Abstract This volume was proposed after Peter Tandy and Joe McCall organized a 1-day meeting of the History of Geology Group, which is affiliated to the Geological Society, at the Natural History Museum in December 2003. This meeting covered the History of Meteoritics up to 1920 and nine presentations were included, the keynote talk being given by Ursula Marvin. There was an enthusiastic audience of about 50, who expressed the view that this meeting should lead to a publication. Dr Cherry Lewis, the chairperson of the group, discussed this with Joe McCall, who said that the material was too small for a Special Publication, but it could be developed by expanding it, taking the history through the 20th century, when there was a revolution and immense expansion both in the scope of meteorite finds and the application of meteoritics to scientific research on a very broad front with the advent of the Space Age. This was agreed and a format of about 24 articles was designed, approaches being made to selected authors. The sections of this Special Publication relate to the early development of meteoritics as a science; collecting and museum collections; researches establishing the provenance of meteorites; and impact craters and tektites.

Abstract From ancient times through to the Renaissance reports of stones, fragments of iron and ‘six hundred other things’ fallen from the sky were written down in books. With few exceptions, these were taken as signals of heaven's wrath. The 18th century Enlightenment brought an entirely new approach in which savants sought rational explanations, based on the laws of physics, for unfamiliar phenomena. They accepted Isaac Newton's dictum of 1718 that outer space must be empty in order to perpetuate the laws of gravitation, and, at the same time, they rejected an old belief that stones can coalesce within the atmosphere. Logically, then, nothing could fall from the skies, except ejecta from volcanoes or objects picked up by hurricanes. They dismissed reports of fallen stones or irons as tales told by superstitious country folk, and ascribed stones with black crusts to bolts of lightning on pyritiferous rocks. The decade between 1794 and 1804 witnessed a dramatic advance from rejection to acceptance of meteorites. The three main contributing factors were E.F.F. Chladni's book of 1794, in which he argued for the actuality of falls and linked them with fireballs; the occurrence of four witnessed and widely publicized falls of stones between 1794 and 1798; and chemical and mineralogicai analyses of stones and irons, published in 1802 by Edward C. Howard and Jacques-Louis de Bournon. They showed that stones with identical textures and compositions, very different from those of common rocks, have fallen at different times in widely separated parts of the world. They also showed that erratic masses of metallic iron and small grains of iron in the stones both contain nickel, so they must share a common origin. Meanwhile, in 1789, Anton-Laurent de Lavoisier had revived the idea of the accretion of stones within the atmosphere, which became widely accepted. Its chief rival was a hypothesis that fallen stones were erupted by volcanoes on the Moon. During the first half of the 19th century falls of carbonaceous chondrites and achondrites, and observations on the metallography of irons, provided fresh insights on the range of compositions of meteorite parent bodies. By 1860 both of the two main hypotheses of origins were abandoned, and debates intensified on whether all meteorites were fragments of asteroids or some of them originated in interstellar space. This paper will trace some of the successes and some of the failures that marked the efforts to gain a better understanding of meteorite falls from the end of the 15th century to the early 20th century.

Abstract ‘Stones fell around L'Aigle, July 26th 1803’. Thus ends the results section of the Biot report read in front of the Institut de France, the 29 Messidor an 11 (17 July 1803) after his 9 days trip to L'Aigle, 140 km NW of Paris. At the time of the L'Aigle fall, the mere existence of meteorites was harshly debated. Chladni's book on iron masses had been published in 1794, but his ideas had not yet convinced the savants or the educated laymen of the time. Meteorite falls were anomalous events in the order of things. In this paper, I argue that Biot's report on the visit he made to L'Aigle is a key event in establishing the extraterrestrial origin of meteorites. Biot was able to build the proof outside the laboratory and the library, solving the central problem of the distrust granted to the eyewitnesses of the falls, usually peasants. The reason why Biot was sent to L'Aigle by the Minister of Interior Chaptal was the establishment, in the early 19th century, of a centralized politico-administrative structure whose aim was to know, classify and organize France. While Chaptal was trying to bring every social and economic reality into a new social order, Biot brought back the L'Aigle meteorites, and thereby all meteorites, within the order of things.

Abstract The article argues that the classical (Aristotelian) understanding of meteorology underwent a profound change by the late 18th century. As a result of a series of empirical, theoretical, methodological and institutional changes in the European earth sciences, meteorology ceased to be understood as a natural philosophy of ‘meteors’ and was more closely associated with the laws of the gaseous atmosphere. This shift had a direct effect on how one understood the origins of ‘meteors’ and their relationship with the phenomena of the weather.

Abstract The French geologist, mineralogist and experimental petrologist, Gabriel-Auguste Daubrée (1814–1896) was a leading scientist of his generation, possibly best known today for his application of the experimental method to structural geology. During his tenure of the Chair of Geology at the Muséum d'Histoire Naturelle, Paris, to which he was appointed in 1861, he played a leading role in expanding its meteorite collection, developing a classification system for meteorites (1867), and using both petrological (1863–1868) and mechanical (1876–1879) experiments to gain a greater understanding of their chemical composition and how their physical attributes had arisen. This led him to believe in the ‘cosmic’ importance of peridotites and their hydrated equivalent, ‘serpentine’ (serpentinite), that the Earth might be unusual in having an oxygen-rich atmosphere and oceans, and that planetary bodies probably had a shell-like structure, increasing in density towards a nickeliferous iron core. (His ideas led to Eduard Seuss's SiAl–SiMa–NiFe model of the Earth.) Following the discovery, by the explorer Nils Nordenskiöld in 1870, of ‘native’ irons apparently associated with basalts at Disko Island, West Greenland, Daubrée took part in the subsequent investigation and the vigorous debate concerning their terrestrial or meteoritic origin.

Abstract The meteorite collection of the Natural History Museum of Vienna has the longest history of all comparable collections in the world. In the second half of the 18th century, soon after the foundation of the Imperial Natural History Cabinet in 1748, the Viennese curators began to collect meteorites. Owing to the efforts and scientific interest in meteorites of Carl von Schreibers (1775–1852) and his successors the Vienna collection became the largest and most extensive in the course of the 19th century. Simultaneously, the collection and its curators became one of the centres of the newly established science of meteoritics. The outbreak of the First World War and the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy brought all these research activities and the growth of the collections at the Viennese museum to an abrupt end. Modest activities between the world wars were interrupted by the onset of the Second World War, again leading to a complete halt. It was not before the late 1960s that the situation improved and a budget for purchases permitted the acquisition of select contemporary meteorite falls and finds. From then on, the meteorites in the collection had again been used intensively for research purposes. Up until the end of the year 2003, the meteorite collection had increased to a total of 2336 localities.

Abstract The meteorite collection at the Museum für Naturkunde (Museum of Natural History), Berlin, had its beginning in 1781 at the Royal Academy of Mining. Enlarged by donations from, among others, the Russian tsar Alexander I and Alexander von Humboldt, the collection in 1810 was transferred to the Mineralogical Museum of the newly founded University of Berlin. During the directorship of C.S. Weiss and later G. Rose, the private collections of M. Klaproth and E.F.F. Chaldni were acquired, and in 1864 the meteorite collection comprised fragments from 181 of the about 230 known meteorites. Based on studies of these meteorites, Rose proposed a classification scheme in 1863 that is still valid in principle today. He also introduced the terms chondrule, mesosiderite, pallasite, howardite, eucrite, chondrite and chassignite. In 1888 the collection was moved to the new Museum of Natural History and by 1906 the number of meteorites had increased to 500. In the following 60 years the meteorite collection did not receive much attention until G. Hoppe and his successor, H.-J. Bautsch again actively acquired new samples and studied meteorites scientifically. In 1993 Bautsch was followed by D. Stöffler and the study of meteorites became one of the main research interests of the Institute of Mineralogy. Stöffler also appointed a meteorite curator for the first time in the collection's history. As a result of two major acquisitions of Saharan meteorites, and continuous classification work, the number of separate meteorites increased to 2110 at the present time, making the collection both an exceptional historical heritage and a modern research tool.

Abstract The first meteorites were acquired by the Natural History Museum (NHM) in 1803. At this time when meteorites had just begun to be generally accepted as extraterrestrial by the scientific community. Over the last 200 years the collection has grown to be one of the largest and most diverse in the world. The collection is made up of approximately 1900 meteorites, including examples of all of the main types, from about 90 different countries. It is the largest collection of meteorite falls (meteorites observed to have fallen through the atmosphere, in contrast to those found later) in the world. The current strength of the collection and associated research can be attributed to the passion for meteorites shown by members of the Department of Mineralogy over the years, especially keepers Nevil Story-Maskelyne, Lazarus Fletcher and George Prior.

Abstract The French national meteorite collection of the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle (MNHN) represents one of the richest collections in the world in terms of its historical heritage and scientific value, particularly for samples of observed falls (512). In fact, early meteoritic research was dominated by French 18th and 19th century scientists such as René Just Haüy, Auguste Daubrée, Stanislas Meunier and Alfred Lacroix. They all contributed, along with Jean Orcel and Paul Pellas in the last 80 years, to form this exceptional collection. The fall at L'Aigle in 1803 led to the recognition of the nature of meteorites and the promotion of the science of meteoritics by Jean-Baptiste Biot. The first catalogue of the meteorite collection elaborated by Cordier in 1837 contained 43 specimens. The collection now contains about 3385 specimens representing 1343 distinct meteorites, to which can be added at least 3000 tektites and numerous specimens of impactites, casts, artificial samples and thin sections. France has the greatest number of meteorite falls by surface unit and by number of inhabitants, with 70 distinct meteorite falls recovered. The collection offers a diverse range of meteorites such as those containing rare presolar grains, the famous carbonaceous chondrite Orgueil (fall, 14 May 1864), the first martian meteorite, Chassigny (fall, 3 October 1815) and Ensisheim (fall, 7 November 1492), which is one of the two oldest observed and documented meteorites and the first meteorite to be registered in the catalogue. The MNHN collection represents a resource that is particularly appreciated by the scientific community.

Abstract The Vatican meteorite collection, one of the largest in the world, is based on the 19th century collection of Adrien-Charles, the Marquis de Mauroy, which was donated to the Vatican in three parts, by the Marquis in 1907 and 1912, and by his widow in 1935. Supplemented since then by further donations and trades, it contains more than 1000 pieces representing nearly 500 different meteorite falls. It is curated today at the Specola Vaticana, the Vatican Observatory, located in the Papal Summer Home at Castel Gandolfo, Italy. The collection has played a role in the long history of Papal support for astronomy, going back to the 1582 Gregorian Reform of the Calendar and continuing today with the Observatory's activities in connection with spacecraft missions to the planets.

Abstract The meteorite collection of the Russian Academy of Sciences is the largest and most unique collection of meteorites in Russia, and one of the famous meteorite collections in the world. The collection contains more than 1230 meteorites and approximately 25 000 individual samples. It also has samples of tektites and impactites, rocks from terrestrial impact craters. Practically all types of meteorites are represented in the collection, making it an excellent foundation for scientific investigations in Russia and worldwide. One hundred and ninety of the collection's meteorites came from territory that was under Russian jurisdiction at the time of accession. The meteorites are mostly represented by main masses and most of them are of historical significance. The Academy of Sciences’ meteorite collection played a significant role in the formation of the science of meteoritics. As well as a scientific resource, the Academy of Sciences’ meteorite collection is a unique social phenomenon.

Abstract Meteoritics at the Smithsonian Institution is intimately linked to the broader growth of the science, and traces its roots through influential individuals and meteorites from the late 18th century to the dawn of the 21st century. The Institution was founded with an endowment from English mineralogist James Smithson, who collected meteorites. Early work included study of Smithson’s meteorites by American mineralogist J. Lawrence Smith and acquisition of the iconic Tucson Ring meteorite. The collection was shaped by geochemist F.W. Clarke and G.P. Merrill, its first meteorite curator, who figured in debate over Meteor Crater and was a US pioneer in meteorite petrology. Upon Merrill’s death in 1929, E.P. Henderson would lead the Smithsonian’s efforts in meteoritics through a tumultuous period of more than 30 years. Collections growth was spurred by scientific collaborations with S.H. Perry and the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, and a sometimes contentious relationship with H.H. Nininger. Henderson played a key role in increasing meteorite research capabilities after the Second World War, placing the Smithsonian at the forefront of meteoritics. After 1969 involvement in the fall of the Allende and Murchison meteorites, lunar sample analyses, the recovery of the Old Woman meteorite and recovery of thousands of meteorites from Antarctica produced exponential growth of the collection. The collection today serves as the touchstone by which samples returned by spacecraft are interpreted.

Abstract The core meteorite collection of the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH), New York, including the massive Cape York and Willamette irons, dates from the three decades ending in 1905. Acquisition of new meteorites was steady into the 1970s, and accelerated in the latter 20th century. Institutional and philanthropic support, coupled with the focus, energy and vision of a succession of curators, have been central to building the collection, exhibiting meteorites, educating the public and participating at the cutting edge of meteoritical science. Efforts to describe and classify, characteristic of the pre-war period, evolved into detailed chemical investigations. Recent science seeks to find underlying processes unifying disparate meteorite groups in a coherent story of the early solar system and planet formation.

Abstract A Japanese field party (Japanese Antarctic Research Expedition 10 (JARE-10)), traversing in the Yamato Mountains of Antarctica in December 1969, recovered nine meteorite masses from ice-field surfaces. These meteorite masses were of diverse types, a fact that set in motion systematic searches for further meteorites. This was initiated by the JARE-15 field party in the austral summer of 1974, which recovered 663 meteorite masses from the ice fields. So many finds led to a hypothesis explaining the unusual concentration of meteorites on the Antarctic ice fields, and later parties searched systematically, according to this hypothesis. The JARE-20, JARE-29, JARE-39 and JARE-41 field parties collected 3692, 1949, 4148 and 3581 meteorite masses in repeated searches, respectively. A total of 15 741 masses is now held by the National Institute for Polar Research, and includes many rare classificatory types, lunar-sourced meteorites and meteorites widely accepted as of martian origin. The original find of nine meteorites triggered the extensive search programmes for meteorites by Japanese and American scientists both in the Yamato Mountain region and the Trans Antarctic Range region of Antarctica.

Abstract The first meteorites recovered from Western Australia were a number of irons, the earliest of which was found in 1884 east of the settlement of York. These were named the ‘Youndegin’ meteorites after a police outpost. Some of the larger specimens were taken to London to be sold as scrap metal, but were recognized as meteorites and eventually acquired by museums. The main mass of Youndegin (2626 kg) was recovered in 1954 and is retained in the collection of the Western Australian Museum. Despite a sparse population and relatively recent settlement by Europeans (1829), a number of factors have contributed to the excellent record of meteorite recovery in Western Australia. Primarily, large regions of arid land have allowed meteorites to be preserved for millennia, and these are generally easily distinguished from the country rocks. A less obvious, but significant, factor is that, in antiquity, Australian Aborigines do not appear to have utilized meteorites extensively. Finally, systematic collecting from the Nullarbor Region, has contributed to the large numbers of recoveries since 1969. The ‘Father’ of the State’s meteorite collection was the chemist and mineralogist Edward Sydney Simpson (1875–1939) who, from 1897 to 1939, recorded and analysed many of the meteorites that formed the foundation of the collection. The first Catalogue of Western Australian Meteorites was published by McCall & de Laeter in 1965 (Western Australian Museum, Special Publications, 3 ). Forty-eight meteorites were listed, 29 of which were irons (some of which have since been paired). Interest in meteorites increased in the 1960s, so that when the second supplement to the catalogue was published in 1972, 92 meteorites were listed with stones accounting for most of the additional recoveries. Today, the collection contains thousands of specimens of 248 distinct meteorites from Western Australia (218 stones, 26 irons and four stony-irons), and around 500 samples of potentially new meteorites (mostly chondrites from the Nullarbor) that remain to be examined. There are also specimens of 160 meteorites from other parts of Australia and the rest of the world. While numerically the collection is small compared to other major collections in the world, it contains a high percentage of main masses from Western Australia (around 85%), including many rarities, and has an aggregate weight in excess of 20 tonnes. The small proportion of falls to finds (4: 244) reflects the sparse population of the State. This may change significantly when a network of all-sky fireball cameras is established in the Nullarbor Region.

Abstract During the last 35 years, the number of meteorites available for study has increased by an order of magnitude (from around 2000 to nearly 30 000). The largest contribution has come from meteorites recovered from the Antarctic ice (more than 20 000); however, since the late 1980s a significant number (more than 8000–9000) have come from so called ‘hot’ deserts. The most notable arid areas of the world for meteorite recoveries are the wider Sahara (Algeria, Libya, Niger and other unspecified localities in NW Africa), Roosevelt County in New Mexico, USA, the Nullarbor Region of Australia, and, more recently, the deserts of the Arabian Peninsula in Saudi Arabia and Oman. Other areas in which meteorites have been found in numbers include the Namibian Desert in SW Africa and the Atacama Desert in Chile. This wealth of material has greatly extended our knowledge of early solar system materials by providing occasional samples of meteorites hitherto unknown to science, and allowing the construction of new groups of related meteorites. In addition, these accumulated collections have also allowed estimates to be made of the flux of meteorites to Earth with time, studies of their mass/type distribution on Earth and palaeoclimatic studies of the areas from which meteorites have been recovered. This paper documents the history of meteorite recovery from the ‘hot’ deserts of the world, and notes the effects that this abundance of material has had on the science of meteoritics.

Abstract Chondrules were first recognized in 1802 by Edward Howard as ‘rounded globules’, but their uniqueness to meteorites was not appreciated until 1863, when Henry Sorby produced excellent microscopic descriptions and Gustav Rose distinguished chondritic meteorites from achondrites. The Rose-Tschermak-Brezina classification was devised by 1885 and was used widely until George Prior, in 1916, replaced it with a simpler classification of chondrites. With this the distinction of ordinary chondrites from carbonaceous chondrites as applied today was formalized. This in turn was widely used until the Space Age of the last half of the 20th century when new classifications of meteorites were proposed based on the work of Keil and Fredriksson, Van Schmus and Wood. Gooding and Keil produced a classification with abundance values for types of chondrules in 1981, and Stöffler, Keil and Scott in 1991 added a classification of shock metamorphism for ordinary chondrites. The fall of the Allende meteorite in Mexico, a CV3 class chondrite, initiated prolific studies on calcium-aluminium-rich inclusions (CAIs) of refractory minerals, which may contain daughter isotopes of extinct parents from the presolar and earliest solar history. Presolar grains such as minute diamonds are recognized in the matrix of chondrules. Radiometric dating has shown that the first chondrules and CAIs formed at about the same time, c. 4566–4567 Ma and chondrules appear to have been forming over 3–5 Ma prior to accretion of meteoritic parent bodies. The origin of chondrules has been covered by a proliferation of hypotheses (some absurd, many well thought out), but in the last 20 years a general consensus seems to have been arrived at that chondrules formed in the outer regions of the solar disk very early on where shock processes raised temperature, in regions where the pressures and concentrations of solid material were higher than the canonical solar value. There was some melting early on but no crystallization from a magmatic melt within the accreted body, as in the case of howardite, eucrite and diogenite (HED) achondrites. Such transient heating models remain incompletely formulated and open to objection on observational astronomy or astrophysical grounds, and a recent alternative model linking chondrule formation with the early active Sun is also being developed. Recent research has suggested that, although ordinary chondrites are the commonest of meteorite classes falling to Earth, this may relate to the fact that we sample in this way only meteorites related to asteroids (Apollos, Amors) with near-Earth passing orbits, and carbonaceous chondrites may be the norm in the main asteroid zone between Mars and Jupiter. Attempts to identify ordinary chondrite parent bodies among asteroids by spectrographic and albedo-based methods have proved unrewarding and there is a need to develop the camera-based detection of fireball traces in the sky alongside collection of the fallen meteorite, only three such cases being up to quite recently recorded for chondrites. There may be as many as 134 asteroidal parent bodies of meteorites, and the H, L, LL and E classes of common chondrites may just represent a few different bodies among these. Sorby’s attribution of chondrules to a ‘fiery rain’ in 1877 and his attribution of them to outer regions of the solar system then occupied by the Sun’s disk appear remarkably percipient from one using only his microscope and quite unaware of the complexities of the solar system that are familiar to 21st century scientists.

Abstract The determination of the age of the Earth has been of scientific interest over hundreds of years, but it was not until radioactivity was discovered at the close of the 19th century that the possibility of a physical estimate became possible. The discovery of isotopes, a means of measuring isotope abundances by mass spectrometry, and the establishment of the U, Th-Pb geochronological system gave impetus to the search for the age of the Earth, but many unsuccessful attempts were made before Clair Patterson measured the isotopic composition of lead in iron meteorites in 1956, to produce an age of 4550 Ma, which is still generally accepted today as an excellent estimate of the age of formation, not only of the Earth, but of the solar system itself. A mere 4 years were then to elapse before the dawn of a new era, to decipher the timing of events in the early history of the solar system, was heralded by John Reynold’s exciting discovery that excess 129 Xe, a daughter product of the now extinct radionuclide 129 I, was present in a stony meteotite. This enabled a ‘formation interval’, between the nucleosynthesis of elements in stars and the formation of meteorite parent bodies, to be determined. The last 40 years of the 20th century have witnessed the investigation of a wide array of short-lived radioactive systems by virtue of the fact that their respective daughter products have been identified in meteoritical material by painstaking mass spectrometric-based research, thus allowing a chronology of early solar system events to be established. This formation interval is less than a few million years. Thus, meteorites were the key to determining both the age of formation of the Earth and of the solar system, together with the early chronology of the solar system. However, meteorites had more secrets to reveal. The ‘third age’ of meteorites is a measure of the time they have spent in space. The bombardment of meteoroids by cosmic rays produces spallation products, some of which are radioactive. Despite the slow production of these radionuclides and their associated daughter products, the long periods of unprotected time spent in space allowed the accumulation of these nuclides, so that when the fragments arrived on Earth, the radioactive systems could be analysed to provide the ‘exposure ages’ of the meteorites in space. Most stony meteorites have exposure ages up to 80 Ma, stony-irons 10–180 Ma and irons up to 2300 Ma, indicating the importance of mechanical strength in their survival in space. There is also evidence of clustering of exposure ages in some meteorite classes, which provide information on the frequency of collisional events and orbital trajectories. A clustering of exposure ages at approximately equal to 7 Ma for asteroidal-sourced meteorites indicate that collisions were prevalent at that time. When meteorites arrive on the Earth’s surface, the source of radionuclide production ceases, but they continue to decay with their characteristic half-lives until retrieved for radiochemical analysis. The activity of such radioactive systems in ‘finds’, compared with corresponding meteorite ‘falls’, give their terrestrial age on the Earth’s surface.

Abstract The matching of meteorite types held in our collections to asteroid classes, and even individual asteroids, may perhaps be said to commence with Olmsted’s meteor researches and Wienek’s pioneering photographic meteor image taken in 1885. Photographic fireball network surveys started up during the 1960s and three major national programmes were initiated during this period; each resulting in the recovery of one meteorite, Přibram, Lost City and Innisfree. Although photographic surveys had low meteorite recovery rates they, nevertheless, provided invaluable data on the population of meteoroids in near-Earth space. Dynamical considerations are paramount in connecting meteorites with cometary or asteroidal sources of supply. Ernst Öpik originally raised the question of locating the mechanism for delivering asteroid fragments to Earth within a timescale and flux that matches known meteorite falls. Several workers took up Öpik’s 1963 challenge, so that today the dynamical conditions and potential delivery mechanisms existing at the Kirkwood Gaps within the asteroid belt are better understood. Pioneering work by Brobovnikoff in 1929 initiated the field of spectrophotometric studies of asteroid surfaces. He attempted to correlate asteroid spectra with the reflective properties of meteorites. Advances in instrumentation led McCord in 1969 to initiate the modern era of asteroid spectrophotometric studies. This is a burgeoning field of contemporary research that has had some success in identifying possible meteorite-asteroid class linkages and even possible meteorite-asteroid matches, i.e. Vesta and howardite-eucrite-diogenite (HED) meteorites. However, space weathering of asteroid surfaces may mask the true asteroidal reflectance characteristics. In recent years spacecraft flyby missions have revealed more about the surface morphologies of asteroids: notably the S class asteroids (951) Gaspra, (243) Ida and the C class asteroid (253) Mathilde. Asteroids are no longer points of light or spectral curves but are bodies with distinct surface morphologies and geological histories. This was exemplified by the soft landing of the NEAR- Shoemaker spacecraft on (433) Eros in 2001 after a year-long orbital mission. However, it is still difficult to reconcile the meteorites held in our collections with the known distribution of asteroid classes and it may be that they are possibly incompatible sets.