Flink, Gustav (1849-1931 )

Gustav Flink, Swedish mineralogist, mineral collector, mineral dealer and schoolteacher, was born at Ås in Skaraborg, Sweden on January 18, 1849. He taught in a Stockholm elementary school from 1871 to 1904, and for a time he owned and worked a small farm in Finja. In 1881 he studied chemistry under Ole Pettersson, and in 1883 he studied mineralogy under Waldemar C. Brøgger at the University of Stockholm. He served as Assistant Keeper (Curator) of the mineralogy collection at the Natural History Museum in Stockholm from 1905 to 1916, and made many collecting trips for specimens which he sold to museums (including the British Museum) and private collectors. He visited Iceland twice (1883, 1893), Greenland once (1897) and the Ural Mountains of Russia 12 times between 1889 and 1916.

Flink's discoveries at Narsarsuk, Greenland yielded nine species new to science. He is said to have contributed more to the preservation, study and description of the minerals of Långban, Sweden than anyone else. The new species flinkite was named in his honor in 1889, and he was awarded an honorary PhD by the University of Upsala in 1900. Following his retirement from teaching he continued to serve the mineralogical community as a dealer in mineral specimens, specializing in Långban; he set aside over 500 unknowns requiring further research, at least 20 of which proved to be new species. Flink also assembled a duplicate set of these unknowns, along with a set of representative specimens, for the American mineralogist Charles Palache in 1924 (it is now in the Harvard Mineralogical Museum). In total he amassed over 10,000 Långban specimens (now in the Natural History Museum, Stockholm), and publish 40 papers on Långban mineralogy. He died in Älvsjö on January 11, 1931.