[meteorite-list] More damage (than the Pellisons)... Help!

From: Michael Gilmer <michael_w_gilmer_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Thu, 26 Feb 2009 17:33:46 -0800 (PST)
Message-ID: <346225.74411.qm_at_web58408.mail.re3.yahoo.com>

Hi List and Martin!

Well said! I bow to you sir! Once again, your mastery of facts
and history sets the record straight.

The next thing you know, they will be blaming war and starvation
on meteorite collectors. ;)

Thank you Martin for the lucid and enlightening rebuttal of that
article's nonsense.

Regards and clear skies,

MikeG


.........................................................
Michael Gilmer (Louisiana, USA)
Member of the Meteoritical Society.
Member of the Bayou Region Stargazers Network.
Websites - http://www.galactic-stone.com and http://www.glassthrower.com
..........................................................


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Message: 5
Date: Thu, 26 Feb 2009 21:06:54 +0100
From: "Martin Altmann" <altmann at meteorite-martin.de>
Subject: Re: [meteorite-list] More damage (than the Pellisons)...
    Help!
To: <meteorite-list at meteoritecentral.com>
Message-ID: <003901c9984d$c60ec410$177f2a59 at name86d88d87e2>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"

Hi Mike and list,

the Pellisons, I doubt that they have any remarkable effect, they are
nobodies and they are private persons.

Endless more harmful are articles like these, where in the perception of the
readers, people of an "official" status are spreading their false pretences.
Here for example they read: Caroline Smith, curator of the meteorite
collection of London's Natural History Museum,
and of course they suppose, that the - sorry - the rubbish, she's telling
has to be true, and furthermore it was an article from holy BBC.

They can't know, that Smith is relatively new in her job, so that she
probably hasn't yet the clue, that ALL of her antecessors purchased the main
load of the meteorites in her museum from meteorite dealers and from private
collectors and persons - and that they had to pay much, much, much higher
prices than what meteorites do cost today;
and that she is not able to get her stats right and to use, like everyone
else the Meteoritical Bulletins or the Bulletin Database.

http://kuerzer.de/lousyPropaganda

Read

"But Ms Smith is worried that the craze for meteorite collecting is having a
damaging effect on scientific research.

'The commercial value of meteorites has now been realized," she says. "It
has affected our work because we are now competing against private
collectors to obtain material for our research.'"

Excuse me, 80 or 90% of the meteorites in the London Nat.Hist. stem from
private persons, dealers, collectors.

In 1810, curator Koenig purchased the mineral collection of Charles Greville
for more than 1 million USD (today's money),
Parish donated them a 3.5 ton-Campo,
Curator Maskelyne bought like a fool to rival Vienna, of course from dealers
and privateers too, more than 200 locales,
and most of these specimen he bought from the mineral (and meteorite) dealer
August Krantz (1809-1872, a famous Pultusk-looter).
Next curator Fletcher was known to be a tough negotiator in buying
meteorites - the seller had to tell the price, not he.
And famous is the anecdote, when Fletcher bribed the niece of the owner of
Crumlin in buying her an organon, for her to convince her uncle to sell that
meteorite. (Well, from the last Crumlin we sold to an Irish museum, we
hardly could afford a good keyboard).
Well and then later curator Hey had a simple maxim about meteorites: Get it,
keep it. And in 1959 he bought a part of the collection from the well-known
meteorite dealer Harvey Nininger. Some say it was half of the collection,
some sources tell a third, some a fifth. (Maybe the discrepancies are
because some counted the different locales, some the number of specimens,
and some the weight). And he paid more than 1 million of today's USD......

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Received on Thu 26 Feb 2009 08:33:46 PM PST