Matteo Tondi

Matteo Tondi was an Italian medical doctor, mineralogist and natural scientist, born at San Severo on 21 September 1762 and dying on 16 November 1835. He went to Naples at seventeen to study medicine, supported himself as a private tutor in chemistry and medicine, and followed the chemical ideas of Antoine Lavoisier. In 1789 he was one of the men chosen to travel across Europe to study mining and the extraction of mineral resources. He later claimed to have found three new elements, which he named parthenium, austrum and borbonium; German and French scientists doubted this, the compound was probably iron sulphide, and he never spoke of it again. Meeting the geologist Abraham Gottlob Werner made him a Neptunist. Exiled to Marseilles in 1799, he moved to Paris in 1800 and worked as assistant to Déodat de Dolomieu at the Muséum national d'histoire naturelle and to René Just Haüy from 1806 to 1813. Back in Naples he was inspector general of waters and forests from 1812 to 1815 and from 1816 director of the museum of mineralogy. The mineral tondiite is named after him.