A Professor, A President, and A Meteor: The Birth of American Science

In the Early Morning Hours of December 14, 1807, in Weston, Connecticut, the Sky Fell.

A fireball flash illuminated the snowy fields and darkened roads of the small town. Its rumbling boom shook window panes and spooked cows. Eyewitness reports of the curious orb blazing across the sky later poured in from up and down the Hudson River Valley. In the following days, Weston's farmers neglected their chores and set out into their fields with wheelbarrows. They brought back strange black-crusted stones---pieces of the heavenly body that had tumbled and slammed into the frozen earth.

Did it come from the moon? Was it an omen for good or for ill? What mysteries were locked inside the cosmic rocks? Speculation ran rampant.

This is the amazing true story of a professor, Benjamin Silliman, whose study of the Weston Fall would galvanize scientific endeavor in post-colonial America; a president, Thomas Jefferson, whose partisanship would collide with the professor and, perhaps for the first time, politicize American science; and the meteor that roared through a sleepy New England town.

Based on a wealth of original source documents and interviews with current experts in history, astronomy, and geology, journalist Cathryn J. Prince recounts this remarkable, little-known tale. In fascinating historical detail, Prince's narrative captures the primitive state of American science at the time; the professor's careful analysis of the meteor samples; and the publication of his conclusions, which contradicted both popular superstitions and the erroneous opinions of fellow scientists. We learn of Silliman's struggles to build a chemistry department at Yale with rudimentary material; new insights into geology that resulted from his analysis of the meteor; and his report to the prestigious French Academy, which raised the prestige of American science. Prince also discusses the political turbulence of the time, which Silliman could not escape, and how the meteor event was used to drive a wedge between New England and Jefferson.

Cathryn J. Prince is the author of Burn the Town and Sack the Banks: Confederates Attack Vermont! and Shot from the sky: American POWs in Switzerland. She is an adjunct professor of journalism at Quinnipiac University, a reporter for Wilton Patch, and a freelance reporter for the Christian Science Monitor and Weston Magazine.