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2.6 gram slice.   H5

TKW 6.4 kg. Observed fall 24 July 1790, Aquitaine, France.

 

Darryl writes:

From the on-line only Christie's Auction Catalog for February 7 - 14, 2018:

Lot 42 / 1790 Barbotan Meteorite Fall – Fake News

Gers, France
H5

Professor Baudin, a physicist in Pau, France witnessed one of the most important celestial events of the late 18th century: "The 24th of July, 1790 had been a very warm day; in the evening the air was calm and serene, and the sky completely cloudless. The moon seemed very bright, and I was walking at about half past ten o'clock with M. de Carris Barbotan in the court of the Mormes Castle, when suddenly we saw a bright white light which darkened the moonlight. As we looked upwards, we saw almost a sphere of fire in our zenith, larger than the moon, with a 5-6 meter longer tail, which became narrower from the ball. The ball and tail were dull-white, the tip dark, almost blood-red. The meteor drew with great speed from south to north. Two seconds after we had seen it, it was divided into several pieces of considerable size, which we saw dropping in various directions. About five minutes afterwards, a violent thunder hit, or rather an explosion, as if several large artillery shells had gone off; the air pressure was so strong that the windows were shaking in their frames. We went into the garden. We then heard a dull roar, which seemed to extend along the chain of the 15 distant Pyrenees. At the same time a very strong sulfur smell spread, and soon a fresh wind rose. It was soon confirmed a lot of stones had fallen. A few stones fell beside houses, in the courtyards and gardens."(Abridged from Annals of Physics, vol. 13).

When the editor of the Journal of Science in Montpellier published a similar report, a colleague responded that this was absurd and demanded official testimony. When the mayor provided a notarized document insisting that 300 persons witnessed this event, the aforementioned editor then wrote, "How sad, is it not, to see a whole municipality attempt to certify the truth of folk tales…a false fact, a physically impossible phenomenon."

When Professor Baudin’s description was republished in La Decade the editors appended a footnote which stated, in part, "The author of the memoir appears persuaded that a fall of stones occurred; he would have been more philosophical to doubt the fact. In spite of so many pretended examples of showers of stones, we do not place any faith in them." While most of the academic world believed in the late 18th Century believed that the Barbotan meteorite shower was a collective delusion, Professor Baudin, Madame de Carris Barbotan and approximately 300 others profoundly knew otherwise. It would take a more than a decade before French scientists acknowledged that rocks sometimes fall out of the sky.

Christie's would like to thank Dr. Alan E. Rubin at the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics, University of California, Los Angeles for his assistance in preparing this catalogue note.