1. Charles Lapworth FRS FGS was a headteacher and an English geologist who pioneered faunal analysis using index fossils and identified the Ordovician period.
16 Facts About Charles Lapworth
1. 2.
Charles Lapworth was born at Faringdon in Berkshire the son of James Lapworth.
3.
Charles Lapworth trained as a teacher at the Culham Diocesan Training College near Abingdon, Oxfordshire.
4.
Charles Lapworth moved to the Scottish border region, where he investigated the previously little-known fossil fauna of the area.
5.
Charles Lapworth was headmaster of the school in Galashiels from 1864 to 1875.
6.
Charles Lapworth completed this pioneering research in the Southern Uplands while employed as a schoolmaster for 11 years at the Episcopal Church school, Galashiels.
7.
Charles Lapworth then studied geology and became in 1875 an assistant at Madras College in St Andrews, Fife, and then in 1881 the first professor of geology at Mason Science College, later the University of Birmingham, where he taught until his retirement in 1913.
8.
Charles Lapworth is best known for pioneering faunal analysis of Silurian beds by means of index fossils, especially graptolites, and his proposal that the beds between the Cambrian beds of north Wales and the Silurian beds of South Wales should be assigned to a new geological period: the Ordovician.
9.
Charles Lapworth received numerous awards for his research work, while for teaching he used the English Midlands as a setting for demonstrating the fieldwork techniques he had pioneered in his own research.
10.
Charles Lapworth died on 13 March 1920 and is buried in Lodge Hill Cemetery near Birmingham.
11.
The first and last born children died during infancy; Ernest, born 22 January 1871 and died 6 February 1871, and Walter Sanderson Charles Lapworth, born in 1882 and died in 1884 before his second birthday.
12.
Arthur Charles Lapworth became a renowned chemist and Herbert a civil engineer, engineering geologist, stratigrapher and palaeontologist.
13.
Charles Lapworth received many awards for his work and contributions to geology.
14.
The glacial Lake Charles Lapworth, was named for him by Leonard Johnston Wills in recognition of his original suggestion of its existence in 1898.
15.
Papers relating to Charles Lapworth can be found at the University of Birmingham in the Lapworth Museum of Geology, located within the Aston Webb building on the main Edgbaston campus.
16.
The Charles Lapworth Archive contains a remarkably complete record of all areas of his research work and teaching.