Ernst Chladni - Meteorites

Meteorites

In 1794, Chladni published, in German, Über den Ursprung der von Pallas gefundenen und anderer ihr ähnlicher Eisenmassen und über einige damit in Verbindung stehende Naturerscheinungen, (On the Origin of the Pallas Iron and Others Similar to it, and on Some Associated Natural Phenomena), in which he proposed that meteorites have an extraterrestrial origin. This was a controversial statement at the time, since meteorites were thought to be of volcanic origin. With this book Chladni also became one of the founders of modern meteorite research.

Chladni was initially ridiculed for his claims of an outer space origin for meteorites, but his writings sparked scientific curiosity that eventually led more researchers to support his theory. In 1795 a large stony meteorite was observed during its fall to earth at a cottage outside of Wold Newton, Yorkshire, England. A piece of this ordinary chondrite, known as the Wold Cottage meteorite, was provided to British chemist Edward Howard who, along with French mineralogist Jacques de Bournon, carefully analyzed the elemental composition of the meteorite and concluded that an extraterrestrial origin was likely. In 1803 a meteor shower over L'Aigle, France peppered the town with over 3000 fragments of meteorites with hundreds of witnesses to the stones falling. The L'Aigle meteor shower was investigated by French physicist and astronomer Jean Baptiste Biot, under commission of the French Minister of the Interior. Unlike Chladni's book and the scientific publication by Howard and de Bournon, Biot's article was a popular and lively report on meteorites that convinced a number of people of the veracity of Chladni's initial insights.