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Benjamin Silliman’s Meteoric Rise to Fame
November/December 2007
by Judith Ann Schiff

Judith Ann Schiff is chief research archivist at the Yale University Library.

Shortly after December 14, 1807, a young Yale scientist named Benjamin Silliman ’96 (1779–1864) was astonished to read in the Connecticut Herald about a “Remarkable Phenomenon” that had taken place on that day. Just 32 miles west of New Haven, at dawn, “a meteor or fire ball, passing from a northern point, disploded over the western part of this state, with a tremendous report. At the same time several pieces of stony substance, fell to the earth in Fairfield County.”

It was believed to be the first time that anyone in the United States had recovered meteor fragments. “Fortunately,” the Herald declared, “the facts respecting this wonderful phenomenon, are capable of being ascertained and verified with precision, and an investigation will, we understand, be immediately commenced for the purpose.”

Silliman knew he was the man for the job. In his unpublished reminiscences, Silliman wrote that he “broke off every other engagement, and immediately resorted to the scene of this remarkable event.” He had studied meteorites in Europe, but he “did not dream of being favored by an event of this kind in my own vicinity, and occurring on a scale truly magnificent.”

This “wonderful” natural phenomenon would launch Silliman—now widely regarded as the father of science education in this country—on his ascent to national fame. In time, it would also help establish Yale as a center for scientific investigation.

In the late fall of 1807, however, Silliman was teaching only his second full course of lectures on chemistry. It was a new subject at Yale, and it was new to Silliman as well, who had originally trained in law. To prepare for it, he had studied in Philadelphia, England, and Edinburgh. At the time, “chemistry" included natural history and geology, so he studied those disciplines as well; when he returned to Yale, he incorporated mineralogy and geology into his teaching with great success.

Several days after the meteor hit, Silliman and his friend and fellow professor James L. Kingsley '99, an expert on ancient languages and ecclesiastical history, visited the small town of Weston, Connecticut, and the surrounding area to talk to eyewitnesses and collect samples. According to Nathan Wheeler, a local judge, the fireball vanished over the horizon and then exploded, after which he heard a rumble that sounded like “a cannon ball rolling across the floor.” Stones of varying weights had been scattered over the countryside. One had gouged a hole about five feet across and “almost deep enough for a grave.”

Silliman and Kingsley published an account of their findings, along with Silliman’s chemical analysis of the stone samples they collected, in the Transactions of the Philosophical Society of Philadelphia in 1808. The report was republished in the memoirs of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, and—the crowning glory—read aloud in both the Philosophical Society of London and the Academy of Sciences of Paris. “It was admitted to be one of the most extensive and best attested occurrences of the kind that has happened, and of which a record has been preserved,” Silliman wrote proudly.

It was also controversial. At the time, many thought that meteors were disgorged by volcanoes. But Silliman concluded that “these bodies did not originate from this earth.” Perhaps, he speculated, they came from outer space.

A charming but probably apocryphal tradition holds that Thomas Jefferson, upon learning of  Silliman's conclusion, declared, “I would more easily believe that two Yankee professors would lie than that stones would fall from heaven.” However, in an 1826 account, early-nineteenth-century scientist Samuel L. Mitchill said that Jefferson exclaimed simply: “It is all a lie!” We do know that Jefferson was aware of Silliman’s meteor because he wrote about “these stones” in February 1808: “We certainly are not to deny whatever we cannot account for.”

Within a few years, the largest stone, at 36.5 pounds, was acquired by Colonel George Gibbs, a wealthy friend of Silliman’s whom he described as “a zealous promoter of physical science, especially of mineralogy and geology." Gibbs had amassed, through the purchase of great European collections and his own collecting, the most extensive and valuable assortment of minerals ever seen in the United States, reputed to include samples of more than 10,000 minerals.

In 1811, thanks to Silliman, Gibbs loaned his entire collection to Yale. It was displayed on the second floor of Connecticut Hall from 1812 to 1820, and later in the Philosophical Building, also called the Cabinet. For many years, this spectacular new mineral gallery served as the center for Silliman’s more specialized courses.

Silliman would go on to teach at both college and graduate levels for a total of nearly 40 years. In 1818, he founded the American Journal of Science, now the oldest U.S. scientific journal in continuous publication. In the view of his 1947 biographers, John Fulton and Elizabeth Thomson, Silliman “influenced the intellectual life of the country as did few others in the nineteenth century.”

In 1825, Yale purchased the Gibbs collection.  Today the Peabody Museum houses Yale’s meteorites, the oldest collection of its kind in this country. Two centuries after it fell to earth, the Weston meteorite remains a star attraction.  

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