William Thomson

William Thomson (1760 – November 1806) was an English mineralogist, who used the name Guglielmo Thomson in Italy in later life. He died in Palermo at the age of 46 years. Discovery of Widmanstätten pattern Thomson at the time was living in Naples. One day he decided to treat a sample of the Krasnojarsk meteorite with nitric acid for the purpose of cleaning it of rust. Shortly after the contact with acid he noticed on the surface of the metal a strange never seen before figures: it was the later-called Widmanstätten pattern. In 1804, his discovery was published in the Bibliothèque Britannique, in French. After his death, his work was published in 1808 in Italian (translated from the original English manuscript) on Atti dell'Accademia Delle Scienze di Siena.