Alois von Beck Widmanstätten

His family owned exclusive printing rights in the Steiermark province, but this was lost in 1784 and Alois sold the business in 1807.

In 1806 he was invited by the emperor to head a newly founded Imperial Technical Museum or Fabriksproduktenkabinett begun in 1807.

While working at the Fabriksproduktenkabinett, he began to examine iron meteorites along with Karl von Schreibers.

[7][8] The Widmanstätten pattern had been observed previously, in 1804, by the English mineralogist William (Guglielmo) Thomson.

During the period that he spent in Naples, he discovered these figures by bathing a Krasnojarsk meteorite in nitric acid for the purpose of removing rust and he published his discovery in French in the Bibliothèque Britannique,[9][8]: 125 [10][11] but Thomson's publication escaped Schreibers' notice.