Henry Joseph Grayson

Who was Henry Joseph Grayson?

Henry Joseph Grayson was a British-born Australian nurseryman and scientist, best known as the designer of a machine for ruling diffraction gratings.

Grayson was born in Worrall, near Sheffield, Yorkshire, England, son of Joseph Grayson, a Master Cutler, and his wife Fanny, née Smith. Grayson came of a family of market gardeners, and travelled to New Zealand in the early 1880s. After returning to England and marrying Elizabeth Clare on 11 August 1886, the couple soon migrated to Victoria where Grayson worked as a nursery gardener. Becoming interested in science he joined the Field Naturalists Club of Victoria, studied botany and did some work on the diatoms, a group of minute plants. Grayson attended meetings of the Royal Microscopical Society and developed a talent for preparing microscope slides. Before 1894 he had constructed a machine for making micrometer rulings on glass, the results being very good for that time. In 1897 some very beautiful work Grayson had done in cutting sections of plants led to his being given a position in the physiology department of the University of Melbourne under Professor C. J. Martin.

He was afterwards transferred to the geology department, and in December 1901 accompanied Professor F. T. Gregory on his expedition to Central Australia. In the preface to The Dead Heart of Australia Gregory paid a special tribute "To my assistant Mr Grayson on whom much of the hard work of the expedition fell". In 1910 Grayson was associated with D. J. Mahony in the preparation of a paper on "The Geology of the Camperdown and Mount Elephant Districts", and in the same year, while working at the university under professor E. W. Skeats, who succeeded Gregory, Grayson made a highly efficient apparatus for preparing rock sections, a description of which will be found in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of Victoria for the year 1911.