FT265


Very early in the morning of 12 August this year, the Perseid meteor shower will do its annual summer star turn. Once again, my girlfriend and I will be watching the light-polluted, 21st-century London skies, hoping to catch sight of some blink-and-you-miss it fiery trails above. The Perseids this year will be of a stronger than usual ‘storm intensity,’ with several hundred meteors hitting the atmosphere every hour. Regrettably, the shower will peak around dawn – this and a Full Moon on the night will probably mean our view of the Perseids will be rubbish.

Nowadays, we know what meteors are. But just over 200 years ago, meteors vexed the great minds of Europe. “Meteor” means literally “something in the air”, and the prevailing explanation for them was that they were the result of an “accretion” of gases high in the atmosphere that somehow congealed into solids.

Volcanoes were also believed to cause meteorites, either by throwing out stones that rained down, or by expelling plumes of “effluvia” that hardened into rock somewhere in the atmosphere, possibly aided by electricity. Others thought meteors were terrestrial stones dumped by hurricanes, or even that the “magnetic effluvia” of the Northern Lights caused their formation. With the arrival of the Enlightenment, scient­ists had an increasing tendency to conclude that meteors existed only in the superstitious minds of peasants who had misidentified stones struck by lightning.

The idea that meteorites were “cosmic bodies” falling from outer space was the least fashionable explanation. The meteorite mystery was solved mostly through the efforts of a man more interested in music and maths than cosmic astronomy. The father of meteorics (the study of meteorites) was an eccent­ric physicist called Ernst Chladni (below left). His methods of investigation, and his lifestyle, were distinctly fortean. Like Charles Fort, Chladni spent far too much time in reference libraries. And like Fort, the evidence

Chladni amassed in support of his ideas on meteors came not from staring through telescopes or from analysing rocks, or from any expertise in his chosen subject, but from curiosity and weeks spent in a university library reading eyewitness reports.

Chladni’s evidence was as likely to come from passages in Homer and from that proto-fortean favourite The Gentleman’s Magazine as it was from scientific journals. And in formulating his conclusions, Chladni relied not on his considerable – although informal and self-taught – grounding in science, but his training as a lawyer, to help him tell “fact” from “fairy tales” when evaluating witness testimony.


STONES FROM THE SKY
The earliest guesses at the origin of meteorites were in fact some of the most accurate. The Roman naturalist Pliny accepted that stones occasionally fell from the sky, and recorded the fall of a meteor in Thrace as confirmation of a prediction made centuries earlier by the Greek philosopher Anaxagoras that a “stone from the Sun” would one day fall. [1]

Aristotle conceived a model of an orderly universe with celestial bodies moving in fixed, orderly ways in otherwise empty space. In the Aristotelian universe, there were no messy bits of rock rattling around or “small bodies beyond the Moon” that could get in the way of the celestial bodies in empty space. It was impossible for stones to fall from the sky, as, apart from the celestial bodies, there was no matter out there to fall. Aristotle suggested instead that meteors were the tops of exploding volcanoes blown into the sky. His explanation wasn’t well received by his contemporaries, but as the Aristotelian universe later became the corner­stone of Christian and Islamic cosmo­logy, the volcanic origin of meteors gained more authority.

Comets were allowed to move “beyond the Moon” after the 16th-century Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe discovered that they orbited much further out than Aristotle had allowed. Newton accommodated Tycho Brahe’s discoveries on comets, but otherwise seemed to confirm Aristotle’s idea that there could be no small bodies beyond the Moon. He concluded that – with the possible except­ion of vapours and effluvia from Earth, and the “æther”– “To make way for the motion of the comets it’s necessary to empty the heavens of all matter.”

Dr William Whiston’s An account of a surprizing Meteor seen in the air, March the 6th, 1715 at night, with its “Conjectures for the solution of the foregoing phenomena”, was relatively mainstream for the time: he argued that meteors resulted when “exhal­ations and effluvia from the Earth travelling above the ‘vapours’ become heavier than air and coagulate into stones in the Northern parts”, while simply turning to thunder and lightning in the south.

In fairness to the Age of Reason’s meteor­ite debunkers, an awful lot of superstition and folk tales fell from the sky. The large meteor that came down on Ensisheim, Alsace, in 1492 was housed in the local church as an example of the “wrath of God”, while practically any stones that looked odd – from fossil shark’s teeth to prehistoric flint tools – were touted as “thunderstones” that had fallen during thunderstorms. The statue of the goddess Diana at Ephesus (probably carved from a meteorite) “fell from the sky”, as did the Nemean Lion, which Hercules had to defeat as the first of his 12 Labours (an association preserved in the constell­ation of Leo and the Leonid meteor shower). The Council of Claremont in France, which proclaimed the First Crusade in 1095, was preceded by portents including an ominous shower of meteors.

To the secular minds of the Enlightenment, all this was like a red rag to a bull. The new brand of science required expensive kit to measure natural phenomena, and observers trained to use this equipment. Peasants and other “unlettered observers” who reported stones falling from the sky didn’t know what they were talking about, their worthless testimony consigned to the bygone world of witch-hunts and old wives’ tales.

The 18th century was a time of exciting new discoveries. From the 1750s, scientists experimented with electricity. This novel science seemed to breathe new life into the atmospheric accretion model, with the electrical action of lightning in the upper atmosphere seen as somehow the key to the procreation of meteors. Mainstream science didn’t so much cling to ancient received wisdom as get carried away trying to explain meteorites by linking them to the sexiest new fields of scientific enquiry: gasses and electricity.

One contemporary scientist was Antoine Laurent Lavoisier, who in his earlier career with France’s Académie Royale des Sciences gained a reputation as a tenacious super­stition-buster. He demolished contemporary claims about water-dowsing and of a boy who could see water through strata of earth and rock. Lavoisier was part of the team called in to evaluate Franz Anton Mesmer’s claims around “animal magnetism”, for which he found no evidence.

Lavoisier’s report on “a stone which it is claimed fell from the sky during a storm” was the first known chemical analysis of a piece of a meteorite, which fell in 1768 in Luce, France. He read his report to the Academy the following year, and it was written up in 1772. [2] Lavoisier, the junior partner in the committee that wrote the report, found iron pyrites in the stone, and concluded that “thunder struck preferent­ially on pyritiferous rock”, which peasants had misidentified. He speculated that the iron pyrites in the rock somehow attracted lightning. On the subject of meteors, he added that “true physicists” had always been sceptical.

An electrical explanation for meteors had been tentatively suggested by the Academy’s Jean Baptiste Le Roy the previous year in his report to an enquiry trigg­ered by a fireball “more intense than the Sun” streaking over Sussex and reaching an apparently impossibly high speed before exploding over Melun, France.

Academy president G de Fouchy added a note to the Academy proceedings for 1772, which pointed out that subsequently three identical stones had been recovered from different sites in the area around the Luce fall, and that further study was needed. In fairness to the vulcanist, hurricanist, atmospheric accretionist and lightningist tendencies of this era, it’s noticeable that they usually concluded with words to the effect of “requires further study”.

By 1789, Lavoisier had published his paradigm-shattering Elements of Chemistry, which caused a steady stream of defect­ions from the prevailing scientific model of “phlog­iston” – a substance with a negative weight that was added during combust­ion – and replaced it with newly discovered gasses such as hydrogen and oxygen. Just as scientists were gett­ing carried away with electricity, so Lavoisier was now changing his mind about meteors, seeking explanations for them in the exciting new world of gasses. He now favoured an idea he had earlier rejected: that dust containing metals rose to inflamm­able layers of the upper atmosphere where it could be ignited by electricity to form meteors.

But when a rain of meteors fell on 24 July 1790 in Barbotan, near the French town of Agen, the preferred approach of the scientific establishment was denial. Sworn affidavits by 300 witnesses attesting to the fall were simply ignored. Professor Nicolas Baudin, a local physicist out for a stroll, did see a meteor fall, but when he wrote this up five years later his editors added their comm­ent on Baudin’s and other such reports: “We do not place any faith in any of them.”

Such reactions were understandable given the political context: France in 1790 was gripped by revolution, and several key events in the French revolution were the result of mass panics or rumours of imagin­ary plots that seized the crowd in Paris. Revolutionaries would have been reluctant in this atmosphere to encourage any apparent superstitious mass hysteria about stones raining from the sky. [3]


CHLADNI AND THE COSMIC BODIES
Enter Ernst Florens Friedrich Chladni. He was born in 1756 in the German city of Witten­berg, descended from Protestants who had fled persecution in Hungary. Although fascinated by science from an early age, Chladni was forced instead to study law at the insistence of his strict father, a law professor at the local univers­ity. Chladni later recalled a materially privileged but restrictive upbringing; it was only with his father’s death in 1782, that he was free to fully take up music and mathematics.

In 1787 he discovered a way to make sound waves visible by sprinkling fine powder on a metal plate and rubbing the edge of the plate with a violin bow. The vibrations caused the powder to form symmetrical patterns (still called “Chladni figures”). He wrote this up in 1787 in Endectungen über die Theorie des Klages, thus founding the discipline of acoustics.

Chladni had a talent for what’s now called “science communication”. His sound wave patterns were visually beautiful, and he combined the science with entertainment and music, inventing and helping to build weird and wonderful instruments – the “clavicylinder”, a kind of glass harmonica harpsichord, and the glass rod-based “Euphon”. With a horse and carriage, he took his show on the road. He thus made a living, and enjoyed what he described as a “nomadic, carefree existence”, on the paid lecture circuit, sometimes with 14 gigs in a row in each town.

Now scientifically respectable, Chladni was on tour in Göttingen in 1793 when he got into conversation with the elderly and frail Georg Cristoph Lichtenberg, one of Europe’s best-known physicists. Lichtenberg told Chladni he’d seen a fireball exploding over the city on a November evening two years earlier. Chladni gave Lichtenberg the credit for coming up with the idea that meteors might be “cosmic bodies” and the suggestion that he should seek evidence in Philosophical Transactions. But having a brilliant idea is not the same as doing the unglamorous library work, as every fortean knows.

Chladni spent the next three weeks in the Göttingen University library, where he found reports of 24 well-documented fireballs and 18 falls of iron or stone, as well as many less well-documented cases, which included 10 historical falls from the first to the 17th century. Of these, the most impressive was the mysterious “Pallas iron”. This was a huge, 700kg lump of iron with holes like a Swiss cheese, found by German naturalist Baron Peter Simon von Pallas in Krasnoyarsk, Russia, in 1772, and still well-known when Chladni was researching.

Chladni found other reports of meteor falls: the recovery of stone fragments “40 or 50 English miles” apart at Blagdon, England, in 1783, and Jean Baptiste Le Roy’s report to the Académie Royale des Sciences on the 1771 Melun, France, fireball. Prefiguring FT’s own “Classical Corner”, he also found reports in Homer’s Odyssey and of the meteor fall on Roman Thrace from Pliny’s Natural Histories.

Chladni’s “lawyer’s ear” convinced him that consistencies in all these accounts meant the eyewitnesses were telling the truth. The patterns he kept finding in accounts were: scorched recovered rocks heated enough to melt their outer layers, thunderclaps, and stones too hot to handle. In Philosophical Transactions he found descriptions of terrestrial stones known to have been struck by lightning, descriptions which were very different from those of meteors. The very high speeds reported and the fact that meteors seemed to come from all directions convinced Chladni that they had to come from “cosmic space”.

He wrote up his researches in the snapp­ily titled Ueber den Ursprung der von Pallas gefundenen und anderer ihr ähnlicher Eisenmassen und über einige damit in Verbindung stehende Naturerscheinungen, (“On the origin of the mass of iron found by Pallas and of other similar iron masses and on a few natural phenomena connected therewith”), which appeared in 1794. The short book’s chapter headings didn’t pull any punches. One stated bluntly that “fireballs are cosmic bodies” and “most shooting stars are no different”. Other sub-headings insisted that shooting stars are “not of volcanic origin… They are not smelted by lightning.”

Chladni hesitated to publish Ueber den Ursprung, expecting a hostile reception – and he got it. Many scientists immediately dismissed the work because it relied on eyewitness accounts of a phenomenon Chladni had himself never observed (indeed, his methods would still be unacceptable to the scientific establishment today). In later magazine articles, Chladni said that while many people agreed with him, they felt unable to say so publicly. Even Lichtenberg criticised Chladni’s book at first, but event­ually came round to his way of thinking.

And while Chladni’s central premise turned out to be correct, some of his ideas were bizarrely wrong, even more barking than the prevailing theories of the day. He decided that some small meteors were “spongey masses” that ascended from the earth and caught fire and that some falling meteors were tiny, but swelled up to enormous size when they hit the atmo­sphere, while others were made of “soft and elastic fluids”. By 1805, Chladni had decided that all meteors came from lunar volcanoes, before changing his mind again.


PROOF FROM ABOVE
Two months after Chladni’s book appeared, supporting evidence literally fell out of the sky near Siena, Italy. A sparking and booming red cloud threw stones to the ground (blamed on volcanoes), some of which were recovered, and their chemical composition was found to be the same as other suspected meteorites.

A 56lb fallen meteorite was recovered from Wold Cottage, Yorkshire, in 1795, and went on display in a London coffee house, complete with witness affidavits, where Royal Society President Sir Joseph Banks saw it. He engaged the young chemist Edward Charles Howard to analyse it. Improvements in chemical analysis techniques since Lavoisier’s day helped identify a distinctive iron-nickel alloy in the Wold Cottage sample, which also showed up in the Sienna stones. Howard had read Chladni’s book on meteors, which was now being taken seriously by British researchers.

While orthodox scientists might not yet have accepted Chladni’s views on meteor origins, his book had at least got them thinking about what evidence they needed to look for – a fall seen by a “trained observer”. A fall of meteors at l’Aigle, France, in 1803 seemed to provide the proof the sceptics were holding out for.

Young physicist Jean Baptiste Biot, dispatched by the Ministry of the Interior to investigate these meteor falls, followed a sound fortean principle: always ask the locals. His report was dated Year 11 of the Republic (1803) and it’s noticeable that all the eyewitnesses he interviewed are addressed as Citoyen (“Citizen”.) In the new egalitarian France, unlettered observers were no longer contemptible peasants but citizens worthy of respect. Biot took the testimony of local Academy of Sciences member Leblond, but also interviewed farmers, an elderly widow and the concierge of the local castle – and their testimony carried equal weight.

Biot also checked the local mineral collections and mines, and found nothing resembling the meteors he’d found. While not explicitly stating that the l’Aigle fall was extraterrestrial, Biot’s conclusion that it came down to earth at a 22-degree angle “at very great speed” was understood by most readers to preclude other explanations, and he summed up by saying: “I have succeeded in putting beyond doubt one of the most astonishing phenomena that mankind has ever observed.”

The theory of the atmospheric propagat­ion of meteors lingered on until the 1860s, while the idea that meteors were from lunar volcanoes didn’t finally die until the late 19th century. Two centuries on, science hist­orians are divided on whether Chladni was more influential than the then obscure Biot, and on whether Chladni founded meteorics or just laid the groundwork for others to follow.

Chladni continued what he called his itinerant life on the lecture circuit, largely unaffected by the controversy around Ueber den Ursprung. On the back of his work on acoustics, his most lucrative lect­uring gig was a private audience at the Tuileries Palace in Paris in 1809, at which he demon­strated his “sound figures” to Napoleon and an impressed Biot and his fellow Academicians. Chladni mentioned Biot’s mission to l’Aigle in his 1819 meteor update Ueber Feuer-Meteore, (“On Fiery Meteors”), by which time he had discovered The Gentleman’s Magazine, citing its latest reports of Irish meteor falls. Fiery Meteors has a more extensive proto-fortean list of historical “falls that have been observed, in chronological order” and “distances they were observed to travel”.

When the Napoleonic Wars came to Witten­berg, Chladni fled to nearby Kemberg, where he was based for the rest of his life, in a crowded one-room house/laboratory. Physicist Wilhelm Olbers said of an elderly Chladni in 1824: “It is truly sad that this, in many ways, deserving man has found no institution to award him a position with a salary.” Chladni died on yet another lecture tour in 1827.

Only in 1950 was the origin of meteors in the asteroid belt conclusively proven, with fireballs being identified as superheated ionising gases around the falling meteorite, and the thunderclap as the sonic boom from the shock wave as it hit the atmosphere at high speed.

Chladni cited several reports of a sinister hissing sound accompanying falling meteors, and we still don’t know exactly what this is. In recent years, the Ministry of Defence’s Project Condign report on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena in the UK has revealed that government scientists take seriously the idea that superheated meteors may somehow interact with atmospheric gases to create exotic plasmas that are mistaken for flying saucers. Over 200 years after Chladni unravelled the origins of meteors, some of their mysteries remain.




Notes
1 Anaxagoras’s explanation turned out to be partly correct. The cores of some meteor­ites contain tiny diamonds a few microns across, currently thought to have originated as material expelled from supernovæ – exploding suns.
2 “Rapport fait a l’Académie Royale des Sciences, par MM. Fougerous, Cadet & Lavoisier, d’une observation, communiquée par M. l’abbé Bachela, sur une Pierre qu’on pretend être tombée du ciel pendant un orage”, Observations sur la Physique, pp63–76, June 1772.
3 There is a widely held belief, especially among “alternative science” enthusiasts, that Lavoisier induced all the museums of Europe to throw away their meteorites in 1790, and that is the reason that there are no meteorites collected from before this date in existence today, except the 1492 Ensisheim meteorite, which was too big to chuck out. I have found no evidence from primary sources for any mass throw-out of meteorites, but have traced the story back to the first page of Richard Milton’s Alternat­ive Science (Fourth Estate, 1991). Milton told me he can no longer recall the source that he got it from – which is fair enough 18 years after he wrote it. I have not found any sources before 1968 mentioning the alleged mass meteor throw out, and Fort made no mention of it in The Book of the Damned (1919). The resident meteor experts at Imperial College and University College London (UCL), the UK’s leading centres for the history of science, hadn’t heard of such an event either. I also could not find any writings by Lavoisier in which he said: “Stones cannot fall from the sky, because there are no stones in the sky”, the proclam­ation which allegedly triggered the mass meteor throw-out. Lavoisier was far too busy reforming the French government’s finances in 1790 to bother with meteors; most of his writings from this year are about the affairs of state. And he wasn’t denying the existence of meteors by then, merely speculating that they came from the upper atmosphere, not outer space.




Sources
Ernst Florenz Friedrich Chladni: Ueber den Ursprung der von Pallas gefundenen und anderer ihr ähnlicher Eisenmassen und über einige damit in Verbindung stehende Naturerscheinungen, Riga, 1794.
HJ Stockmann: “Chladni meets Napoleon”, European Physical Journal Special Topics, 145, pp15–23, 2007, EDP Sciences, Springer Verlag, 2007.
EFF Chladni: Über Feuer-Meteore, und über die mit denselben herabgefallenen Massen, JG Heubner, Vienna, 1819.
Mary D Waller: Chladni Figures – A Study In Symmetry, G Bell & Sons, 1961.
Ursula B Marvin: “Ernst Chladni and the origins of modern meteorite research”, Meteorics and Planeteary Science 31, pp545–588, Meteorological Society, USA, 1996.
“J’ai reusi a metre hors de doute un des plus etonnans phenomenes que les hommes aient jamais observes.” A quote from JB Biot: “Relation d’un voyage fait dans le department de l’Orne pour constater la realite d’un meteor observe a l’Aigle le 26 floreal an 11”, Instituut Nationale Paris Memoires, Baudoin, Paris, 1799–1819.
William Whiston MA & J Senex: An account of a surprizing METEOR seen in the air, March the 6th, 1715(16) at night, W Taylor, 1716.
Antoine Lavoisier, trans. Robert Kerr: Elements of Chemistry in a New Systematic Order containing all the Modern Discoveries (Traites de Chemie), Edinburgh,1790.
“Rapport fait a l’Académie Royale des Sciences, par MM. Fougerous, Cadet & Lavoisier, d’une observation, communiquée par M. l’abbé Bachela, sur une Pierre qu’on pretend être tombée du ciel pendant un orage”, Observations sur la Physique, pp63–76, Paris, July 1772.
EFF Chladni: Endectungen über die Theorie des Klages, Leipzig 1787.
EFF Chladni: Ueber Feuer-Meteore, JC Heibner, Vienna, 1819.
“Lettre ecrite a l’Auteur de cel Recueil, pour M. Lavoisier, de L’Academie, Sur le jeune Homme de Dauphine, don’t il a été question dans la Gazette de la France, des 5, 12 & 15 Juin 1772”, Observations sur La Physique, pp239–243, June 1772 (Lavoisier debunks dowsing for water).
Mike Jay: “Cosmic Debris”, FT143:34–38, 2001.