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1.54 grams, 15 x 10 x 7 mm.   L6

TKW 3.5 kg (single stone). Observed fall 13 September 1768, Lucé Sarthe, Maine, France.


Steve writes:

For a short time I was interested in collecting historic meteorites that made significant contributions to the early science of meteoritics. Less than a dozen made up my rather narrowly defined list – a list that along with such traditional historics as Ensisheim, L’Aigle, Sienna, and Wold Cottage also included a few lesser known ones like Elbogen (the 1400 A.D. iron on which Widmanstatten later observed crystalline patterns). But my hardest to find and final acquisition from that list was an L6 ordinary chondrite that fell on Lucé Sarthe in Maine, France at around 4:30 PM on Tuesday September 13, 1768.

Through a clear afternoon sky, the 3.5 kg Lucé meteorite reportedly arrived with thunderclaps and a loud hissing noise before embedding itself into the French soil. The single stone was quickly collected and subsequently sectioned, with one of the pieces acquired by the Abbé Charles Bacheley, an amateur mineralogist and member of the French Academy of Sciences. Bacheley later sent it to the Royal Academy of Science in Paris where three chemists – Fougeroux de Bonderoy, Cadet de Gassicourt, and Antoine Lavoisier¹ – were appointed to study the stone.

While the chemists did not recognize Lucé as an actual thunderstone, their bulk chemical analysis – the first of its kind on a meteorite – described it as a pyrite-rich sandstone comprised of three principal ingredients: 55.5% vitrifiable earth (silicates), 36% iron, and 8.5% sulfur. The chemists also wrote that the stone “had a thin black crust partially covering an interior of gray cindery material scattered with an infinite number of shiny metallic grains of pale yellowish color.” They described the fusion crust as being caused by a lightning strike that blew away a thin covering of dirt and melted the surface of the stone but that was too transitory to affect the interior of the rock – the first explanation describing the basic mechanism behind how the exterior and interior of a meteorite can be of the same material, yet wildly different in texture (though of course atmospheric heating is now known to be the cause, and not lightning).

The report of their work was eventually published in 1772. Edward Charles Howard – an early British meteoriticist who discovered that stone and iron meteorites both contained nickel, and who later recognized chondrules in meteorites² – was quite critical of it. Since the chemists knew of at least two similar stones with fusion crust³, Howard wrote that the academicians must think " . . . that the lightning had fallen by preference on pyritical matter". Howard also noted that "It was unfortunately made on an aggregate portion of the stone, and not of each distinct substance, irregularly disseminated through it. The proportions obtained were, consequently, as accidental as the arrangement of every substance in the mass⁴."

Despite this criticism, it’s hard to dispute the significance of Lucé being the first chemically analyzed meteorite using essentially modern methods. And its study led to the earliest rudimentary explanation of fusion crust formation – all more than three decades before the scientific community would finally accept the fact that meteorites did indeed come from space⁵. Consequently Lucé made my historics list because many feel it marked the beginning of the formal science of meteoritics. The piece shown in these photos is only 1.54 grams; I apologize for the quality of the images, but the fragment’s mere 15 x 10 x 7 mm size made it difficult for my rather basic photographic equipment to capture it with appropriate resolution.



¹ Lavoisier was a French scientist who made contributions in a number of different areas, including formally describing the notion of conservation of mass in 1789. But unfortunately he was beheaded as a traitor five years later largely because of his attempts to reform the tax system in order to benefit the lower classes.

² Previously Jacques Louis Compte de Bournon, one of the foremost mineralogists of the time, defined four kinds of material in meteorites: "martial pyrites", iron, earthy cement, and “curious globules” that Howard later recognized as chondrules.

³ The two stones Howard referred to are thought to be one that fell near Coutances and resembled Lucé (some believe it might have been the 1750 Nicorps meteorite) and Aire-sur-la-Lys that fell in Nord-Pas-de-Calais a year after Lucé but that was arguably known to the chemists before their 1772 publication three years after its fall. Unfortunately neither of those meteorites are known to exist today.

⁴ This criticism reminds me of a related caution noted by MexicoDoug in a comment he made in my prior Chico submission:

They, too, illustrate the danger of gross generalizations on composition based on cherry-picking certain parts or conducting selective analyses on limited portions of material.

⁵ It was barely two centuries ago that the scientific community finally accepted meteorites as coming from space. Before that their origins were attributed to superstition or pseudo-science. Some believed meteorites were fiery signs from the gods or had supernatural roots. As examples, King Maximilian I thought Ensisheim’s fall was a good omen regarding his strategic war plans, while the villagers of Loket in the Karlovy Vary region of what is now the Czech Republic thought Elbogen was the reincarnation of their malevolent burgrave when it fell on the day of his death (they quickly chained it in the dungeon of their local church to preclude its further havoc). Still others thought meteorites were ejected from nearby volcanoes, formed by condensation of volcanic ash, or created in the sky by lightening coalescing atmospheric dust into stone.