January Speaker: “The ABC’s of Rock Collecting: Accumulation Becomes Collection” by Gene Meieran
by Ken Rock, MSDC Editor
Our speaker for January, Gene Meieran, began collecting rocks during a visit to his father’s birthplace in Norway and has never stopped! He will tell us a story about the transformation of a curious kid accumulating rocks into a serious collector and scientist because of his proximity to museums and his interactions with people who knew more than him and were willing to share their knowledge and experience.
History of Accumulating and Collecting
Gene’s talk will describe how his interest in collecting began as a child, how that interest led him to begin accumulating a collection, first including all types of rocks, and later becoming more focused as he began collecting crystals which spurred his innate curiosity about unusual findings. As Gene said, that was his start of accumulating a collection: pick up and question everything that looked unusual!
“My fascination with real identifiable specimens led me to start to label the rocks I found; first steps in transforming to becoming a collector. At the same time, my interest in the properties of these specimens (transparent crystals, cubic crystals, hard crystals, hexagonal crystals) took over my accumulation habit and I decided to become a materials scientist and actually study these properties for a living.”
This accumulation phase lasted more than 20 years and changed into a collection phase when Gene met Wayne Thompson and started collecting crystals that Wayne was importing from Pakistan. Gene says that he was becoming better known and welcomed to visit museums all over the world, as a result of his professional knowledge of crystal properties. Seeing and being able to purchase truly outstanding specimens was the last nail; the period accumulation was officially over. In one deal, he got rid of all sulfides, carbonates, oxides, sulphates, fluorides …. in exchange for one single crystal! He was well on the way to building a collection!
Speaker Bio
Gene was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1937. His early interest in collecting rocks led him to pursue a BS in metallurgy at Purdue, followed by an ScD at MIT in 1963. His work on properties of single crystals led him to work on semiconductor crystals sf Fairchild and Intel, pioneers of the semiconductor industry.
After retirement from Intel as a Senior Fellow in 2009, he became involved as a Board member for both the Rice Northwest Museum of Rocks and Minerals and the University of Arizona Alfie Norville Museum in Tucson. During all these years since 1949, he has continued to collect rocks, primarily single crystals. Gene was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2002, received the Carnegie Medal in 2004, and an honorary doctorate from Purdue in 2006. His wife Rosalind is an artist working in clay and paints.