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A professor, a president, and a meteor

2011; Wiley; Volume: 46; Issue: 10 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/j.1945-5100.2011.01242.x

1945-5100

Ursula B. Marvin,

History of Science and Natural History

A professor, a president, and a meteor , by Cathryn J. Prince. Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books, 2011, 254 p. $26, hardcover (ISBN #978-1-61614-224-7) . The professor was Benjamin Silliman at Yale, the president was Thomas Jefferson, and the meteor was the fireball that hurled a meteorite to the ground at Weston, Connecticut, at 6:30 in the morning of December 14, 1807. Prince opens the book with a description of the fireball, which startled early risers from central Vermont along a north–south path across western Massachusetts and Connecticut to Weston, where it emitted three thunderous explosions and flung fragments of stone onto a strip of the rural countryside about 10 miles long. This was the first documented fall of a meteorite in the Americas. Weston lies about 25 miles west of New Haven where Benjamin Silliman was the Professor of Chemistry and Natural History at Yale. Silliman soon received a description of the event and a sample of the meteorite from his friend, Dr. Isaac Bronson, who lived near the site of fall. Silliman immediately began planning to go to Weston, accompanied by his colleague, Professor James Kingsley, to conduct interviews with eyewitnesses and collect samples for analysis. Prince provides us with a vivid sense of what travel could be like at the turn of the 19th century in New England. Early on the morning of December 19, Silliman and Kingsley left New Haven for the Fairfield home of David Judson, a Silliman family friend. Judson’s house was about 25 miles from New Haven and 5 miles from Weston. In those years, New Englanders commonly provided overnight accommodations for travelers, whether for dear or distant friends. . . . As the pair bumped along in their horse-drawn carriage, they noticed how sorely the roads needed improvement. . . . Rutted paths cut through forests and fields, and small streams crossed glorified trails littered with stumps and punctuated with boulders. . . . Roughly hewn logs spanned the town’s numerous brooks and rivers. High waters in the spring and ice in the winter quickly weathered the simple structures; even animals crossed with trepidation. (p. 32) As late afternoon wandered into evening, Silliman and Kingsley arrived in Weston. It was Saturday, December 19, 1807. (p. 33) Shortly after breakfast on Monday, December 20, Silliman and Kingsley set out to interview witnesses of the Weston fall. (p. 35) Other sources tell us that Silliman and Kingsley spent Saturday night and all day Sunday, December 20, at Judson’s home, and then started for nearby Weston on Monday morning, December 21. Prince offers us no explanation of why she dropped the Sabbath Day, December 20, when neither Silliman nor Kingsley would have been willing to travel, from her calendar of that critical weekend. Unfortunately, this mistake is fairly typical of Prince’s book. She tells her stories with enthusiasm but often shows too little regard for the facts. When they arrived in Weston, Silliman and Kingsley talked with numerous witnesses, visited all the verified sites of fall, and obtained fragments from each one. Their reports, beginning with a long newspaper account published on December 29, 1807, and followed early in 1809 by their technical report, including Silliman’s chemical analyses of the stones, electrified readers everywhere. It was the first scientific paper in America (since Benjamin Franklin’s time) to win the admiration of the learned societies of Europe. Prince describes the near absence of science in American education and how Silliman, unexpectedly, had become a chemistry professor. In that era, any young man fortunate enough to attend college normally chose between the ministry, the law, and medicine. Chemistry was seen as an offshoot of medicine. Silliman had graduated from Yale in 1796 and became a tutor there while studying the law. He passed his bar examination in March, 1802, and was preparing to begin his career when he learned, to his great surprise, that Timothy Dwight, the president of Yale, had other plans for him. Prince (p. 52) reports that Dwight had kept informed of the progress that chemistry and geology were making in Europe and he decided they must be taught at Yale. She does not mention that in 1797 Dwight had studied the impressive mineral collection at Harvard University, where geology and mineralogy had been taught since 1788 (Frondel, 1988:10). One year later, in 1798, Dwight recommended to the Yale Corporation the establishment of a new Professorship of chemistry and natural history. The Corporation agreed to this position if Dwight could find the money for it. In 1802, Dwight had the necessary funds. Hence, to remain independent of European traditions, he was searching for an American who could initiate a course in chemistry while remaining loyal to the tenets of the Congregational Church, which dominated life in New England. Dwight was a longtime friend of the Silliman family and had served as a mentor to 11-year-old Benjamin after his father died in 1790. He was fully aware of Benjamin’s choice of the law, but he also knew of his determination to excel in whatever he chose to do. And he never doubted that Benjamin would remain true to his faith while mastering a branch of science. So, one afternoon in July 1802, Dwight invited Benjamin for a stroll on the Yale campus. As they sat under an ancient elm tree, Dwight urged Benjamin to take up a career teaching chemistry. Connecticut did not need another lawyer, he argued, but it would benefit greatly by having its first chemistry professor. If Silliman would agree to such a calling he would find himself playing the leadership role in a promising new field. Silliman wrote later that he surprised himself and Dwight by agreeing to this proposition on the spot. Consequently, on September 7, 1802, the Corporation established the Professorship of Chemistry and Natural History (i.e., mineralogy, geology, paleontology, botany), and Dwight appointed Benjamin Silliman, a 23-year-old lawyer, to the chair. Suddenly, Silliman had to learn some chemistry. Prince traces this process in some detail. As a beginning, he chose to study chemistry at the Medical School of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, where, as Benjamin Franklin’s city, the sciences had flourished as nowhere else in America. On the advice of friends, he took up residence in Mrs. Smith’s Lodging House, which catered to a select group of young men. There, he found congenial company, including Robert Hare, a chemist who had gained international fame in 1801 as the inventor of the oxyhydrogen blowpipe. Silliman and Hare arranged to set up a chemistry laboratory in their landlady’s spare kitchen cellar, and they spent many an evening doing experiments—sometimes punctuated with explosions. Although we do not think of Philadelphia as a southern city, Silliman quickly noticed key differences from the customs prevailing in New England. Nobody said grace at meals, nor did anyone rest from activities on Sundays. There was no water on the dining table so he drank Porter and beer while some of the others drank rather freely of spirits. And in the chemistry lectures he attended Silliman missed hearing references to the wonders of God’s works as expressed in science. But most astonishing to Silliman was his discovery that many of his personable and highly intelligent companions admired the President, Thomas Jefferson. Prince depicts the rancorous partisanship that developed during the election of 1800 when Jefferson, the Democratic–Republican challenger overwhelmed John Adams, the Federalist incumbent. In her chapter titled: President Jefferson and New England Argue, Prince explains why Jefferson’s election almost amounted to a second American Revolution. The New England Federalists were actively promoting a hierarchical society with a strong central government, tax-supported schools and churches, a national bank, a strong federal judiciary, and tariff system aimed at the expansion of business and commerce. The South, led by Jefferson, favored equality of opportunity, states’ rights, freedom of speech, and freedom of religion! Jefferson argued that religion should be private, and people should be free to practice a faith of their own choosing (p. 93). He would have liked to see America fill up with independent farmers and small self-governing villages, with no big government interference. Many New Englanders saw Jefferson as a godless threat to the integrity of the Republic. The bitterness grew with time. In 1804, when Jefferson ran for re-election, Timothy Dwight and a chorus of northern newspaper editors railed savagely against him. They even threatened to secede from the nation. Nevertheless, Jefferson won his re-election overwhelmingly. It is widely believed that due to this rabid opposition, Jefferson developed a grudge against New Englanders in general and Yale in particular, but we lack clear evidence of this. Jefferson was a very busy president at that time: he had purchased the Louisiana Territory in 1803, and he sent out the Lewis and Clark expedition in 1804–1806 to document the terrains, peoples, plants, animals, and resources of the vast area. Then, on December 22, 1807, a week after the meteorite fell at Weston, Congress passed Jefferson’s Embargo Act, forbidding American ships to trade abroad. He may have thought the Act would avoid a shooting war by persuading Great Britain, with its need of raw materials, to stop interfering with American ships on the high seas. But the Act had no such effect, and predictably, it bankrupted the American port cities. It was particularly severe in New England, which harbored at least half of America’s shipping fleet. For one example, Prince reports (p. 135) that 134 vessels sailed from Salem, Massachusetts, in 1807 before the Act took effect. But not a single one left the port in 1808. That year, Salem’s soup kitchens served 1200 destitute people. Needless to say, this situation spurred rampant smuggling through Canada. Traces of it may be found today in place names, such as “Smuggler’s Notch,” a popular ski resort in northern Vermont. Silliman spent the winters of 1802–1803 and 1803–1804 in Philadelphia learning mineralogy as well as chemistry. The following winter, he presented his first course in chemistry at Yale and then, in the spring of 1805 he sailed for London and Edinburgh to further his studies and to choose books and equipment for his new laboratory at Yale, for which the College had appropriated $10,000. Prince (pp. 64–65) reports that on April 4, 1805, Silliman embarked in New York Harbor carrying with him letters of introduction penned by his colleagues from Princeton (not Yale?) and Philadelphia to scientists overseas. He first sighted land—Ireland—on April 27, and then his ship sailed along the south coast of Britain, passing Stonehenge (but not within sight of it), and the Isle of Wight. In Portsmouth, Silliman watched Admiral Nelson, himself, waving his hat to a crowd roaring its approval. The ship went on to Liverpool, where Silliman boarded a slave ship recently arrived from Guinea, and left it with an abiding horror of slavery. Decades later, he would furnish rifles to Connecticut soldiers in the Civil War (p. 66). In London, he met Frederick Accum, a prominent young chemist who had written one of the first chemistry textbooks in English. Accum helped him acquire instruments and coached him on how to perform experiments in his classes. Accum held his own courses in his home, where he opened the doors to the public. This inspired Silliman to include public lecturing in his career. In Edinburgh, he encountered a higher level of instruction than he had seen before. And he learned about the Wernerian and Huttonian doctrines of geology, which were presented in chemistry courses. He undertook field excursions to gain experience for leading his students through the surroundings of New Haven. From the first, Silliman found that he could easily reconcile his science with his faith. He accepted the creation story in Genesis, but believed that since then every portion of the Earth has been subjected to continual alteration in response to geological principles established by the Creator. He argued that we can learn to appreciate His works by studying nature. He avoided engaging in direct debates with unyielding believers in literal readings of the Bible. Without realizing he needed one, Silliman also got a fine education on meteorites, a new and lively topic in Europe. Between 1794 and 1804 an astonishing succession of new ideas, four witnessed falls of meteorites and chemical analyses of them, took place that established meteoritics as a new branch of science. Prince ignores this chain of events almost entirely. Her approach leaves such a gap in the founding of meteoritics that herewith is a brief sketch of the main events that are missing from her book. In April, 1794, Ernst F. F. Chladni of Wittenberg published the first modern book on meteorites and their origins. He began by discussing the Pallas Iron, a huge mass of metallic iron found on a high mountain in Siberia. After reasoning away hypotheses that it formed in the atmosphere, or was smelted from ore by lightning or by prehistoric men, he concluded that it, and other masses like it, must have fallen from cosmic space. This was a completely new concept at a time when space was “known” to be empty. Chladni added that archival records of stony meteorite falls indicated that they, too, must have originated in space. He pictured them as small bodies left over from planet-making, but he added that they might be rubble of a planet that had been shattered by an explosion from within or by collisions from without. Chladni then suggested that if one of these small bodies, moving freely in space, encounters the Earth’s gravitational field it will streak through the atmosphere becoming an incandescent fireball in which the solid body may or may not survive to fall as a meteorite. Chadni’s linking of meteorites with fireballs proved to be one of the earliest advances in meteoritics. Chladni’s book might have languished unread had not four witnessed falls taken place within the next 4 years. First, a large shower of stones fell at Siena, in Tuscany, on June 26, 1794; second, a single large stone fell at Wold Cottage in Yorkshire, on December 13, 1795; third, a single stone fell ar Évora Monte in Portugal on February 18, 1796; fourth, hundreds of stones fell at Benares in India, on December 19, 1798. The Siena fall began to change minds. Up until then, reports of falls commonly were dismissed mainly because the reports came mostly from unlettered country folk. But, Siena was a university town where one of the leading scholars of Europe, Professor Ambrogio Soldani, obtained specimens and described the event in a book he issued in September of 1794. Soldani did not argue for an origin in space because the Siena stones had fallen from a fiery cloud visible to all the witnesses. In England, Sir Joseph Banks, President of the Royal Society, obtained specimens of the Siena and Wold Cottage stones and gave them to the Medal-winning young chemist, Edward C. Howard, to analyze. Howard added stones from the fall at Benares, and one that fell in 1753 at Tabor, in the current Czech Republic. (The stone from Portugal was lost to science almost immediately.) Howard read Chladni’s book, and so he obtained a sample of the Pallas Iron, the Meson de Ferro from the Argentine chaco, and a mass of iron from Siratik in Senegal. In 1802, Howard published his chemical analyses along with mineralogical descriptions of each of his samples by his collaborator, the French émigré, Jacques-Louis de Bournon. The two of them showed that all of the stony meteorites they studied contained the same four principal components and were wholly or partially covered by thin black crusts. Howard analyzed each sample of metallic iron for nickel, and measured small percentages of it in the large iron masses and in the metallic iron grains in all four stones. His results demonstrated that meteorites are fundamentally different from terrestrial rocks. Soon, chemists in France and Germany were publishing analyses of meteorites. Nevertheless, a few naysayers continued to insist that nothing falls from the sky, until April 30, 1803, when a great fall of nearly 3000 stones fell at L’Aigle in Normandy. Jean-Baptiste Biot interviewed witnesses all along his route from Paris and at L’Aigle he collected specimens and mapped the distribution of the fallen stones, which occurred within a classical ellipse. His observations ended all doubts that the stones had, in fact, fallen from the sky. The new science of meteoritics had its spectacular beginnings in Europe with Howard’s paper in 1802 and Biot’s report of the L’Aigle fall in 1803. Four years later, in 1807, the fall occurred at Weston, and Silliman and Kingsley published their first account of it in the December 29th issue of the Connecticut Herald, a widely distributed newspaper. It was a long article describing the fireball, the distribution of fallen fragments, and a preliminary list of their principal chemical components. Complete analyses would not be available for many months. Toward the end of the article they recalled some historical falls including the one at Ensisheim in Alsace in 1492. They listed the difficulties of accounting for these events and wound up their article saying: “The subject must be acknowledged to be involved in much obscurity, and the phenomenon, till we are possessed of more facts and better observations, must be considered to be inexplicable” (Silliman & Kingsley, 1807). Their article was quickly picked up by other newspapers and by various scientific and philosophical journals in America and Europe. Two years later, in 1809, they published their first technical report in the Transactions of the American Philosophical Society. It was titled: Memoir on the origin and composition of the meteoric stones which fell from the atmosphere, in the County of Fairfield, and State of Connecticut, on the 14th of December 1807. In her eagerness to bestow credit on Silliman, Prince (p. 43) declares: “The work of Benjamin Silliman and James Kingsley had set the stage for the science of meteoritics.” Although she briefly mentions the ideas of Chladni and observations of Biot, she does not even include Howard’s name in her index. But fortunately for any reader interested in history, Silliman, himself, had set the record straight. In his Chemical Examination of the Stones which fell at Weston (Connecticut) Dec. 14, 1807, which was published in 1810 as a companion piece to the Silliman–Kingsley paper of that year. In it, he wrote of the strong similarities between the Weston stones and those fallen in other countries, which: “. . . have been analyzed by Howard, Vauquelin, Klaproth, and Fourcroy, who have been my guides in my investigation” (Silliman 1810, p. 151). Prince concedes later in her book that relevant literature from chemists, geologists, and others on the subject of meteorites crammed Silliman’s work space. His work space may well have been crammed: The Bibliography on Meteorites (Brown 1953) shows that between the appearance of Howard’s paper in February 1802, and the fall at Weston in December 1807, more than 150 articles and one book about meteorites had been published in Europe. With respect to meteorite origins, the first problem had been to persuade scientists and the public that meteorites fall from the sky. As we have seen, that issue was resolved by Biot’s observations at L’Aigle. But, despite Chladni’s logical reasoning for a cosmic origin, debates continued into the 1850s for an origin in the atmosphere or in volcanoes of the Moon. Prince (p. 103) remarks that Silliman adopted Chladni’s theory of cosmic origins, but Silliman favored a distinctive type of cosmic origin that differed markedly from Chladni’s. He believed that meteorites fall from Earth-orbiting comets. The hypothesis of terrestrial comets had been formulated by Thomas Clap, who had served as the first president of Yale from 1745 to 1766. Clap’s manuscript on terrestrial comets was found among his effects and published, posthumously, in 1781. Clap believed that the Earth is orbited by its family of comets just as the Sun is, and that Earth’s comets follow long, elliptical paths that carry them outward for enormous distances and then they swing back to pass through Earth’s upper atmosphere, where they are heated and electrified. On their closest approach to the planet, the electricity is discharged in great fireball explosions (Clap 1781, p. 12). Clap was not aware that fireballs sometimes hurl meteorites to the ground. So Silliman’s colleague, Jeremiah Day, Yale’s Professor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy, adjusted Clap’s hypothesis to allow meteorite fragments to break off and fall during the fireball explosions. The comets would then pass out of sight and resume their long, orbital flights (Day 1810). Prince (p. 30) refers to Day as a former president of Yale, although at that time he was a future president of Yale, who would serve in that office from 1816 to 1848. Silliman accepted Day’s hypothesis wholeheartedly. It helped to explain the immense size of the glowing disk of the Weston fireball, which different witnesses had estimated as being one-fourth, to two-thirds the apparent diameter of the full moon. Day concluded that the glowing body must have been at least half a mile in diameter, traveling at more than 300 miles per minute at an elevation of more than 20 miles. He declared that no such a body ever fell on the Earth. He noted that the fragments collected at Weston would make up a sphere only about 2 ft in diameter (Day 1810, p. 167). Thomas Jefferson was well aware of the great fall of meteorites at L’Aigle, and he was quickly informed of the fall at Weston by Connecticut citizens, and Congressmen. On February 8, 1808, one Mr. Daniel Salmon of Trumbull, Connecticut, offered to send Jefferson a large fragment of the stone which had fallen near his house. Several experts had declared it to be a stone of meteoric production. He thought that an official examination of it should be made by members of Congress. On February 15, the day after he received Salmon’s letter, Jefferson responded that pieces of the stones already had been distributed among the publicly elected representatives, but he felt it would be more informative to have the stone examined by a scientific society such as the Philosophical Society of Philadelphia. He remarked that we certainly are not to deny what we cannot account for, but given the difficulties of accounting for how the stone got to the ground and how it got into the clouds from which it was supposed to have fallen would require very serious consideration of the evidence (Jefferson 1808, in Bergh 1907). We will notice here that Jefferson did not say then (or ever) that it would be easier to believe that two Yankee professors would lie than that stones would fall from heaven. Beginning in the 1960s some meteoriticists began trying to squelch that legend, which, unfortunately, had entered into popular discourse. In her chapter titled, The Misquote Heard Round the World, Prince (p. 130) points out that one of the earliest mentions of that statement was made by Benjamin Silliman, Jr., during a talk he gave at the Celebration of the Centennial of Chemistry, in Philadelphia, on August 1, 1874. “Young Ben,” as he often was called, used the occasion to celebrate his father, who had died 10 years earlier. Ben’s remark was, of course, intended as a barb aimed at Jefferson, although he had died 48 years earlier. Amid much doubt of their authenticity, the Yankee professors lived on through most of the 20th century until the historian, Silvio Bedini, of the Smithsonian Institution, identified the statement as a fabrication by Young Ben (Bedini 1990, p. 388). So, Jefferson stands acquitted of that old legend of meteoritics, but now we have another one. Prince (p. 142) tells us that when he turned down Mr. Salmon’s request for an examination by Congress, Jefferson asked Nathaniel Bowditch to investigate the Weston meteorite on his behalf. This is widely believed and viewed as a slap in the face of New Englanders in general and of Benjamin Silliman in particular. Young Ben claimed that his father felt the sting of it all his life, and that he, himself, was still feeling it. Prince (p. 234) states in her Index (but not in her text) that Jefferson asked Nathaniel Bowditch to dispute Silliman’s findings! This would be a most unlikely request by a President who spoke and wrote with unfailing elegance. But the fundamental question is whether or not Jefferson did, in fact, ask Bowditch to study the Weston meteorite. We can dispose immediately of the notion that the request was a slap at New England, because Nathanial Bowditch was a native and life-long resident of Salem, Massachusetts. And, it seems unlikely that it was a slap at Silliman because in February of 1808, when Jefferson wrote his response to Mr. Salmon, Silliman had only very recently begun to earn his measure of fame with the Silliman-Kingsley article in the Connecticut Herald of December 29, 1807. Interestingly enough, the Connecticut Herald printed a short notice in the column adjacent to the Silliman–Kingsley report announcing: NEW HAVEN; EMBARGO National Intelligence Extra, Dec. 22, 1807 “Congress this day passed the following act.” It then lists the terms of the Embargo and the numbers of Yea and Nay votes in each house of Congress and states that the rules will be enforced by officers of the revenue, the Navy and revenue cutters of the United States. In her chapter titled, Thunderstones, Prince refers to the fall at Ensisheim in 1492, which Silliman had mentioned in his Journal. How much of this story she got from Silliman is unclear. She reports that soon after the fall, the Emperor Maximilian chanced to pass through Ensisheim. At that time, however, he was King (not yet Emperor) Maximilian, and he was marching through Ensisheim to make war on France. He claimed the stone as a portent of divine protection, and ordered it to be preserved inside the church forever. Prince (p. 118) reports that ignoring the sanctity of the place, villagers amassed inside bearing chisels and tools and chipped pieces out of the stone to fashion them into good-luck charms. But no such sacrilege is described in the archival records (e.g. Marvin 1992). The stone remained in the church for 301 years until 1793 when French revolutionaries carried it to Colmar. Prince states that they put it into their own church, but with true revolutionary spirit, they actually placed it on public view in the Bibliothèque National at Colmar. On that same day the Louvre Palace in Paris also was opened to the public for viewing of historic objects and works of art. But, in 1803, with the Revolution over and Napoleon in charge, the stone was returned to the church in Ensisheim. Today, it resides in the elegant Hotel de la Régence across the town square. Prince (p. 112) reports that Frederick Hall, an American living abroad, wrote to Silliman that he had read his article with much interest and pleasure. Prince adds that Hall published a copy of it, but she does not say where it appeared. She adds that Hall handed a copy to Count Rumford (the loyalist American inventor who had left Boston with the British in 1776). Rumford passed it on to Marc August Pictet, the editor of Bibliothèque Britannique, who translated it into French and read it to a rapt audience of the first class of the National Institute in Paris. Soon, it was published in Annales de Chimie. Silliman’s name was quickly becoming known among scientists in Europe. Nevertheless, if President Jefferson wanted a technical report on the fall at Weston, he would have been more likely to request it from one of America’s leading scientists rather than from a relatively unknown one. And Bowditch was better prepared, by far, than Silliman would have been to undertake a mathematical analysis of the fall at Weston. At age 35, Bowditch was America’s leading mathematician–navigator–astronomer. He had been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences as early as 1799, and had become world famous in 1802 for his book, The American Practical Navigator. Harvard College had presented Bowditch with an Honorary Master of Arts Degree in 1804 and offered him the Chair in mathematics and physics in 1806, which he refused, as he did similar offers of professorships in the U.S. Military Academy (West Point) founded by Jefferson in 1802, and the University of Virginia, founded by Jefferson in 1819. When the meteorite fell, Benjamin Silliman was virtually unknown outside of Yale. His earliest publication on the fall was the newspaper article, mentioned above, which was quickly picked up by other newspapers and various scientific and philosophical journals in America and Europe. In 1808, Silliman and Kingsley submitted their technical paper to the American Philosophical Society, which published it in its Transactions in 1809. By that time Thomas Jefferson had completed his second term in the White House. Bowditch undertook, most likely on his own initiative, a detailed study of the extraordinary meteor that appeared over Weston and exploded with several discharges of stones. He wrote that it had caused great excitement nationwide but was one of those phenomena of which few exact observations are to be found in the history of physical science. So he set out to collect the best observations of the fireball reported from different places and to determine, as accurately as possible, the height, direction, velocity, and magnitude of the body. Prince (p. 142) says that he repeated Silliman’s interviews with the eyewitnesses, but inst