Famous Scientists

  • Home
  • Top 100 Scientists
  • List of Scientists
  • Blog

James Dwight Dana

Lived 1813 – 1895.

The field of geology is studded by many notable names that anyone would recognize in a heartbeat. One great name though that isn’t heard of very often is that of James Dwight Dana’s. During his life, he made massive contributions to the field of geology, mineralogy, volcanology, and zoology. He pioneered the study of mountain-building, the origin and structures of the continents and oceans, and volcanic activity. Indeed, he was a man that proved to be relentless in his desire to understand the earth.

Advertisements

Early life

James Dwight Dana was born in Utica, New York, on February 12, 1813, the eldest of a family of ten children. His mother was Harriet Dwight and his father, James Dana worked as a merchant. Through his mother’s side of the family, he was related to the Dwight Family of New England who were missionaries and educators. His relatives included Henry Otis Dwight and Harrison Gray Otis Dwight.

James Dwight showed an interest in science at a very young age and was fond of collecting and bringing home natural objects. His science interest was fostered by Fay Edgerton, one of his teachers in Utica high school who taught classes in chemistry, mineralogy, botany, and geology. He played a large role towards ensuring that young James developed his scientific interests.

In 1830, James graduated from high school and enrolled in in Yale College where he studied under the elder Benjamin Silliman. James Dana graduated from Yale College three years later in 1833 and spent the next two years of his life working as a teacher of mathematics to midshipmen in the navy. He sailed to the Mediterranean while he was teaching and made scientific notes during his 16 month cruise.

His notes in 1834 on the condition of the volcano Vesuvius were published in the American Journal of Science and this was his first scientific paper.

His career

In the years 1836 and 1837, Dana became an assistant to Benjamin Silliman who was a professor at Yale and headed the chemical department. Two years after his assistant post, Dana moved on to become a mineralogist and a geologist for the US Exploring Expedition which was headed by Capt. Charles Wilkins in 1838. He also acted as the zoologist from 1840 onwards, producing important reports on corals and crustacea. The expedition took him to the Pacific Ocean where he collected enough material to keep him occupied for the next 13 years of his life. The expedition finished in 1942 and Dana by then had notebooks filled with sketches, maps, diagrams, and a large fossil collection.

In 1849, his sketch of Mounts Shasta, a volcano in California was engraved and published in the American Journal of Science an Arts- a publication spearheaded by Silliman in the early 1800s. The article detailed the rocks, minerals, and the geology of the Shasta region in California using scientific terms. The Journal also published a lengthy article based on Dana’s geological notes from 1841.

1844 was an exciting year for James Dwight Dana; not only did he become a resident of New Haven, Connecticut but it was also the year he married Henrietta Frances Silliman- the daughter of Benjamin Silliman. They had four children, two sons and two daughters.

In 1850, he was appointed as the successor to his father-in-law and became a Silliman Professor of Natural History and Geology in Yale. Dana remained in this teaching post until he retired in 1890. He joined the American Journal of Science and Arts in 1846, becoming joint editor.

During the later years of his life, he became chief editor and he was also a contributor publishing works on geology and mineralogy.

Notable works

His 1849 publication of Mount Shasta was in response to the gold rush in California. After all, he was the pre-eminent geologist in America during his life and he was one of the very few observers who had knowledge of the terrain in northern California. Dana wrote confirming that, given the geography and geology of the area, it was very likely that gold could be found in northern California.

Dana was also responsible for giving the world information about the volcanic landscape and activity in Hawaii. In the years 1880 and 1881 he embarked on the first geological study of volcanoes in Hawaii and he theorized that the chain of volcanoes in the area consisted of two strands, known as the “loa” and the “kea” strands. Later in 1890, Dana travelled with C.E. Dutton, a fellow geologist, and published a manuscript that was the most detailed study of the island that anyone had seen at that time. For decades, his manuscript was the definitive source concerning Hawaii’s volcanoes.

Publications

Dana was a prolific writer and some of his best works are “System of Mineralogy” (1837), “Manual of Geology” (1863), and “Manual of Mineralogy” (1848). He also wrote a very interesting manuscripts “Science and the Bible” which was an effort to reconcile science with some biblical texts. His works received much attention and were used in schools.

He also received many awards including the Copley Medal in 1877 from the Royal Society, the Wollaston medal in 1874 from the Geological Society of London, and the Clarke medal in 1882 from the Royal Society of New South Wales.

The final journey

James Dwight Dana died on April 14, 1895 in New Haven, Connecticut aged 82. His son, Edward Salisbury Dana followed in his footsteps and was also a well-known and brilliant mineralogist (1849-1935).

Advertisements
More from FamousScientists.org:
  • Charles DarwinCharles Darwin
  • Alfred WegenerAlfred Wegener
  • James HuttonJames Hutton
  • J. Willard GibbsJ. Willard Gibbs
Advertisements

Search Famous Scientists

Scientist of the Week

  • Abdus Salam: The second great unification in physics

Recent Scientists of the Week

  • James Croll: Visionary janitor who explained the ice ages
  • J Harlen Bretz: Proven right after decades of mega-flood ridicule
  • Youyou Tu: Malaria drug discovery has saved millions of lives
  • Ambrose Fleming: The dawn of the electronic age
  • Ernest Walton: Artificially split the atom; Verified E = mc2
  • Franz Mesmer: Mesmerizing pseudoscience & hypnosis
  • Phillipe Pinel: Founder of psychiatry & humane therapy
  • Rudolf Virchow: Discovered diseases strike by attacking cells
  • Irene Joliot-Curie: The first artificial radioactive elements
  • Thomas Gold: Maverick streetfighter; explained pulsars & hearing
  • Clinton Davisson: Proved that electrons can be waves
  • Henrietta Leavitt: The key to the size of the universe
  • Robert Boyle: The birth of chemistry
  • Hippocrates: The father of Western medicine
  • Sophie Germain: Elasticity theory & Fermat’s last theorem
  • Thomas Kuhn: The paradigm shift
  • William Gilbert: Founded magnetic science
  • Craig Venter: Mapped the human genome; created new bacteria
  • Bernhard Riemann: The Riemann hypothesis; curved space; relativity
  • Pliny the Elder: The first encyclopedia
  • Thomas Harriot: First map of moon; created modern algebra
  • Frances Kelsey: Saved America from thalidomide
  • Stephen Jay Gould: Paleontology and punctuated evolution
  • George Wald: Discovered the chemical basis of vision
  • Charles Townes: Invented the laser and maser
  • J. Willard Gibbs: Founder of chemical thermodynamics
  • Rosalind Franklin: The structure of DNA
  • Edwin Hubble: Our galaxy is one of many
  • Georges Lemaître: The Big Bang & expanding universe
  • Jacob Berzelius: A founder of modern chemistry
  • Georges Cuvier: Father of paleontology
  • Rachel Carson: Pioneer of environmentalism
  • B. F. Skinner: 20th century’s most influential psychologist
  • Omar Khayyam: Accurate year length and algebra
  • Arthur Compton: Proved the existence of photons
  • Mary Anning: Fossils, paleontology, and ancient life
  • S. N. Bose: Quantum statistics and the boson
  • Claudius Ptolemy: Dominated astronomy for 1,500 years
  • Inge Lehmann: Discovered our planet’s solid inner core
  • Alfred Nobel: Invented dynamite and those prizes
  • Lise Meitner: The discovery of nuclear fission
  • Louis Pasteur: Founder of modern microbiology

Top 100 Scientists

  • Our Top 100 Scientists

Our Most Popular Scientists

  • Astronomers
  • Biologists & Health Scientists
  • Chemists
  • Geologists and Paleontologists
  • Mathematicians
  • Physicists
  • Scientists in Antiquity

List of Scientists

  • Alphabetical List

Recent Posts

  • 13 Great Scientists Who Were Home-schooled
  • Was Archimedes’ Father Really an Astronomer?
  • Interesting Facts about Numbers 0 to 10
  • Quotes – Scientists Bashing Philosophy and Philosophers
  • Einstein did NOT say that!
  • Evolution by Natural Selection – Essential Quotes
  • The Watson Crick Feud
  • The Unsung Heroes of DNA (Not Rosalind)
  • Scientists Behaving Badly
  • Astonishing Ancient Greek Automatons
  • The Extraordinary Ancient Greek Computer
  • 16 Great Scientists who died before they were 40
  • 22 Things Scientists Wish They Had Never Said
  • 7 Leading Scientists Who Believed in Ghosts




Alphabetical List of Scientists

Louis Agassiz | Maria Gaetana Agnesi | Al-BattaniAbu Nasr Al-Farabi | Jim Al-Khalili | Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi | Mihailo Petrovic Alas | Angel Alcala | Salim Ali | Luis Alvarez | Andre Marie Ampère | Anaximander | Carl Anderson | Mary Anning | Virginia Apgar | Archimedes | Agnes Arber | Aristarchus | Aristotle | Svante Arrhenius | Oswald Avery | Amedeo Avogadro | Avicenna

Charles Babbage | Francis Bacon | Alexander Bain | John Logie Baird | Joseph Banks | Ramon Barba | John Bardeen | Charles Barkla | Ibn Battuta | William Bayliss | George Beadle | Arnold Orville Beckman | Henri Becquerel | Emil Adolf Behring | Alexander Graham Bell | Emile Berliner | Claude Bernard | Timothy John Berners-Lee | Daniel Bernoulli | Jacob Berzelius | Henry Bessemer | Hans Bethe | Homi Jehangir Bhabha | Alfred Binet | Clarence Birdseye | Kristian Birkeland | Elizabeth Blackwell | Alfred Blalock | Katharine Burr Blodgett | Franz Boas | David Bohm | Aage Bohr | Niels Bohr | Ludwig Boltzmann | Max Born | Carl Bosch | Robert Bosch | Jagadish Chandra Bose | Satyendra Nath Bose | Walther Wilhelm Georg Bothe | Robert Boyle | Lawrence Bragg | Tycho Brahe | Brahmagupta | Georg Brandt | Wernher Von Braun | J Harlen Bretz | Louis de Broglie | Alexander Brongniart | Robert Brown | Michael E. Brown | Lester R. Brown | Eduard Buchner | Linda Buck | William Buckland | Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon | Robert Bunsen | Luther Burbank | Jocelyn Bell Burnell | Macfarlane Burnet | Thomas Burnet

Benjamin Cabrera | Santiago Ramon y Cajal | Rachel Carson | George Washington Carver | Henry Cavendish | Anders Celsius | James Chadwick | Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar | Erwin Chargaff | Noam Chomsky | Steven Chu | Leland Clark | John Cockcroft | Arthur Compton | Nicolaus Copernicus | Gerty Theresa Cori | Charles-Augustin de Coulomb | Jacques Cousteau | Brian Cox | Francis Crick | James Croll | Nicholas Culpeper | Marie Curie | Pierre Curie | Georges Cuvier | Adalbert Czerny

Gottlieb Daimler | John Dalton | James Dwight Dana | Charles Darwin | Humphry Davy | Peter Debye | Max Delbruck | Jean Andre Deluc | René Descartes | Rudolf Christian Karl Diesel | Paul Dirac | Prokop Divis | Theodosius Dobzhansky | Frank Drake | K. Eric Drexler

John Eccles | Arthur Eddington | Thomas Edison | Paul Ehrlich | Albert Einstein | Gertrude Elion | Empedocles | Eratosthenes | Euclid | Leonhard Euler

Michael Faraday | Pierre de Fermat | Enrico Fermi | Richard Feynman | Fibonacci – Leonardo of Pisa | Emil Fischer | Ronald Fisher | Alexander Fleming | John Ambrose Fleming | Henry Ford | Lee De Forest | Dian Fossey | Leon Foucault | Benjamin Franklin | Rosalind Franklin | Sigmund Freud

Galen | Galileo Galilei | Francis Galton | Luigi Galvani | George Gamow | Carl Friedrich Gauss | Murray Gell-Mann | Sophie Germain | Willard Gibbs | William Gilbert | Sheldon Lee Glashow | Robert Goddard | Maria Goeppert-Mayer | Thomas Gold | Jane Goodall | Stephen Jay Gould

Fritz Haber | Ernst Haeckel | Otto Hahn | Albrecht von Haller | Edmund Halley | Thomas Harriot | William Harvey | Stephen Hawking | Otto Haxel | Werner Heisenberg | Hermann von Helmholtz | Jan Baptist von Helmont | Joseph Henry | Caroline Herschel | John Herschel | William Herschel | Gustav Ludwig Hertz | Heinrich Hertz | Karl F. Herzfeld | Antony Hewish | David Hilbert | Maurice Hilleman | Hipparchus | Hippocrates | Shintaro Hirase | Dorothy Hodgkin | Robert Hooke | Frederick Gowland Hopkins | William Hopkins | Grace Murray Hopper | Frank Hornby | Jack Horner | Bernardo Houssay | Fred Hoyle | Edwin Hubble | Alexander von Humboldt | Zora Neale Hurston | James Hutton | Christiaan Huygens

Ernesto Illy | Ernst Ising | Keisuke Ito

Mae Carol Jemison | Edward Jenner | J. Hans D. Jensen | Irene Joliot-Curie | James Prescott Joule | Percy Lavon Julian

Michio Kaku | Heike Kamerlingh Onnes | Pyotr Kapitsa | Friedrich August Kekulé | Frances Kelsey | Pearl Kendrick | Johannes Kepler | Abdul Qadeer Khan | Omar Khayyam | Alfred Kinsey | Gustav Kirchoff | Martin Klaproth | Robert Koch | Emil Kraepelin | Thomas Kuhn | Stephanie Kwolek

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck | Hedy Lamarr | Edwin Herbert Land | Karl Landsteiner | Pierre-Simon Laplace | Max von Laue | Antoine Lavoisier | Ernest Lawrence | Henrietta Leavitt | Antonie van Leeuwenhoek | Inge Lehmann | Gottfried Leibniz | Georges Lemaître | Leonardo da Vinci | Niccolo Leoniceno | Aldo Leopold | Rita Levi-Montalcini | Claude Levi-Strauss | Willard Frank Libby | Justus von Liebig | Carolus Linnaeus | Joseph Lister | John Locke | Hendrik Antoon Lorentz | Konrad Lorenz | Ada Lovelace | Lucretius | Charles Lyell | Trofim Lysenko

Ernst Mach | Marcello Malpighi | Jane Marcet | Guglielmo Marconi | Lynn Margulis | James Clerk Maxwell | Ernst Mayr | Barbara McClintock | Lise Meitner | Gregor Mendel | Dmitri Mendeleev | Franz Mesmer | Antonio Meucci | Albert Abraham Michelson | Thomas Midgeley Jr. | Milutin Milankovic | Maria Mitchell | Mario Molina | Thomas Hunt Morgan | Samuel Morse | Henry Moseley

Ukichiro Nakaya | John Napier | John Needham | John von Neumann | Thomas Newcomen | Isaac Newton | Florence Nightingale | Tim Noakes | Alfred Nobel | Emmy Noether | Christiane Nusslein-Volhard | Bill Nye

Hans Christian Oersted | Georg Ohm | J. Robert Oppenheimer | Wilhelm Ostwald | William Oughtred

Blaise Pascal | Louis Pasteur | Wolfgang Ernst Pauli | Linus Pauling | Randy Pausch | Ivan Pavlov | Marguerite Perey | Jean Piaget | Philippe Pinel | Max Planck | Pliny the Elder | Karl Popper | Beatrix Potter | Joseph Priestley | Claudius Ptolemy | Pythagoras

Harriet Quimby | Thabit ibn Qurra

C. V. Raman | Srinivasa Ramanujan | William Ramsay | John Ray | Prafulla Chandra Ray | Francesco Redi | Sally Ride | Bernhard Riemann | Wilhelm Röntgen | Hermann Rorschach | Ronald Ross | Ibn Rushd | Ernest Rutherford

Carl Sagan | Abdus Salam | Jonas Salk | Frederick Sanger | Alberto Santos-Dumont | Walter Schottky | Erwin Schrödinger | Theodor Schwann | Glenn Seaborg | Hans Selye | Charles Sherrington | Gene Shoemaker | Ernst Werner von Siemens | George Gaylord Simpson | B. F. Skinner | William Smith | Frederick Soddy | Arnold Sommerfeld | Nicolas Steno | Nettie Stevens | William John Swainson | Leo Szilard

Niccolo Tartaglia | Edward Teller | Nikola Tesla | Thales of Miletus | Benjamin Thompson | J. J. Thomson | William Thomson | Henry David Thoreau | Kip S. Thorne | Clyde Tombaugh | Evangelista Torricelli | Charles Townes | Youyou Tu | Alan Turing | Neil deGrasse Tyson

Harold Urey

Craig Venter | Vladimir Vernadsky | Andreas Vesalius | Rudolf Virchow | Artturi Virtanen | Alessandro Volta

George Wald | Alfred Russel Wallace | Ernest Walton | James Watson | James Watt | Alfred Wegener | John Archibald Wheeler | Maurice Wilkins | Thomas Willis | E. O. Wilson | Sven Wingqvist | Sergei Winogradsky | Friedrich Wöhler | Wilbur and Orville Wright | Wilhelm Wundt

Chen-Ning Yang

Ahmed Zewail

Return to top of page

Famous Scientists - Privacy - Contact - About - Content & Imagery © 2018

This website uses cookies to improve your experience. We'll assume you're ok with this, but you can opt-out if you wish.Accept Read More