Jessie May Sweet

Jessie May Sweet (27 April 1901-20 November 1979) was a British mineralogist and science historian who worked at the Natural History Museum in London and the Royal Scottish Museum in Edinburgh.

Early years and education

Jessie May Sweet was born on April 27, 1901, to Emily Chapman and Edward Sweet, a banker. She grew up in Wisbech and Boston, United Kingdom, and studied science at Edinburgh University, graduating with a B.Sc. in geology in 1924.

Career

After completing her education, Sweet landed a temporary job in the Department of Mineralogy of the British Museum (Natural History), a.k.a. Natural History Museum, in I927. That was the year when famed mineralogist Leonard James Spencer assumed the role of Keeper of Minerals at the museum. In 1928, she was elected a member of the Mineralogical Society and served on the Council of that Society from 194O to 1943. After the end of the Second World War, she was promoted to Senior Experimental Officer, a position she maintained until her retirement in 1961.

While at the Natural History Museum, Sweet published articles on several minerals, including uigite, baryte, and plinthite. One of the minerals was tacharanite, which was discovered by her while on holiday at Portree on the Isle of Skye in the Inner Hebrides of Scotland. She named it after the Gaelic word "tacharan", a changeling, "an object or a thing left in place of a thing stolen" alluding to the initially presumed instability of this mineral because, after the first X-ray photographic examination, it was thought to be unstable when exposed to air and prone to decompose into tobermorite and gyrolite.

Sweet published short papers on Benjamin Franklin's asbestos purse, Sir Hans Sloane's minerals, and British gold from the Georges de la Bouglise collection. She was also interested in diamonds and their history and published in The Journal of Gemmology a note on Mr. Clayton's diamond (with A. A. Moss, 1951) and the "Colenso" diamond (with A. G. Couper, 1961). She was an abstractor for Mineralogical Abstracts from volume vii (194O) to volume xiii (1958).

After she retired from the Natural History Museum in 1961, Sweet moved to Edinburgh where she continued her historical studies at the Royal Scottish Museum. In those years, she became an authority on the life of famed Scottish naturalist and mineralogist Robert Jameson, Professor of Natural History at Edinburgh University from 1804 to 1854. She published thirteen papers on Jameson and related subjects, which are summarized in her introduction of the facsimile reprint of The Wernerian Theory of the Neptunian Origin of Rocks (Haffner Press, 1976), with a foreword by George W. White.

One of her favorite papers was her research on Scottish physician and mineralogist Matthew Guthrie, who was responsible for the original classification of gemstones.

For her work, Sweet was honored with the award of MBE.

Death

Jessie May Sweet died in Edinburgh on November 20, 1979, at age 78.