Fortunately, in 1803 Edward Howard’s chemical work on meteorites came to a successful conclusion. This patient chemist made analyses of samples from the Siena, Wold Cottage, and Benares falls and from an older Bohemian fall. He also had the samples studied mineralogically by a fellow scientist. From the results of these investigations, he drew the following conclusions, which admirably supported Chladni’s well-reasoned and thoroughly documented theory regarding meteorite falls:
All four of the stones studied had very nearly the same composition.
Despite the fact that the stones contained no new elements, their mineralogical character differed in several important respects from that of any rocks found naturally on the earth.
The four masses must have had a common origin although their reported falls had been widely separated both in time and in space.
Finally, said Howard, it was quite possible that the stones had really fallen from the sky.
Howard’s views were soon put to the test. Shortly after the publication of his important paper, a shower of stony meteorites fell near L’Aigle, France, on April 26, 1803. This event was carefully investigated by French scientists, and they reluctantly admitted that about 3,000 stones actually had fallen within an oval-shaped area about 6 miles long by 2 miles wide. This shower of meteorites had been accompanied by the same light and sound effects mentioned in many of the old meteorite-fall reports collected by Chladni, effects now recognized as characteristic of the infall of meteorites upon the earth. The evidence was overwhelming—stones really did fall from the sky. In the camp of the enemy, so to speak, the reality of meteorite falls was established once and for all!
12. THE MODERN VIEW
After the L’Aigle shower of 1803, a whole new era opened in the study of meteorites. No longer did scientists hold these objects up to ridicule and scorn. Instead, they came to regard meteorites as well worth collection and careful study.
The Vienna Museum, the British Museum, the Paris Museum, the Academy of Science of St. Petersburg (now Leningrad), and the U.S. National Museum began to build up splendid meteorite collections. Scientists in Germany, England, France, and Russia engaged in the painstaking mineralogical study and classification of individual meteorite specimens.
The modern science of meteoritics is rooted deep in the nineteenth century. Many special fields of investigation had their beginnings then. Scientists became interested in the chemistry, the mineralogy, and the metallurgy of meteorites; in the orbits of meteorites and the trajectories they follow through the earth’s atmosphere down to impact with the ground; and in the distribution of meteorite falls in space and time.
From this period we can date such milestones of progress in meteoritics as:
The discovery of the beautiful and significant Widmanstätten patterns characteristic of the majority of the irons, and the less spectacular but equally important lines named for J. G. Neumann, the German meteoriticist who discovered them, in 1848, in the Braunau meteorite.
The realization that there were many different kinds of meteorites and that these diverse objects were very important to an understanding of the internal structure and origin of the earth, and perhaps of the Solar System and the wider cosmos as well.
Tentative explanations of the violent and terrifying light and sound effects connected with meteorite falls.
Tentative explanations of such oval-shaped areas as shown above.
