biography
pronunciation:
[hiylprin]
| sex:
| male
|
| lived:
| (1853–1907)
|
| biography:
| Geologist, palaeontologist, and traveller, born in Satoralja-Ujhely, Hungary, the son of Michael Heilprin. He was brought to the USA in 1856 but returned to Europe for his college and university education. During 1880–1900 he held a series of professorships, curatorships, and club presidencies in Philadelphia scientific institutions, and became a professor of geography at Yale (1903–7). Best known as a traveller and explorer, he went with Robert Peary on his Arctic expedition (1891). His most spectacular moments came when he photographed the Mont Pelée volcano at close range while it was erupting in 1902. His many books include Principles of Geology (1890), The Earth and Its Story (1896), and Mont Pelée and the Tragedy of Martinique (1903). Also a talented painter, he illustrated some of his own works. On a 1906 expedition up the Orinoco R in British Guiana, he contracted some tropical disease, and died of a heart problem the next year. |
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