Henry Clifton Sorby

Henry Clifton Sorby (1826 to 1908) was an English amateur microscopist and geologist from Sheffield. His major contribution was the development of thin sectioning for rocks and minerals, in which slices thin enough to transmit light are studied with polarised light under a microscope. He extended the same approach to iron and steel, a trade his family had followed in Sheffield for generations, and he introduced a blowpipe method of melting small beads for the microscopic study of meteorites. Born at Woodbourne near Sheffield and educated at Sheffield Collegiate School, he lived on a comfortable private income, which let him pursue science independently. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1857, and his methods became the basis of modern petrography and, later, metallography.