William Henry Fitton

William Henry Fitton was an Irish physician and geologist born January 24, 1780, in Dublin, Ireland, who died May 13, 1861, in London, and who studied at Trinity College Dublin before training in medicine in Edinburgh under Robert Jameson and in London, earning a medical doctorate from Cambridge in 1816. Practicing largely as an amateur geologist, he published Observations on some of the Strata between the Chalk and the Oxford Oolite in the South-east of England between 1824 and 1836, establishing the stratigraphic relationships of the Greensand, Wealden and Purbeck formations, and he also wrote A Geological Sketch of the Vicinity of Hastings in 1833 and contributed essays to the Edinburgh Review from 1817 to 1841. He served as president of the Geological Society of London from 1827 to 1829, was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1815, and received the Wollaston Medal in 1852; he is also credited with inventing the thaumatrope around 1825.