Response to Presentation of the Service Award of the Meteoritical Society

Thank you, Derek. And I extend my sincerest thanks to the society for honoring me with this award—even though you have not seen me for quite awhile. The last meeting I attended was the one in Tucson in 2007. That seems like a long time ago, but I am proud of my attendance record up until then: I joined the society in 1963 at the meeting in Ottawa with its excursion to the newly recognized crater at Holleford, Ontario. In the years between that early meeting and the one in Tucson, the society held 44 meetings and I attended 39 of them—at home and abroad. I also played a strong role in arranging for the meeting in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1968, which was co-sponsored by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and the Harvard University Department of Geology. That was an exciting time: it was the final meeting to be held before the return of the Apollo 11 lunar samples the following summer. So, we invited Harold Urey to describe his latest thoughts on the composition and thermal history of the Moon. In addition, Bevan and Mary-Hill French displayed at the registration desk a pre-publication copy of Shock Metamorphism of Natural Materials edited by Bevan and Nick Short, which introduced us to our first authoritative book on the many aspects of impact metamorphism. After the meeting, we awaited a chartered Greyhound Bus to drive us to Quebec for a visit to the Charlevoix impact crater, half of which lies beneath the St. Lawrence River. The bus was late picking us up so we fitted in a late supper en route. That evening, the bus broke down. We were rescued by a passing bus with a friendly driver who sang folk songs to us all the way to our hotel. We arrived there at 10:30 p.m. with the understanding that we could sleep late because our bus had been towed in and had to be repaired before we could leave in the morning. But our hosts did not know this. They had scheduled a 7:30 a.m. departure, so when they arrived at 6:45 a.m. and found nobody having breakfast, they telephoned every one of us. We all enjoyed leisurely breakfasts before our bus appeared about 10:00 a.m. Then we were off on a 110 km drive downstream to the exposed portion of the crater rim, which is semicircular and 57 km in diameter. Our guide, Jehan Rondot, led us to impactites and shatter cones, and the structural characteristics of the rim. In the afternoon, the bus drove down a steep escarpment to river level where we got closer views of interesting features. But the bus could not drive back up again on the loose gravel road. A tow truck was called and it quickly and smoothly pulled the bus up the hill, past most of us who already were climbing it. After one more night in Quebec, our bus carried us back to Cambridge by way of Boston’s Logan airport, where some of us caught planes with not a minute to spare. Ten days later, I was visited at my office by two representatives of the Greyhound Bus Company. One of our senior members, Brandon Barringer, had written to the President of Greyhound about the general inconveniences of the trip and the special difficulties for passengers with heart problems. My two visitors wanted details of the story from me. We three managed somehow to keep straight faces during my recital. Then they asked me if the society would accept their apologies and 150 dollars. I said “Yes, we would, and thank you very much.” We also sent our thanks to Brandon. Does any other host organization have a story to match this one? I first thought of writing a history of the society in the fall of 1968, when I spent a semester as a visiting professor at Arizona State University. My office was close to a room holding the earliest collection of the society’s archives. I took the opportunity to read letters written by Frederick Leonard and Harvey Nininger discussing the founding of such a Society, and it quickly dawned upon me that the Society’s 50th anniversary would occur only 5 years later. So I gave my first account of its founding in 1983 at the meeting in Mainz. After that, I spoke about the Society’s history at two more meetings, mentioned by Derek, and finally published my detailed history in 1993, the Society’s 60th anniversary. In 2003, I began interviewing my colleagues and publishing oral histories of their careers. As a beginning, I chose to interview winners of either the Leonard Medal or the Barringer Medal who were born before 1931. We had an extraordinarily talented group of members in that category and, of course, the stories of their careers illustrated major advances in the science itself. I published my interviews with the 13 of them that Derek listed in his citation, but unhappily a few of the scientists on my list died or were not available for interviews before I completed this project. Besides conducting interviews, I have greatly enjoyed searching through archives for original sources in an effort to set the records straight on historical topics such as the fall of the meteorite at Ensisheim in 1492 and the founding of meteoritics by Ernst F. F. Chladni in 1794. Of all my articles, I think I am proudest of the one I wrote with my Italian colleague, Mario Cosmo, on the falling stone described in 1766 by Domenico Troili. Troili reported that after a tremendous explosion followed by fierce whistling sounds, a single stone fell out of the sky and plunged nearly one meter into the ground. He examined samples of it under his microscope and noted a brassy mineral he called “marchesita,” an old name for pyrite. A century later, W. K. Haidinger, at the Imperial Cabinet in Vienna, wrote in 1863 that recent chemical analyses had shown the brassy mineral to be stochiometric FeS, a new mineral for which he proposed the name “Troilite,” in honor of Domenico Troili, who, he wrote, had recorded the actuality of meteorite falls a generation before Chladni did. (!) In his books of 1952 and 1972, Harvey Nininger championed Troili not only as the first to describe a valid fall but also to deduce that the Alberato meteorite came from space!! In the late 20th century, some younger scientists were beginning to cite Nininger’s conclusions. So I felt it was high time for me to read Troili’s book and find out what he actually wrote. I quickly located his book in the Rare Book Library at Harvard University and found Troili’s descriptions of the fall and the mineralogy of the stone to be well written. But his primary conclusion was abundantly clear—so much so that I decided to use it as the title to my paper: “The true cause of the fall of a stone in Albereto is a subterranean explosion that hurled the stone skyward.” When his book first appeared, Troili was severely criticized by the local bishop, for ignoring the “much better” explanation that the stone had been thrown aloft by a stroke of lightning! These two men of the Enlightenment were searching for natural causes for natural occurrences. But with Troili’s book in hand, I could see the records straightening out: Troili never thought of the stone as a meteorite, so he never dreamed that it came from space (pace, Haidinger, and Nininger). Haidinger knew that Troili believed the stone had been sent aloft in a volcanic explosion, but he argued that inasmuch as we know it was a meteorite from space, we should credit Troili as the first scientist to describe one. This anachronistic judgment, called “presentism,” is anathema among modern historians who make every effort to place a person’s accomplishments in the context of his or her own time. We owe to Chladni alone the insight that the bodies of meteors, meteorites, and fireballs must originate in space because they enter the atmosphere at cosmic velocities.

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