The Emperor and his councillors decided that the fall of the meteorite at such a time and place was an omen of divine favor which meant good fortune to the cause of the Holy Roman Empire. After breaking off two small pieces of the stone, one for the Duke of Austria and one for himself, the Emperor forbade further damage to it. He also gave orders that the stone be hung in the parish church in Ensisheim for all to see. In this way, the Ensisheim stone became the very first meteorite of witnessed fall to be preserved down to the present day—and all because of the superstition of a famous military leader.
The discussion to this point makes clear that in ancient, medieval, and Renaissance times, meteorite falls were considered as startling and disturbing events, which frequently were interpreted in strange and mistaken ways. But the fact that meteorites actually did fall from the heavens was not questioned. As the so-called “Age of Reason” opened, a curious change in attitude toward meteorite falls took place.
At the very time that knowledge in general increased, men of learning began to deny that meteorite falls occurred at all! The scientists of the French Academy, in particular, were very positive on this point. Since the era was one in which all Europe sneezed if “la belle France” had a cold in the head, it was a trying time not only for the early meteoriticists, but for all who had the nerve to insist they had seen rocks fall from the sky.
By the end of the 1700’s, the authorities had studied the evidence relating to meteorite falls and had completely rejected it. They said that there was no “proof” whatever that “stones fell from the heavens.” These early scientists openly sneered at people who claimed that they had seen meteorites fall. It was felt that the spectators of such events either had merely been “seeing things,” or had surely been reporting light and sound effects connected with nothing but ordinary thunderstorms.
When confronted with the “fallen” masses themselves, the authorities often refused to examine them, or if they did, insisted that these masses were only rocks that had been struck by lightning. Such were the opinions of learned men around the close of the eighteenth century.
Fortunately, scientific facts have a stubborn way of winning out in the long run. A major part of the credit for seeing that the truth regarding meteorite falls was at last recognized must go to E. F. F. Chladni, a German physicist, and to Edward Howard, an English chemist.
In 1794, Chladni published an extremely important paper concerning a large spongelike mass of “native iron” found near Krasnoyarsk, Russia. This object had been discovered in 1749 by a Russian blacksmith, and it was studied in 1772 by P. S. Pallas, an early traveler. Chladni concluded that the mass of iron[11] must have fallen from the heavens, because it had been “fused” (but not by man, electricity, or fire) and also because there were no volcanoes anywhere around its place of find.
Chladni supported his theory by listing numerous reports of meteorite falls dating from ancient and medieval times. But Chladni’s fellow scientists flatly rejected his theory as clever but not satisfactory.
With the fall of the Siena meteorites in Italy on June 16, 1794, the controversy regarding the possibility that stones actually fell from the sky became particularly heated, and remained so for nearly ten years. During this interval, two other important meteorite falls occurred: Wold Cottage, England, on December 13, 1795, and Benares, India, on December 19, 1798. Scientists had a hard time finding explanations for these well-observed events, and some of the theories put forward to account for them far outdid Chladni’s in “cleverness,” if that be the correct word.
One scholar, writing in 1796, suggested that the masses which fell at Siena resulted from the solidification at great height of volcanic ashes from Mount Vesuvius. These ashes had supposedly been carried northward beyond Siena and then been “brought back by a northerly wind, congealing from the air....”