Volume
69, pages 572-573, 1984
Presentation of the Roebling Medal of the Mineralogical Society of America
for 1983 to Hans-Peter Eugster
DAVID R. WONES Department of Geological Sciences
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
Blacksburg, Virginia 24061
Officers and members of the Society, and guests:
Today I have the privilege of introducing to you one of our outstanding
members as the Roebling Medalist. I have known the man for a quarter of a
century, and continue to be rewarded by his friendship, his personal
generosity, his demand for truth, and by his creativity. Those of us who
have had the good fortune to have Hans Eugster as our mentor have sensed
from the start of our apprenticeships that we were truly colleagues in the
effort to better understand rocks and minerals. This feeling of selfworth
is the greatest gift one human can bestow on another, and Hans has
showered it on his students in great abundance.
Those who have visited Hans' rural retreat in Maryland can also attest to
his generosity as a host and to his abilities as a chef and raconteur. He
has a wonderful sense of humor which has served him and his colleagues
well over the years. I remember well the tenseness of the situation when
he, the Swiss, was correcting and improving the english in my
dissertation. His good humor made me come out of the encounter grateful
for his suggestions, and more importantly, happy about myself and my work.
His generosity is given freely, not only on things mineralogical, but on
food, wine, music and art. This generosity has been freely given to us
even when Hans himself was going through his own physical and emotional
traumas. A wonderful by-product of being an Eugster Associate is the sense
that we all are part of a family, and some of my longest and truest
friendships with graduates of Johns Hopkins University began during our
mutual association with Hans. I don't know if Hans was a scout in his
native Switzerland, but his personal qualities read like the Scout Law:
his regard for the truth; his kindness to his students; his bravery under
physical ordeals; and his reverence for the world, its people, and our
science.
Two exceptional personal qualities which have brought Hans to this podium
today are his quest for truth, or if you will, his curiosity, and his
creative ways in finding that truth. When I was struggling with some
apparent discrepancies during our early collaboration, I finally came to
the conclusion that some of my original temperature determinations must
have been in error. I reluctantly spoke about this to Hans, and the
immediate retort was to find out why. Thus began my initiation into why
one never takes any sort of laboratory measurement for granted. The consequent corrections led to a consistent set of
measurements, and our work was on its way. I then learned the true meaning
of "the truth shall set you free." During that work we had
occasion to summarize the thermodynamic parameters of the system Fe-Si-O
twenty years ago, and I am pleased to say that Hans is the coauthor of a
recent paper refining these parameters. His quest for the truth remains
vigorous.
Eugster's creative genius is the other reason we are celebrating his
career today. When I was visiting the Geophysical Laboratory in quest of a
possible doctoral thesis, his inventive ideas captured me in the way that
N. L. Bowen's ideas must have captured an earlier generation. He had just
invented his buffer method, and I was greatly taken with the simplicity of
the device, and the powerful reach that its application would give
mineralogy. My association with Hans and his ideas has given me countless
gifts, and I remain in awe of his ability to grasp a problem ("Dave,
you haven't come to grips with the problem" was a constant
invocation), see the essential conflict, and propose a dozen solutions. He
remains a disciple of multiple working hypotheses, and through this,
continues to create new interpretations and methods for discovering the
truth. I hasten to add that his mind is not only creative, but also facile
and tough. Part of our original collaboration was possible because of my
formal training in chemical thermodynamics which Hans had not had. For a
few months, I was the teacher and he the student, but he quickly absorbed
what I knew, set off on his own, and began to teach me new things and new
methods. His recent work on the Cornwall Pennsylvania Magnetite deposits
and his paper at this meeting on tin deposits in China demonstrate his
firm grasp of thermodynamic methods, and his uncanny ability to create new
applications.
His creativity rubbed off on all of his students, and through us, Hans has
given the world oxygen, hydrogen, water, carbon dioxide and halogen
fugacity meters, geologic thermometers, properties of minerals and other
phases of geologic interest, and methods of attacking problems in all
phases of petrology: igneous, metamorphic, ore deposition, and
sedimentology. His early recognition that the evaporite minerals of the
Green River formation were the product of a history of aqueous processes
started him on a series of major contributions of ideas, data, and students to chemical
sedimentology. His influence has been felt so pervasively
that now it is
commonplace to interpret sedimentary mineral assemblages to reveal the history of
H2O
interactions in those rocks.
Mr. President, for
these many contributions to our science - his students, his colleagues, his inventions, his ideas, his vision of a
coherent science of mineralogy - I am pleased and proud to introduce Hans-Peter
Eugster, the 1983 Roebling Medalist.
Volume
69, pages 574-575, 1984
Acceptance of the Roebling Medal of the Mineralogical Society of America
for 1983
HANS-PETER EUGSTER Department of Earth & Planetary Sciences
The Johns Hopkins University
Baltimore, Maryland 21218
President Roedder, Members of the Society, Guests:
One hundred years ago this spring, a bridge built by John Augustus
Roebling, father, and Washington Augustus Roebling, son, was dedicated
which to this day connects Brooklyn with Manhattan across the East River.
The son, of course, is the reason why I'm privileged to stand before you
today and why it is appropriate to use the bridge as the theme of my brief
remarks. John Augustus Roebling, or if you permit me to deanglicize his
name, Hans-August Röbling, was born in Prussia in 1806. Hans-August was
his first name, just like mine is Hans-Peter, shortened for American usage
to Hans or John. After studying civil engineering in Berlin he moved to
Pittsburgh, where he began to realize his central idea: building of
bridges supported by wire ropes or steel cables. Starting with an aqueduct
across the Allegheny River, graduating to a combined road-railroad bridge
over the Niagara Falls, he finally gave his life to the Brooklyn bridge.
He died of tetanus in 1869 after being injured while laying out the
supporting towers.
Washington Augustus Roebling completed the bridge and added to the
achievements of his father. He had the leisure and means to assemble a
remarkable mineral collection and to generously endow the Mineralogical
Society of America. Today I am the immediate beneficiary of his
generosity. In the early fifties, when we were synthesizing layered
silicates, I frequently used his collection, housed in the Smithsonian
Institution. I particularly remember specimen R4416, a fine paragonite we
used as starting material. During those happy years at the Geophysical
Laboratory, I was, in fact, working as a mineralogist, synthesizing
minerals and defining their thermal stabilities, chemical and X-ray
properties. What I have done since hardly fits the mold of a mineralogist,
either of the geometric kind exemplified by my late teacher Paul Niggli,
or of the modern TEM type represented by my office neighbor and
cocelebrant, Dave Veblen. Why then should I be honored today by the
Mineralogical Society, for work in experimental petrology, geochemistry
and sedimentology? Aside from the very generous interpretation of their
charge by the selection committee, it points to the role of mineralogy as
a bridge. Paul Niggli, in one of his philosophical essays, spoke of
crystallography and mineralogy as the glue, which binds together the
natural sciences through the concept of order in the solid state. Glue or
bridge, the architecture of the solid state certainly is a central theme for physics,
chemistry, biology and geology and the Niggli message was not lost on me.
However, I also belong to the lucky generation of geologists who came into
their own after the war. We had new toys and new thoughts and could try
anything once and almost everything worked. I agree with Connie Krauskopf
that the real revolution in the earth sciences was initiated in the
fifties rather than the sixties: the change from a largely descriptive to
a quantitative science. I remember buying the 1951 text on igneous and
metamorphic petrology by Turner and Verhoogen and taking it into the
Canadian bush where it competed for my attention with black flies.
Verhoogen's sections baffled me but I couldn't let go. I finally mastered
that material years later after I started teaching it at Johns Hopkins.
Building a bridge from chemistry to geology became and still is a passion
for me, but building bridges depends on having strong anchors and towers
in the lands to be joined, as John Augustus Roebling knew. My anchor in geology was built while I labored on my
thesis, mapping metamorphics in the Alps, and I feel good about it, but my
tower in chemistry is another matter. Its foundation, also built in
Switzerland, is sound, but it pointed in the wrong direction. I was taught
how to analyze rocks, but I never had a course in physical chemistry or
thermodynamics and hence those symbols of Verhoogen looked so strange. I
am still building and shoring up that structure and I have been lucky to
have smart people teaching me during the last 25 years, from Dave Wones to
John Weare. Dave was my first student and, although he'll tell you
otherwise, he taught me more than I taught him. He got his Ph.D. from MIT
and I never had to read his thesis and perhaps that is why we are still
good friends. Dave was followed by a string of students too long to
mention, but each one helped eradicate another corner of my ignorance.
Just about the time Dave was finishing his thesis, I was asked to review a
paper by Charles Milton on the Green River minerals and this started me on
a second track which only now is becoming integrated with my earlier
interests. I cannot explain my continued fascination with salt lakes. In
fact some of my friends gently chided me for escapism and wasting my time.
That may be, but it has been an enormous source of fun, excitement and
adventure. Initially it was just Blair Jones and I and then Laurie Hardie
joined us. Here too, bridges had to be built, from mineralogy to water
chemistry to sedimentology and even to organic geochemistry. For our
recent study of Great Salt Lake, for instance, Blair and I assembled a
dozen specialists to carry out the necessary work and we learned what it
means to organize a research team. Clearly both of us prefer one-on-one
collaboration.
Although I do not consider myself to be a mineralogist, minerals and
mineral assemblages remain near the center of my interests. Looking back
over 30 years to the days when Hat Yoder first introduced me to the world
of hydrothermal synthesis, I realize that the central theme has been and still is the interaction of minerals with aqueous fluids,
from surface waters to geothermal brines to metamorphic fluids to igneous
gases; a bridge carrying water just like Roebling's aqueduct over the
Allegheny River. Even my newest venture into ore deposits is launched from
a watery base.
To thank all those who have helped me in my scientific endeavors would be
name dropping and selecting among my teachers, students and colleagues is
too difficult. There are three people, however, that I feel compelled to
acknowledge. Blair F. Jones, an early student, longstanding friend,
colleague and perennial coauthor: You make it look as if it is easy to
work with me, a precious illusion not shared by many. Bob Houston,
southern gentleman and Indian expert of Laramie, Wyoming: You have prodded
me into my new venture; the geochemistry of hydrothermal ore deposits and
your friendship and the snow in the Rockies are the reasons for my yearly
treck west. Finally, Elaine Koppelman, the James Beall Professor of
Mathematics at Goucher College. Those of you who teach are familiar with
the five-minute panic, when five minutes before the lecture an equation
suddenly looks mysterious and unfathomable. As the clock ticks away and
desperation mounts, you consider whether you should declare yourself sick,
run away, commit suicide or just brazenly pretend to understand. That's
when I call Prof. Koppelman who then calmly clarifies that tricky
derivation. During the summer months she acts as my most trusted and
capable field assistant, and unhesitatingly follows me to the salt lakes
of Africa and the high Andes or the tin mines in China. She is also an
excellent cook and, as my wife, makes life worth living. A native of
Brooklyn, she is very much connected with the Brooklyn Bridge and hence to
the father and son team of J. A. and W. A. Roebling. I accept this medal
for both of us and we thank you for this honor and for including us in the
brotherhood and sisterhood of mineralogists. Thank you very much.
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