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  Iron, IID

TKW 107 kg. Fall not observed. Found 1400, Czech Republic.




       

Steve writes:

This post about the Elbogen meteorite is admittedly LONG (even for me!). Understandably, I suspect not everyone will want to take the time to read the whole thing. But for those that do, I hope you enjoy the storied history of this historically significant meteorite – one that in my humble opinion has few equals.

Elbogen – one of only a small number of type IID iron meteorites to date – is also called the "Loket Iron" because it fell in the village of Loket, in the Karlovy Vary region of today’s Czech Republic (Elbogen is German for Loket). If the legends are true, then Elbogen’s 1400 A.D. fall is likely the earliest observed Western one with extant material (the oldest of 27 recognized meteorites from the Czech Republic, it significantly predates even 1492’s Ensisheim meteorite). Unfortunately, many of the historical documents describing Elbogen were lost as a consequence of wars over the intervening centuries, and the remaining ones only associate the meteorite with a particular local burgrave, bounding its fall to somewhere between 1350 and 1433 A.D. As a result, the later Ensisheim meteorite has been given the honor of being the first precisely recorded Western fall.

Originally weighing about 107 kilograms (240 pounds), the Elbogen meteorite has a medium octahedrite nickel-iron structure, as seen in Photo 1 of a 14.7 gram, 36 x 27 x 1.5 mm part-slice. The meteorite’s original dimensions were approximately 50 × 30 × 20 cm (1.6 × 1.0 × 0.7 feet). Its mass was rounded and wedge-shaped, to some resembling a horse’s head (which added to an interesting mythology that developed around the meteorite during the Middle Ages – more on that in a bit). Elbogen is well studied, with pieces sent to museums and research institutions all around the world. Additionally, a very limited amount of the meteorite has been removed from the main mass and made available to collectors.

Elbogen is so named because it fell near the castle of the burgrave of Elbogen in Bohemia. Burgraves were rulers of castles who also served as mayors and taxmen, and several references suggest that at the time Elbogen purportedly fell, Loket’s burgrave was Puta von Illburk (also referred to historically as Půta of Illburk or Puta de Ilburk). Illburk was said to have died the same day the meteorite fell, with one legend describing him as being so cruel to the local townspeople that he was cursed by an old woman, subsequently struck by lightning, and as a result transformed into this hard piece of iron (the burgrave’s family crest was a horse’s head, so the meteorite’s shape appeared to support that belief).

Such stories caused the locals to attribute mystical powers to the "Bewitched Burgrave", as the meteorite was called at the time. Given its fiery plunge from the skies, some feared that even if thrown into the deepest well, it would fly back to the castle anyway and wreak havoc amongst the former burgrave’s constituents. Others were afraid it would change weight over time and when light enough would fly away as violently as it had arrived. For these reasons, Elbogen was said to have been affixed with chains deep within the dungeon of the Loket Castle.

During the Thirty Years' War of 1618 through 1648, the imperial general Johann von Werth decided to test these beliefs by having Elbogen thrown into the deepest well of the castle. By the end of 1670, the well’s water was drawn off and the meteorite, still there, was subsequently pulled out and brought into the castle. It remained there until the Siege of Prague in 1742, when the invading French army – as part of an attempt to subjugate the locals – threw the "Bewitched Burgrave" back into the 130 foot deep well again, where after a few years it was forgotten.

Elbogen remained in the well until sometime in 1776, when the well ran dry and the meteorite was rediscovered. Supposedly it was then taken to a local forge to be repurposed. Not surprisingly, the pure metal of the meteorite would not melt at the scant 950 ᴼC temperatures of the primitive blast furnaces of the time, and the old stories about Elbogen’s mystical properties were rekindled. Back in 2013, I was able to acquire two small pieces of Elbogen from Russ Kempton of New England Meteoritical Services: one from the heated and pounded edge where the original crystallization structure was lost, and another from an unaffected part of the meteorite’s interior. I mounted these in the small 4" by 3" Riker mount shown in Photo 2, where one can compare the altered and original features (the burgrave’s family crest and a graphic of Loket can be seen on the matte as well).

In the early 1800s, when the meteorite was first cut and scientifically studied, it was noted that the whole surface was covered with dark gray oxides of iron, dull and without any signs of the original fusion crust – not surprising given the years it spent surrounded by water in the well, exposed to the elements after the well ran dry, and the purported attempt by the blacksmith to melt it. In 1808, Count Alois von Beckh Widmanstätten, at the time the director of the Imperial Porcelain works in Vienna, heated a slice of Elbogen and observed his now famous Widmanstätten lines – an observation he only orally mentioned to colleagues, as Widmanstätten himself didn’t recognize Elbogen as even being a meteorite. Widmanstätten also noted the distortion of Elbogen’s crystalline pattern at areas near the edge of the meteorite’s slice where the blacksmith’s unsuccessful attempt in 1776 to forge Elbogen had altered the meteorite’s structure.

Interestingly, the first use of the term "Widmanstätten figure" was in a 1813 scientific journal article based on an 1812 note by Carl Franz Anton Ritter von Schreibers. Then in 1820, von Schreibers self-published a small number of copies of a book describing his personal collection of meteorites (it’s thought to be the first geology-related book to include lithographs); each copy included a "nature print" made by inking Widmanstätten’s flame-treated slice and pressing it onto a piece of paper bound within it (Photo 3 shows that "print" from our copy of one of von Schreibers’ books). Consequently, von Schreibers is indirectly responsible for falsely crediting Widmanstätten with the discovery of the "Widmanstätten figure", as it was actually English geologist William Guglielmo Thomson who in 1804 used today’s more traditional acid etch technique to observe the crystalline structure of the Krasnojarsk pallasite – an observation made four years earlier than Widmanstätten’s.

[As an aside, to honor Schreibers’ contributions to the study of meteorites over the years, mineralogist and physicist Wilhelm Karl Ritter von Haidinger later gave the name schreibersite to the iron-nickel phosphide mineral found in many meteorites – including Elbogen – but only terrestrially found on Greenland’s Disko Island and in Illinois (the latter possibly formed there from lightning strikes, as described in a 1986 study). In fact, researchers reported in 2007 that schreibersite and other phosphorus-bearing minerals in meteorites may have been the source for all of Earth’s phosphorus. Photo 4 shows a 3.02 gram, 20.6 x 5.7 x 4 mm part-slice from an oxidized area that contains some schreibersite and other meteoritic minerals and alloys.]

In 1811, three years after Widmanstätten’s analysis, Mr. K. A. Neumann, a professor of chemistry at the technical institute in Prague (and the discoverer of the shock-induced parallel lines in iron meteorites that bear his name), had a small piece of Elbogen sent to him for chemical analysis. From that analysis, Neumann first recognized Elbogen as being a piece of a meteorite (a finding later confirmed by physicist Dr. Ernst Florens Freidrich Chladni in 1819). The main mass was subsequently divided into two uneven parts. The larger, weighing about 79 kilograms (170 pounds), was taken to the Royal and Imperial Natural History Museum in Vienna. The smaller "muzzle of the horse’s head" weighed about 14 kilograms (31 pounds) and is still located at the city hall in Loket.

Elbogen was eventually classified as a member of the IID chemical group of iron meteorites, a relatively uncommon group with only 26 known examples to date. Early analyses showed around 2.5% nickel in 1810 to as much as 8.5% nickel in 1834, sufficient to remove any doubt as to its meteoritic origin. Today, however, we know Elbogen’s chemical composition to be 10.25% Ni, 0.64% Co, 0.3% P, 74.5 ppm Ga, 87 ppm Ge, and 14 ppm Ir (germanium and gallium are the elements that make this iron group so unusual, and their presence suggests likely formation in the core of a larger asteroid).

Unfortunately, many pertinent documents regarding Elbogen have been destroyed by the aforementioned wars, leaving mostly legends or facts passed down verbally to describe the meteorite’s storied history. As a consequence, in 2017 the Meteoritical Bulletin changed Elbogen’s status from "fall" to "find" (relevant portions are shown in Photo 5). Emmanuel Jacquet’s reasoning was that despite the many legends, neither Buchwald nor a note by Neumann in 1812 provided either a definitive date or any specific observations of its fall. Based on other historical references, Jacquet narrows a find date to sometime in the last half of the 14th century or first third of the 15th century to coincide with reign of the castle’s burgrave during that period (though the MetBul describes the burgrave as Kopetzky – per Nuemann – as opposed to the more commonly held Puta von Illburk).

Prior to 2019, Elbogen was a very hard meteorite to acquire. But at the Tucson Fossil and Mineral Show that year, I was able to obtain the pieces shown in Photos 1 and 4 from Moritz Karl (of Mo’s meteorites). He and his father had negotiated a slice of Elbogen from the Austrian Natural History Museum’s main mass and at the same time were allowed to make a limited number of additional "nature prints" from Widmanstätten’s original slice. I was lucky to be able to acquire one of these modern prints (Photo 6). Obviously a much better version than Photo 3’s, and less fragile as well, it’s now framed behind museum glass and hangs on the wall in my study along with other treasured space artifacts (Photo 7 is an animated GIF where I tried to align the original and modern prints for comparisons – even after some exposure and color adjustments, the overlay isn’t perfect, but it’s nonetheless fun to directly compare two prints made two centuries apart!).

So that summarizes the storied history of Elbogen: one of the first Western witnessed falls, a meteorite that was studied by many of the early scientists from the field of meteoritics, and one with a mythos spanning several centuries and two European wars. If you’ve managed to read through all of this, I hope you found its story as fascinating as I have, and maybe even picked up an interesting fact or two about early meteoritics along the way.