Presentation of the Roebling Medal of the Mineralogical Society of America for 2002 to Werner Schreyer

Abstract

Mr. President, distinguished mineralogists, and guests, I was delighted when Werner Schreyer asked me to be his citationist, because I admire him for his scholarship, for his dogged pursuit of the perfect experiment seeking exquisite minerals, and for his application of experimental mineralogy to petrological problems. Werner and I have had parallel lives in experimental petrology, following paths that have converged from time to time, and with each convergence has come growing respect and friendship. But as a schoolboy in the 1940s, I hated Werner Schreyer, and I’m sure that he hated me. We were receiving bombs from our respective air forces in Germany and England, and wartime propaganda is a powerful opinion-shaper. One of the exercises in my school’s Air Training Corps was aircraft recognition, identifying the silhouettes of German aircraft, and Werner probably was expert in the same exercise as a member of the “Hitlerjugend”.