[meteorite-list] A Ben Franklin Meteor Mystery

From: MexicoDoug_at_aol.com <MexicoDoug_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Tue Jan 17 14:37:01 2006
Message-ID: <2e4.b6ae34.30fea14a_at_aol.com>

Today (January 17, 2006) is Benjamin Franklin's 300th birthdate anniversary!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, BEN !!! Wish we could have chatted together over some
drinks!

Ben Franklin is credited with discovering that lightening is electricity,
and also for first discussing its "positive" and "negative" charge
characteristic. Ben had no formal scientific education but was a very formidable
scientist, not to mention mover and shaker of the global enlightenment.

Ben believed for a time that meteors were also caused by electricity,
however his contemporary, the great Astronomer Early American astronomer David
Rittenhouse, had other thoughts and most obviously discussed them at length with
Franklin. They were both founders and officers in the American Philosophical
Society - the Innovative and incomparable Academic Ivory Tower in the unique
American tradition of their time responsible for adding scientific thought
to the American Revolution and much beyond...Upon Franklin's death,
Rittenhouse became the second president of the Society until his own death five years
later.

Eleven years before Ben's death, On "All Hallow's Eve", October 31, 1779,
Rittenhouse had witnessed a 30-second bolide accompanied by sonic booms near
Philadelphia, where he was the head of the University of Pennsylvania's
Astronomy department...as the war of American Independence was still in Gear...

Rittenhouse described the event in a letter purportedly to Franklin:
"Leaving behind it a bright trail of light of a fine Silver Color, which
continued Visible about 20 minutes, altho' but half an hour after Sunset, and
then gradually disappeared, after changing from a Strait line to a very crooked
one. [Meteors are] bodies altogether foreign to this Earth, but meeting with
it, in its Annual Orbit, are attracted by it, and on entering our Atmosphere
take fire and are exploded, something in the manner Steel filings are, on
passing thro' the flame of a Candle. [It made a] glorious appearance at the
distance of a few miles, yet from its prodigious Magnitude it must have been
quite terrible. [Had the] Cataract fallen on the plain where on Philadelphia
stands, half its inhabitants would probably been [sic] drowned."

In the absence of the word "bolide", a cataract most certainly is the best
word choice available to describe the phenomenon. It was brighter than the
Sun, "a half hour after Sunset".

Now, the third President of the American Philosophical Society which
Franklin founded in 1743, the Sage of Monticello, none other than Thomas Jefferson,
perhaps the most accomplished, and sage scientific politician genius
combination of all time wrote, with unadulterated American pride, a defense to stuffy
European scientific criticisms of Americans as somehow being racially
inferior due to their environment/land's influence over them, as arguments were
made for European supremacy in the sciences. Jefferson, Rittenhouse and
Franklin were all contemporaries whom would have shared ideas and not scoffed at
each others theories and observations.

>From "Notes on Virginia" Tom wrote in 1782, among other well presented
arguments in this article:
"In physics we have produced a Franklin, than whom no one of the present age
has made more important discoveries, nor has enriched philosophy with more,
or more ingenious solutions of the phenomena of nature. We have supposed Mr.
Rittenhouse second to no astronomer living; that in genius he must be the
first, because he is self-taught. As an artist he has exhibited as great a proof
of mechanical genius as the world has ever produced. He has not indeed made
a world; but he has by imitation approached nearer its Maker than any man who
has lived from the creation to this day."

(Rittenhouse made an awesome coated optic telescope)...

No doubt, this description also was related to Benjamin Silliman, the
whippersnapper Yale Chemist and Geologist who at 28 years old analyzed the Weston
Connecticut fall. Silliman (b. 1779, the year of Rittenhouse's account) was
the new generation of independent thinkers released by the American Founding
fathers, soon to eclipse the scientific activity of their parents' generation
as the older gents reminisced of the golden days of the Revolution and
enlightenment. By 1818, Silliman went on to found a competitive publication, the
"American Journal of Science and Arts" (a.k.a., Silliman's Journal), which has
itself eclipsed the Proceedings of the American Philosophical Journal as the
longest continuously published scientific journal in America. It is now
call the American Journal of Science and a nice place to publish Earth Science
papers.

So, the man who flew the kite in the electrical storm to discover
electricity in lightening, his mutually respected colleague's assessment over tea of
meteors, and the Author of American Independence were three cronies most
probably at a genius level and lock stepped in findings and beliefs as they
discovered the word.

What would Jefferson believe as late as 1808 during political rallies as the
Weston meteorite information was discussed, to make the quip unsupported
though attributed to him about "Sooner believing that the Yankee's lied, than
that the rocks fell from the sky." It is clear to me that the usurping new
generation of young Yankee's on the political and scientific scene, in the
opinion of the stately old Virginian had nothing to do with his beliefs regarding
meteorites, but rather his beliefs relating to lying Yankees, who did not
support his presidential campaign in 1804 and were not supporting his Secretary
of State's in 1808, James Madison. The 1808 election was scandalous, and a
preview of the American War Between the States over 50 years later. The
Yankees didn't support Jefferson in 1804, and in 1807 - 1808, the incumbent
self-decided lame duck Jefferson campaigned for Madison under fire by the
opposition to Embargo Act of 1807 implemented by Jefferson, which halted trade with
Europe and punished New England traders and favored France over Britain.

And not to mention the migration of the scientific establishment from
neutral grounded keystone Philadelphia where Jefferson had supported the seat of
the American Philosophical Society to New England by the New England's sons
while the University of Virginia Jefferson founded, lost prominence to Yale, and
 Harvard. The American Journal of Science and Arts founded at Yale in New
Haven Connecticut, by the whippersnapper Silliman, within ten years emphasized
the situation.

We know what Franklin's and Jefferson's iconic Carl Sagan of the time
believed long before the fall of L'Aigle (April, 1803), as Rittenhouse was dead by
1790. But the fact that the insolent green behind the ears Yankees' would
scoop the Philosophical Society, well hell no, in Politics they won't cause
they're just a lying bunch! After all, I doubled the size of the United States
and wrote the Declaration of Independence, right? Now its time to retire and
pursue my scientific pursuits at the country's best University - Mine in
Virginia. So if they get to do the science, let's have a bunch of fun at the
expense of those damn prosperous Yankee Traders, they're gonna take over the
country we built...

The real mystery is whether Franklin gave in to Rittenhouse and relinquished
his belief that meteors were another form of electricity ... I'd say 98%
YES, as Franklin was no dummy and this was coming from Rittenhouse, also
Jefferson's hero...

Saludos, Doug
Received on Tue 17 Jan 2006 02:36:42 PM PST