great-grandfather was Francis Place, an active social and political reformer. His mother was Susan Fry.
Education
Miers won scholarships at Eton College and Trinity College, Oxford, where he studied classics and science, and gained second-class honors in mathematics upon graduation in 1881.
Career
Although he had no formal training directly related to crystallography, Miers prepared within a year for an opening as an assistant at the British Museum by short stays with N. Story-Maskelyne at Oxford, W. J. Lewis at Cambridge, and Paul von Groth at Strasbourg. His work at the Museum, under Lazarus Fletcher, was largely concerned with descriptions of crystal forms. He first detected the merohedrism in cooperite and other minerals, thus helping to complete the recognition of the classes of naturally occurring crystal symmetry. He described a number of sulfosalt minerals in detail and the complex morphology of these crystals led to his interest in crystal growth. Miers constructed an ingenious inverted goniometer for measuring crystal faces while they were growing in solution. This led to direct observation of the ubiquitous but variable presence of slightly divergent (vicinal) faces during crystal growth. He realized the role of growth in the matching of a low reticular density on such faces with the lower density of matter in the solution, but the real underlying reason did not become apparent for another fifty years.
After his appointment as Wayneflete professor of mineralogy at Oxford in 1895, Miers refined his apparatus so that it could also measure the concentration of solution at the growing crystal surface through the index of refraction as determined by total reflection. This ingenious approach enabled him and a group of students to observe directly the conditions of various styles of crystallization, from slow, regular growth of large crystals at low supersaturations to the shower of microscopic crystals at a critical high degree of supersaturation, which were correlative with Ostwald’s metastable and labile conditions, respectively.
Miers began his teaching in 1886 when H. E. Armstrong asked him to give a course in crystallography at the recently opened City and Guilds of London Institute (later part of Imperial College). His most famous student was William J. Pope, later professor of chemistry at Manchester and then at Cambridge. William Barlow is said to have learned his crystallography from Miers, apparently without formally registering as a student. Students at Oxford who later gained prominence in the field were Thomas V. Barker and Harold Hartley. Miers completed his textbook on mineralogy in 1902; it went through a second edition in 1929 and was translated into French. It drew heavily on Dana’s Mineralogy and, for its time, contained excellent discussions of, for example, crystal optics as treated by Lazarus Fletcher. The description of internal structures of crystals, which was then only a theory, was relegated to an appendix, although Miers had certainly followed closely developments in the field.
In 1908 Miers was appointed principal of the University of London, the first of a long series of administrative and committee posts that occupied most of his time and energy for the remainder of his life. Although his next appointment, as vice-chancellor of the University of Manchester (1915), also created a special chair of crystallography, he did not publish further scientific work. That his teaching there was influential is amply shown by one student, H. E. Buckley, who later became head of the crystallography department at Manchester and who included much from Miers in his book Crystal Growth. Published in 1951, just as F. C. Frank’s revolutionary theory of crystal growth by dislocations had appeared, it was the most important inspiration and source of information on earlier work for the new school of crystal growth in the 1950s.
Membership
Henry Alexander Miers was a Fellow of the Royal Society since 1896.
Personality
The boyish enthusiasm which Miers retained to the last was his passport to every institution with which he became associated. Opinions revealed by others to be different from his own were enthusiastically welcomed with keenness, like new minerals and strange crystal forms, as subjects worthy of sympathetic research and suitable emplacement in his capacious memory. It was this frank and friendly attitude to the views of others which opened to him free access to unusual sources of information and enabled him to leave behind records which will last long to the benefit of the scientific community. Some of these attractive characteristics and many of his interests were manifested by his forebears and relations.
Physical Characteristics:
Miers was small in stature, and the handsome appearance and trim build that he retained for most of his life made him look younger than his years.