The Wold Cottage Meteorite
Fell on 13 December 1795
Among the treasures on the first floor balcony sits a dark, pitted lump of rock that changed how people understood the sky. On a December afternoon in 1795 a farm labourer named John Shipley was working in a field near Wold Cottage in Yorkshire when a stone the size of a football hurtled out of the clouds and buried itself in the ground a few metres from him. Fragments of soil and chalk sprayed into the air, and witnesses across the East Riding reported hearing explosions. It was, at the time, the largest meteorite ever seen to fall in Britain.
Look at the surface. The black crust is fusion crust, a thin glassy skin formed when the outside of the stone melted during its passage through the atmosphere. Where the crust is broken you can see the pale grey interior, speckled with tiny metal flakes and with the round grains called chondrules that formed in the cloud of dust from which the Solar System condensed. The rock is about four and a half billion years old, older than any rock on Earth.
The landowner Edward Topham, a magistrate and newspaper editor, collected sworn statements from the witnesses and put the stone on show in London, charging a shilling a view. The chemist Edward Howard analysed a piece in 1802 and showed it matched other supposed sky stones from Italy and India, which persuaded scientists that meteorites really did fall from space, an idea that had been dismissed as peasant superstition. Topham built a monument in the field, which still stands, and the stone came to the museum in the nineteenth century.
Did You Know? For a few weeks in 1796 Londoners could pay a shilling to see the stone in Piccadilly, the first meteorite ever exhibited to the public.
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