Weston, H4
Weston was the first witnessed, recovered, American fall. There are some great anecdotes from the eyewitnesses and other important persons of the day including Thomas Jefferson and a few leading naturalists of the day, Drs. Jeremiah Day, Benjamin Silliman, and James L. Kingsley. The documents read well and deserve to be read in their entirety:
On the origin of meteoric stones, by Jeremiah Day
A few of the wonderful descriptions are here, for those short on time:
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As you can see, the descriptions are wonderfully verbose and use a variety of antiquated references and descriptors. The above articles were transcribed from The Memoirs of the Connecticut Academy of Sciences, Volume 1, Part 1, published in 1810.
Weston created a stir among the young United States’ leadership. The idea that stones could fall from the sky was a threatening one for people who believed that a God had created the universe and heavens. The concept of an imperfect ether, where rocks were flying around between celestial bodies willy-nilly, wasn’t something that even a scientifically inclined scholar like Thomas Jefferson could easily accept.
A letter from Thomas Jefferson to Daniel Salmon
While Thomas Jefferson may never have uttered the ubiquitous line “I would rather believe that a Yankee professor would lie than that rocks would fall from the sky,” he certainly treated the concept with a great deal of skepticism.
Here are some images of a ~6.1 gram fusion-crusted end-cut of the meteorite, originally from ASU.
