Out of The Blue

You're listening to an Air Wave Media Podcast. A world on fire, nations collapsing, ideologies clashing, and ordinary men and women caught in the storm. Hi, I'm Ray Harris Jr. of the History of World War II podcast, and we'll cover the battles that shaped the war from the deserts of North Africa to the frozen forests of the Ardennes, because history isn't just names and dates, it's people, choices, and consequences at World War II Podcast.net. Here is your reminder, specifically for you, to send your best fun fact to tell me something constant at gmail.com for our upcoming 200th episode. Record yourself telling me a bit of cool trivia that I should know, but probably don't, and attach it as any kind of audio file you want. Have a short, if possible, don't overthink it, just throw me something neat that will all be excited to learn. Got it? That's tell me something constant at gmail.com. Thanks. I've been thinking lately about this phrase. I think it might be the most annoying phrase in the entire world. It's in the running, at least. You see it sometimes, macromade on pillows or painted on the sides of buildings, or written in cursive on flimsy wall art, and you hear it, well, everywhere. It's common parlance. I'm sure I've said it myself innumerable times. It goes like this. Anything is possible. Think about it. Isn't that insufferable? For two main reasons, I think, beyond the simple fact of how well worn it is. The first thing that irks me is that this chestnut in its typical deployment is meant to be inspirational, and that can't be right, right? Because if, indeed, anything were possible, that would be horrifying. Like, HP Lovecraft level bad. Most conceivable things, even the ones that are possible, but especially the ones that aren't, would be nightmares. What if we're hit by an asteroid tomorrow? What if the air spontaneously transmutes into venomous snakes? What if they give Tim Allen another sitcom? I hope not. Which is the other vexing thing about this problem? Because quite thankfully, anything is not possible. In fact, it seems to me that the great majority of things are impossible. Think of any math problem. It doesn't have to be complex. What is three times three will do? There is one correct answer to that question. One possible answer versus literally infinite impossible ones. The island of the possible sits upon a boundless dark sea of the impossible. But we can rejigger anything is possible to be not just correct, but even interesting. What we really mean, I hope, when we say it, is anything which is possible could happen. Which yes, is a totology, but it's a pretty profound totology when you actually sit and contemplate it. Anything which is possible, anything which is possible, no matter how improbable, could happen, could actually happen. That's nuts. Most possible things don't happen, of course, and even those that do happen rarely, but still, they could and have. Take for instance, what might be the most improbable event in human history, if there were a way to figure such things, which there is not. Still, I think you'll agree that this particular event beggars believe in a way that few, if any, others do, and you will naturally say, no way, that couldn't have happened. And for thousands of years, everyone agreed that it had not, but for a different reason than you'd think. I'm getting ahead of myself. The setting for probably the most improbable event in history is along the south coast of the Black Sea. Today we'd call it Northern Turkey. Plutarch called it Faridia, while in the first century BC most called it Bethinia. In any event, Mithradade's the sixth wanted to call it Pontus, because that's where he was king of. Had been, since he overthrew his mother and brother, tossed them in prison and left them to die, or else, killed them, the records are understandably ambiguous. That was in the similarly ambiguous year of between 116 and 113 BC. To ensure his claim on the throne would go unchallenged, he married his last living potential rival, Leotici, which would be typical monarchal power-politicking if Leotici were anyone other than his 16 year old sister. What's good about this is that it gives you a pretty solid idea of what Mithradade's was about, power and expansion at any cost. And indeed, a struggle for those things to find his reign better than most kings, and if you know anything about most kings, you know that saying something. His position at home secured the young Mithradade's cast his gaze abroad. He wanted to gain control of the entire Black Sea, and in the early days, he looked like he might. He took control of a number of smaller kingdoms, including the Bosphorus and all of Crimea. Then he set his eyes on Anatolia, otherwise known as Asia Minor, that big chunk of modern Turkey between the Mediterranean, Black and a G&C's. The size of Anatolia wasn't the only reason conquering it would be tough. The present owner was also a different kind of foe than Mithradade's had dealt with before, the Roman Empire. Mithradade's was stepping into the majors, and if he was to succeed, he'd need some help. So he formed an alliance with his next-door neighbor, King Nighamides III of Bethinia, who agreed to split the region with him once they had defeated the Romans together. The alliance didn't last long, Mithradade's correctly suspected that Nighamides was plotting to betray him and ally with the Romans, so Pontus and Bethinia began to fight. Pontus began to win, and Nighamides openly asked for Rome's help. They provided it, and pushed Mithradade's out of the area. Mithradade's was alone again, naturally. Mithradade's third died, and his replacement, Nighamides IV, was an out-and-out Roman puppet, who declared war on Pontus at the Roman Senate's urging. The upshot from Mithradade's was that Rome was distracted at the time by one of the many civil wars it was constantly engulfed by, so the empire was unable to send much support to Bethinia. Pontus ran roughshod over what Roman and Bethinian forces there were, and the nation-states of Anatolia celebrated Mithradade's as a liberator. Most of the Grecian city-states agreed. It looked like Mithradade's VI was on the verge of doing the impossible, but that's not how the impossible works, is it? So instead, he organized a massive purge where his supporters attempted to murder every last Roman still living in the area. They managed to kill some 80,000 in what's known as the Asiatic Vespers. In response, Rome sent in a massive force, crushed Pontus forces, and kicked them out of Greece and Anatolia. The first Mithradatic war was a huge L for Pontus. Mithradade's barely managed to keep power at home, but he did, and he immediately began rebuilding his army, which he soon tossed at a second Mithradatic war, which was kind of a wash and did quickly without a whole lot of fireworks. The third Mithradatic war, on the other hand, was said to be something else entirely. In 74 BC, King Necomades IV, who had never been to anything but a Roman figurehead anyway, died, and in his will, he left the nation of Bethinia to Rome. Ah, you shouldn't have. To Mithradade's, a guy not known for his graciousness even under ideal circumstances, this was totally unacceptable. Rome would now be right on the other side of his border, and left unchecked, his kingdom of Pontus would surely fall. But he wasn't down yet. For the last decade, he had been building up his biggest army yet, and meanwhile, Rome was distracted by another large-scale rebellion, this one led by the Roman general quintus Sertorius throughout the Iberian Peninsula. Most of Rome's fighting force, along with its greatest general, Pompey, were tied up with Sertorius in Spain, making it the perfect time for Mithradade's to stroll into Bethinia with his massive army and make Pontus the greatest empire of the era. You know that didn't happen, because how much time do you spend thinking about the Pontian empire? In the end, the Romans ran Mithradade's out of his own country. To Bosphorus, where his son, McCarrase, was Viceroy. He tried to get McCarrase to fight for him, and when he refused, Mithradade's murdered his own son, and took his throne. Then his other son, Farnassi's, did raise an army, and marched it to Bosphorus to defeat his dad. Mithradade's drink poison, just like his father had, but because his father had, Mithradade's had been taking small doses of poison for years to build up a tolerance. Yes, like in Princess Bride, a practice which is known even today as Mithradism. Unable to die by his own hand, he ordered one of his men to stab him, which he did. And that was the end of Mithradade VI, and for most intents and purposes, the end of Pontus too. Rome took most of its lands and left the rest as a client state in the nominal hands of Farnassi's, as reward for putting down his dad. But it didn't have to end that way. When Pontus first marched on Bethinia at the start of the Third War, they had a significant advantage, 300,000 soldiers, compared to a mere 30,000 Roman ones. In the early days of the war, Pontus totally rocked the Roman navy and marched unopposed through several major cities. The Roman general Lucius Lucinius Lucullus, say that five times fast, had a straight shot to Pontus, but he wanted Mithradade's. So he began marching his substantially smaller army towards Mithradade's gigantic one. It was an obvious tactical blunder. The two armies met near Acheria and faced off across the field. Lucullus was reluctant to fight, given that he was facing an army 10 times the size of his. But Mithradade's general, Marcus Marius, was also a bit hesitant. His forces were huge, but also two days away from their supply lines. Now that I liked it or not, battle was upon them. And Marius would almost certainly have prevailed, changing the course of history for all time, and making Pontus a place you've actually heard of. Except that, right as the armies were advancing towards one another, the most improbable event in history occurred. The sky opened up, and out of it crashed a thundering fireball, which landed with an explosive thud in the middle of the field where Marius and Lucullus's men were about to fight. This large, red-hot, silver ball was propelled into the earth with such force that it shook the would-be battlefield, and shook the would-be battleers too. It was dazed, confused, frightened, both sides retreated to think about what they'd just seen and what they should do next. No battle occurred that day. Marius went back to his supply lines, giving Lucullus an opportunity to regroup and fortify. Whether anyone knew it at the time, that was the moment the fate of the kingdom of Pontus was sealed. By a meteorite. And you might think, "No way, that couldn't have happened." But it seems as though it probably did. The description, given by Plutarch, is precisely what you'd expect of a meteor, a thing Plutarch wouldn't otherwise have had any reference for. A thing almost nobody would have reference for, actually, for another 2,000 years. During which time, most people thought, as you did, that this couldn't have happened. Not because it was improbable, but because it was impossible. Since until the 1800s, everyone knew that meteors didn't exist. This is the constant, a history of getting things wrong. I'm Mark Chrysler. Today's episode, out of the blue. Why was the existence of meteors considered impossible for so long? The short answer, and you can say it along with me, is fucking Aristotle. In 340 BC, Aristotle published one of his most militantly influential texts, under the title, "Mediorology," meaning, roughly, "Study of High Up Things." It's in meteorology that Aristotle does most of his work codifying and expanding the theory of classical elements, i.e. earth, water, air, fire, originated by impetically a hundred years earlier. In Aristotle's view, these four elements are defined by their essences, dry, wet, cold, and hot, and all things in the universe, below the sphere of the moon, are made of various composites of them. Everything beyond the moon, however, is made up of a fifth kind of thing, a quintessence, which does not interact with the lower stuff. The heavens, according to Aristotle, are a movable, permanent, fixed, and unreachable. Most of meteorology, though, is not concerned with the heavens. What, says Aristotle, is the purview of astronomy. Meteorology, in contrast, is Aristotle's theory of what we can roughly call weather. Roughly because to Aristotle, a lot of stuff that we would definitely not consider weather was. For example, earthquakes, which Aristotle proposed were caused by air pockets, pushing upwards through underground caves. Moreover, the Aurora Borealis, which Aristotle calls jumping goats, very adorable, and explains as "inflammable vapor" being excited in the atmosphere. Also, dubiously included in Aristotle's meteorology, are separate explanations for two things we might call "shooting stars" and "comments." Shooting stars to Aristotle are the same thing as northern lights, bands of inflammable vapor, which are squeezed by cold air, causing them to ignite, and make a "motion looking more like that of a thing thrown than like a running fire." Comments are pretty similar to shooting stars. Quote again. We may say, then, that a comet is formed when the upper motion introduces into gathering of this kind a fiery principle, not of such excessive strength as to burn up much of material quickly, nor so weak as soon to be extinguished, but stronger and capable of burning up much material, and when exhalation of the right consistency rises from below and meets it. So okay, that's almost everything we need to know. To Aristotle, shooting stars and comets are variations on the same phenomenon. Inflammable vapors, carried into the sky from the earth by the warmth of the sun, are ignited in a comet's case like a log in a campfire in the shooting stars like tissue paper thrown into the same. What's most important, again, is that these things occur within Earth's atmosphere, not in outer space, since outer space is fixed and empty and perfect. But Aristotle had one more interesting wrinkle to contend with. When he was a teenager, a large metal stone had, perhaps I should say, seemingly had, fallen out of the sky and struck near the mouth of the river called Agas Potomai in modern turkey. According to Pliny, the fall of the stone was predicted by the philosopher Anaxagoras, because he related it to the appearance of a comet that was at that time lighting the night sky. Aristotle did not care for an axagoras. He cared even less for his theories of the heavens, which Anaxagoras did not think were impermeably separated from the earth at all. Aristotle spends a good portion of meteorology attacking Anaxagoras' ideas, and when it comes to the stone of Agas Potomai, he doesn't even bat an eye. The stone, says Aristotle, was just a stone, a regular old hunk of earth, not a chip flaking off from the heavens, as Anaxagoras claimed. It had been tossed up high into the sky by a particularly strong and dry north wind, the same strong and dry north wind, which had ignited the vapors that made up the comet. It all made sense, or sense enough that pretty much everybody up through the 16th century uncritically accepted Aristotle's theories on comets, shooting stars, and meteors. Funny enough, both the term shooting star and the term meteor, as we use them today, come from Shakespeare. The former was a bit of poetry, whereas meteor had been used to describe any kind of weather, until Shakespeare narrowed it down to mean fiery sky portans. Aristotle's theory of comets was one of the first ideas of his to fall apart in the face of modern science. In early November 1577, a very large and bright comet appeared in the night sky, where it remained until January 26th 1578. Remained is the wrong word, though. It "traveled" through the night sky, and was seen by people all over the world. Artists painted it, writers published books about it, kings and sultans worried about what it augured. And astronomers did what astronomers did. They took measurements of it. Particulably Taiko Brahi. Brahi is one of the wilder characters in the history of astronomy, but we don't have time to talk about him too much now, suffice it to say he had a golden nose, a prosthetic he required after losing the original in a drunken duel, and a pet reindeer which drank itself to death. He was, if you're not catching on, an alcoholic, and a glutton. A hothead, and a faithful believer in geocentrism. Right at the moment the geocentrism was starting to look a little bit doubtful. But he was also one of the most meticulous observers of the sky in all of history, and particularly in the pre-teloscopic world. Over the roughly two months that the comet was visible from his observatory, Brahi took thousands of observations of it. The data he collected eventually helped his assistant Johann Kepler discover the laws of planetary motion. But before that, they provided Brahi with an epiphany nearly as startling. Whatever the comet was, it wasn't meteorological. By measuring its parallax, Brahi firmly concluded that it was at least three times as distant as the moon. Not everybody believed Brahi naturally, among those who did various excuses were offered, as to why this astronomical comet didn't violate Aristotle's perfect night sky. Galileo, the very guy who took out so many of Aristotle's notions of the heavens, seemingly defended the philosopher in this regard. He thought that comets were like an optical illusion, and that therefore their apparent parallax couldn't be relied upon to gauge their distance. But by the time Galileo was finding moons and rings and heliocentrism, it was no longer astonishing to believe that comets were denizens of outer space, rather than cloud cousins. Aristotle's hold on Western thought was falling apart. That grip finally broke almost totally with Isaac Newton, whose physics entirely supplanted Aristotle's, except on one point, meteors. Like Aristotle, Newton didn't think meteors could come from outer space. Beyond the moon there could only be large bodies, stars, planets around those stars, and moons around those planets. Comets were one thing, provided they were large enough, but aside from the luminiferous ether, he believed light traveled through, there could not be small, detrius, and rocks, and whatever, out there in the onder. So while every other bit of Aristotelian physics and astronomy was being overturned, the impossibility of space meteors remained. In this respect, science actually got worse, because at least Aristotle had come up with some excuse for how rocks could fall from the sky. For Galileo and Newton, there wasn't really any way for that to happen. So scientists decided that it didn't. That any reports of meteorites striking earth, like the one Plutarch described during the Mithriatic Wars, or the one in Axagoras had supposedly predicted, which so consternated Aristotle, were they were wrong. Maybe, maybe, some of the time, rocks or balls of molten metal could be thrown along distance by erupting volcanoes, but other than that, reports of meteorites had to be mistaken, or misunderstandings, or made up. Most reports of meteorites, after all, came from the distant past, when people were superstitious and stupid, and most reports of meteorites, after all, came from the countryside, where people were superstitious and stupid. There was no reason to trust any of them, certainly not more than they could trust Newtonian physics, case closed, no meteors, and no meteorites. That was the general consensus for more or less the entire 18th century, even after one was found. In 1749, a Russian blacksmith by the name of Yakov Medvedev found iron. Not a vein of iron, not iron, or he found a hunk of iron, a ball more or less of iron. The iron was of a quality like Medvedev had never seen before. So he went back to his home, and returned with some tools, and a horse, and got to work etching out a fifty pound or so piece of the ball, and lugging it the many miles back to his village. Medvedev hoped to make something of his hunk of iron, literally, instead he made something figuratively. At room temperature, the iron was much more malleable than the blacksmith's experience suggested it should be, and when he heated it, it became brittle. He couldn't do anything with it, so eventually he threw it outside the front door of his business as a curiosity and advertisement for his services. It sat there for twenty-three years, until a young Prussian scientist wandered into town. His name was Peter Simon Palace, and he'd recently been hired by Catherine the Great to serve as a professor at the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences. To begin his tenure there, he launched a six-year-long expedition into the more remote portions of the Russian territory. He recognized immediately that the blacksmith's iron-calling card was something extraordinary. He traveled to the mountain where Medvedev had discovered the gigantic mass and soon ran across it himself. The specimen was like nothing palace had ever seen before. It was iron, but it was poked with holes and cavities like a sponge. Many of the holes were covered up by a yellow, glassy material that looked like amber. It weighed 1600 pounds, and it was sort of wedged into the side of a high-end remote ridge. There was no iron around the ball. There was pretty nearly nothing around the ball, certainly no volcanoes, no primitive people, capable of smelting metal, no people at all, actually, within a hundred miles. So how had the ball ended up there? Medvedev and his fellow villagers had an explanation, it had fallen from the sky. That was how the blacksmith had known to go find it in the first place. Palace knew that couldn't be right since everyone understood that such things were impossible and stories of that kind mere superstitions. But if not that, then what? Palace curiously doesn't appear to have been too concerned by the mystery. He just assumed the humongous bulk of mysterious iron had come from an iron deposit which had somehow washed away in the distant past, but he wrote up an analysis and had pieces of the iron sent to scientific societies, universities, and museums all around Europe. One piece ended up at the University of Wittenberg, and there it was handled by a law professor by the name of Ernst Florence Friedrich Klodney. Klodney might have been a lawyer, but it wasn't by choice. His father had pushed him into it. The Klodney really wanted to study was music, physics, math, and science. And once his dad kicked the bucket in 1782, he was free to pursue each and every one of these hobbies. He found a sort of mentor in George Christoph Lichtenberg, the chair of physics at the University of Göttingen. Lichtenberg had given Klodney the idea to experiment with sound, and Klodney had run with it. In 1787, he published a paper on the nature of what he called "sound waves," which he had discovered by running vibrating sounds through glass plates covered with sand. The sand on the plates bounced and rattled, and produced intricate, predictable patterns. With this discovery, Klodney was on his way to becoming the world's foremost expert on sound, and he only bolstered that impression when a few years later, he developed a new musical instrument out of glass and water, inspired by Benjamin Franklin's glass armonica. Klodney's version was called the euphone, or euphonium, and he toured it across Europe, including two St. Petersburg, where he saw what he called "the palace iron." And to Göttingen, where he was able to meet his hero, Lichtenberg, face to face. By that time, Lichtenberg was in poor health, and claimed to Klodney that he had recently seen a fireball shoot across the sky. This was the sort of thing that anyone else might have ignored. Fireballs were understood to be myths, perpetrated by country robes, and Lichtenberg was old and sick and who knows how sane. But Klodney owed his scientific inspiration to Lichtenberg once over already, so he was ready to listen. Egged on by Lichtenberg, Klodney went to Göttingen University's library, and began pouring through every letter and every back issue in every scientific journal in the world. Lichtenberg was found totally blew his socks off. On November 7, 1492, Maximilian of Austria was marching towards the city of Ensenheim, on his way to make war with some French and Flemish rebels. Maximilian's story is one of those ones that make you wonder if every monarch in history was a total sociopath or what? He was a Habsburg, and the son of Holy Roman Emperor Frederick III. Eventually, he'd become Emperor himself, without the consent of the Pope, that little trouble-maker. But in 1492, he was merely the self-styled King of the Romans, which practically meant that he had kinda sort of usurped his own young son after his wife died in a horse-riding accident, to become ruler of the low countries, flanders, and a stretch of northeastern France. A lot of the French and Flemish did not care for this; they began following a nobleman and army commander named Philip the Handsome, who wouldn't. They even minted coins, with Philip's beautiful face on them. Open revolt soon followed, and Maximilian spent the next decade beating them into repeated, but questionable submission. As he marched towards Ensenheim on November 7, 1492, he was in a little bit of trouble, though. The French forces he was marching towards were larger and better provisioned than his own. Also, on November 7, 1492, something extremely alarming happened in Ensenheim. Out of the clear blue sky, there was a sudden clap, like thunder, but much louder. Reports are that it could be heard for a hundred miles. Along with the clap came an enormous fireball, which streaked across the sky and landed with an earth-shaking explosion in a wheat field not far outside the city walls. People from all around Ensenheim teamed towards the wheat field to see what had landed. It was, they soon found, a large stone, around 280 pounds in weight, and unlike anything native to the area. The farmers and peasants began hacking at it, taking little pieces as souvenirs or charms or, most likely, things to sell and barter later. But they were stopped by a local magistrate, who declared that the stone should be preserved for Maximilian. When Maximilian arrived in Ensenheim a few days later, he asked his advisers what he should make of the sky-cracking earth-shaking fiery stone that had landed almost directly in his warpath. They decided, amongst themselves, that it was a good thing, a sign of God's favor for his campaign. Or at least, they decided that's what they should tell Maximilian since they didn't want to be shoved on pikes right there. Maximilian was pleased to hear that this thundersdone was a good omen, and returned it to the people of Ensenheim with gratitude, ordering them to place it at the local church as a reminder of the miracle. As it happened, at just the same time, the poet and satirist Sebastian Brandt, author of the ship of Fools, was also passing by Ensenheim. It was hoping to get in Maximilian's good graces, so he wrote and distributed a poem about the Ensenheim Stone, in which he echoed the expert opinion that the event foretold a great Maximilian victory. The poem was a fantastic success, based as much on the illustrations as the writing, and it became an even greater success two months later, when Maximilian prevailed over the last of Philip the Handsome's army and forced him to sue for peace. Everyone in Klobney's time knew about the Ensenheim Stone. It was still there at the church 300 years later, but serious people discarded the account as an ignorant myth, or vain Maximilian hageography. Klobney did not. In his studies, he found many other accounts of things he called fireballs, things he called shooting stars, and things he called stonefalls and ironfalls. There was, he discovered, a 71-pound iron in the imperial cabinet of curiosities at Croatia. Along with the iron, was a document containing the sworn testimonies of seven eyewitnesses, who said they had heard an incredible boom around 6 o'clock PM on May 26, 1751, near the town of Hiroshima. All the witnesses, independently described then, seeing a brilliant fireball light up the sky and then split into two separate chains of fire which raced for the earth, with one of the large balls crashing like an earthquake in a newly plowed field, driving deep into the soil which was scorched as from an immense fire. All of this was investigated and reported by Andreas Xavier Stutz, the assistant director of the Imperial Natural History Cabinet at Vienna, who even took a trip to see the iron and confirmed that it was clearly singed by an extravagant heat all over its surface. He admitted that the witness statements were too consistent to be coincidence, and the witnesses too disconnected to conspire. But his conclusion was that the boom which preceded the fireball had been a thunderclap, and that a lightning bolt had clearly caused iron oxide in the air to coagulate into the mass. Stutz had been moved to investigate the Croatian iron because a friend of his, the Baron Homsbeck, had sent him a piece of sandstone, flecked with iron, along with a notarized eyewitness report that it had fallen from the sky after a loud thunderclap near Eichstatt in Bavaria in midwinter 1785. The witness ran to where he saw the fall, and found the stone black and too hot to touch until it had melted through a full foot of snow. With Stutz, this report was further proof that thunder stones were formed in exactly the way their name suggested. But Claudine was growing less and less sure. He found more reports of a cloudless day in Bohemia when a thunderclap came seemingly without lightning and a rain of small metallic stones immediately followed. A clear blue sky in loose France in 1768 witnessed this time by farm workers who heard the clap saw the fall, found the stone. Nykor in 1750. Arsurla Lee in 1769, Alboretto Italy, 1766, all together Claudine collected reports of 24 fireballs and 18 stonefalls, most of which were paired. Each one had been either written off or explained away, individually that was easy enough. Volcanoes were a great way to explain strange rocks flying through the sky, and even might account for the sound of thunder that accompanied them. A shorter path for explaining what sounded like thunder was to presume it was thunder. There were many ways that lightning might square the existence of stones and irons. Maybe lightning struck the ground, kicking a rock high up in the air, only for it to fall back down. Or maybe it didn't fall at all. Maybe what these dull country robes thought was a rock falling was just a regular old lightning strike, which superheated the ground it touched, melting the earth into the strange rock, or otherwise flash-smelting some latent iron. Or maybe it was like Aristotle suggested, an abacena more thoroughly detailed, that little bits of earth and metal were floating around the high atmosphere at the way water vapor does, and electrical storms caused that matter to clump up, or a creed, or whatever, not unlike hail stones. Just for the cases where stones and irons were reported to fall, but had been carried off, were gone missing? The explanation for those was simple. They didn't happen. Yes, there were reports of stone showers dotted about the historical record. But what of it? There were also reports of rains of frogs, rains of fishes, and rains of blood. Nobody took those seriously, well, not yet at least, but that's a story for another time. So what was so different about these irons and stones? After reading every account he could get his hands on, Claudio knew exactly what was so different. Every incident of stone and iron falls on record was virtually identical. As were most of the stones and irons themselves when they existed. No matter where they fell, whatever the local geology, the stones were more like one another than they were to the native earth they fell upon. Of the available theories, only the idea of metal and stone a creeding in the sky by lightning storm could conceivably explain that. But that hypothesis had a glaring flaw of its own. If it were lightning storms that formed the stones, why didn't the stones form in lightning storms? Almost every report of falling stones had them falling out of the clear blue sky. Meanwhile, in all the thousands of thunderstorms experienced everywhere and at all times, there were no corresponding stones or irons. No, there was only one explanation that made sense, and even though Claudio knew that his fellow natural philosophers weren't going to like it, he had to tell them anyway. In 1794 he published a book entitled "On the Origin of the Mass of Iron Found by Palace" and other similar iron masses and on a few phenomena connected therewith. In it, he made a parsimonious, elegant, and powerful argument that despite what the best minds of the time thought, stones and irons do fall from the sky. That despite what every learned man in the world said, the sky sometimes does play host to fireballs which are formed when these stones and irons shoot through the atmosphere. And that they fall through the atmosphere because they originate from outer space where there must be tons of small rocks floating around despite the fact that both heirs, detillion, and Newtonian physics called this impossible. It was a radical hypothesis, but Claudio backed it up to the hilt. There was no other way to explain the lockstep similarity between eyewitnesses of fireballs across thousands of miles and dozens of centuries than to conclude that they really happened. There was no other way to explain the similarity of the composition of the stones and irons other than to conclude they had similar origins. And since the accounts of falling stones showed them coming from every direction in the sky and landing anywhere on earth with a heat and velocity well beyond the upper limits of gravity, that origin had to be outside of our atmosphere. The book was unassailable. Yet, assailed it was. Initial reviews scoffed right in Claudio's face had he personally witnessed one of these fireballs, let alone a stone streaking to the ground, had he even examined one of these irons he spoke of, many of which by his own admission were supposed to be available in various museums and cabinets? No, instead he thought he could upturn all of established physics, meteorology, and astronomy by spending a month in a library, gullibly accepting the doofy stories of a literate world gocles. The book was largely ignored and when it wasn't it was ridiculed. And then, as if on cue, stones started falling from the sky. It was a slim matter of months after Claudine's book hit Germany that the subject of his book hit Siena Italy on June 16th, 1794. At roughly seven in the evening, the people of the city looked up to see what appeared to be a very high and very dark cloud which cast out smoke, rocket-like sparks, and things which observers called bolts of slow moving red lightning. As the cloud passed over the southwest side of the city, the black cloud suddenly turned red with flames, and a quick series of deafening explosions shot through the air. And it began to rain, stones, red hot stones by the hundreds. They peppered the fields, they burnt through trees, they landed in a pond and caused it to boil. One went straight through the brim of a boy's hat, leaving a perfect hole lined with glowing felt embers. Siena wasn't some far flung, hick-infested village. It was a major city, a hub of finance, and home to one of Europe's oldest and most prestigious universities. There were more than 30,000 people there in 1794. No matter how little one valued eyewitness testimony, there was no getting around the fact that a fireball had passed over Siena, exploded, and rained stones. Precisely, as Ernst Claudine had hypothesized, "Well, there was almost no getting around it." By an incredibly frustrating coincidence, Mount Vesuvius had erupted just 18 hours before the Siena fireball, frustrating mainly because so few people saw it as coincidental. Instead, it seemed like very strong evidence that stonefalls were volcanic in nature after all. Clearly, the stones had been shot high up into the sky and carried on the wind to Siena. That Siena was 200 miles distant from Vesuvius, confused this hypothesis of wee bit. But for those who found that too hard to bridge, they had the old ideas of Avasina and fucking Aristotle to fall back on. That Vesuvius had kicked up dust clouds, high into the atmosphere, which then aggregated into stones when they were struck by lightning over Siena. As easy peasy, no one outside of Germany had yet read Claudine's book and no one in Germany would know about the Siena event for another half a year, and so it was impossible for anyone to put two and two together. But as dumb-founding a near miss as the Siena fall was, it was also a perverse kind of progress. Up until word of the Siena stones spread across Europe, virtually every person of learning on the continent was agreed that such things could not and did not happen. Now, that position was becoming untenable, and it grew even more so the next year. On December 13th, 1795, at just about three in the afternoon, two farmboys in rural Yorkshire saw something whizz through the sky far above the overcast clouds. Then, they heard an explosion. A worker nearby also heard the boom and looked up just in time to see something break through the clouds and fall at an enormous speed to earth in a field 30 feet away from him. It struck so hard that it drove itself through a foot of soil and half a foot more of limestone, shooting mud into the air and sending out a shockwave that was felt at a decent distance. When the man got to the spot, the earth was warm, the grass burnt, and the air smelled of sulfur. The witnesses to this meteorite, known as the "Wold Cottage" meteorite, were of exactly the kind that natural philosophers were happy to discount. But the owner of "Wold Cottage" was an altogether different type. His name was Edward Topham, and he was, to put it mildly, difficult to ignore. He'd spent the last 14 years as one of the most ostentatious men in London High Society. Known for his eccentric fashion, his romantic dalliances, as well as his biting tongue and pen. Topham had been a successful playwright and journalist, although I'm using journalists here in a very loose sense. He'd formed a paper called "The World and Fashionable Advertiser" in 1787, mainly for the purpose of promoting a West End actress he was shacking up with named Mary Wells. And soon enough, the purpose of Topham's world shifted, and it became a place for Topham to drop gossip about affairs, divorces, and other such body business, written in his particularly entertaining and acid style. In 1790, he'd written a memoir of a particularly crotchety and cheap member of parliament, named John Yules, which went on to inspire the character of Ebenezer Scrooge. But when Topham deployed his Friars Club style against George Nassau Clavering, a more well-liked member of parliament and member of the Royal Society who had died less than a year previously, it didn't go over nearly so well. Topham was arrested, tried, and found guilty of libel, and breach of the public peace. On appeal, the verdict was overturned, but by then Topham had fallen angrily out with the rest of the publishers and staff of the paper, including Mary Wells, who'd borne him for bastard children before he abandoned her. And after his former friend and partner Reverend Charles Est, started attacking him at a rival paper, Topham had decided to give up on the enterprise and on London itself. He moved to World Cottage in 1790, with a new mistress, where he intended to raise greyhounds and write a history of the local area in quiet country peace. Then the meteorite hit, and Topham saw a last chance at notoriety. He took sworn affidavits from the witnesses and wrote up a hand-build describing the event as well as the stone. Then he sent them all over London. One's interest was sufficiently drummed up, he took the 56-pound stone to pickadilly and had it displayed at a storefront there, available to view at the cost of one shilling per person. While Topham had no direct knowledge of science and his interest in the stone was purely mercenary, his hand-bills on the subject made some excellent points. There was no Vesuvius anywhere around that might have checked his stone to Yorkshire. In fact, Vesuvius was the closest known volcano to Yorkshire, at more than a thousand miles away. Topham dared anyone to explain how a rock, the weight of his, could have been tossed that far. He also noted that the rock appeared to be "pocked" all over, almost like a golf ball, and had a sort of burnt-over crust, and he sagely concluded that it had been chipped away somehow. It seemed to Topham impossible that these "pocks" and this crust might have occurred if the stone had just aggregated in mid-air from some bits of dirt and minerals spiraling around the stratosphere a few minutes earlier. It was clear that between the "wold cottage" meteorite and the Siena Fireball, the subject was gaining traction. Yet still, most of the books and letters published were brush-offs, and anyone who went to bat for the existence of these phenomena risked becoming the subject of ridicule. For those unwilling, or unable to deny Siena and "wold cottage," there was a new explanation, too. In 1787, our old pal William Herschel was in the early days of his astronomical career, still working as a musician, but in his free time, he was training his telescope nightly at the moon and making copious notes of what he saw. On the night of April 19th, he observed three glowing red spots on the darkened part of the moon. He interpreted these red spots as volcanic eruptions, a hypothesis which was later backed up by several other astronomers. It is, to this day, uncertain what Herschel actually saw. For a long while, it was assumed that he had seen meteors striking the moon, but an analysis a couple decades back concluded it was unlikely any such strikes took place at that time. It may have been an extraordinarily strong aurora borealis, or else reflection from a sunstorm, or some sort of atmospheric interference. What it most surely was not was a lunar volcano, since there are none, but nobody would know that for many years to come. In the meantime, a handful of astronomers independently forwarded a theory that the stones and irons, which it was getting very hard to deny, were falling from the sky, were indeed volcanic, but that the volcanoes in question were on the moon. Heinrich Wilhelm Matthias Olbers, who had come up with a good way for calculating comet orbits and had discovered a number of them through his method, set out to calculate the force needed for meteorized rocks to reach escape velocity on the moon, and concluded that the numbers were very much within reason, which they were, if there were volcanoes on the moon, which, again, there are not. But also, again, no one knew that yet, and it was getting hard to see how anybody was going to finally learn anything about meteors, mostly because no matter how dramatic the evidence was, it wasn't enough to shake the influence of Aristotle and Newton, and it was seeming unlikely that anything more dramatic could ever take place. Which is precisely when something more dramatic did take place. It was somewhere around 1pm on April 26th, 1803, in the commune of Laegla, along the eastern border of Normandy, France, that the fireball streaked out of a cloud in clear view of thousands. Three enormous explosions followed, and a minute later, the whole southern end of town was blanketed in falling stones, some 3,000 of them in all. Pierre Simone de Place, one of the most influential and important French scientists alive, saw in Laegla an opportunity. He was the leading proponent of the moon volcano theory of meteors, and he hoped an analysis of the stones could prove him right. Using his influence, he nudged French interior minister Jean-Antoine Chaptel to appoint someone to go investigate the scene. Chaptel chose Jean-Paptiste Biault. Biault wasn't yet 30 years old, but it already served in the military, worked as a math teacher, ascended to professor of physics at the College of France, and been elected to the Academy of Sciences. In a year, it would become clear how daring he was when he took part in the first scientific experiment on board a hot air balloon. But before that, he was going to show both how thorough and how compelling he could be there in Normandy. Before even arriving at Laegla, Biault was already asking questions. Had anybody seen anything that day, heard anything, and what, from what direction, how far, long, etc. He collected witness reports from all around the area, and from the many, many people was able to start putting together a map of the event. That map was all the more improved when he arrived at Laegla, and was able to start picking up some of the stones for himself. They were, he knew, like no stone, native to the area. Investigating the local foundries and blacksmiths, he found nothing like them being either melted down or built up. And according to everyone he spoke to, there had never been any rocks like them anywhere in their recollection up until after the fireball. What's more, the stones had fallen in an elliptical pattern. This coupled with his hundreds of eyewitnesses, who put the sound and sight of the explosion a half-league to the northwest of Laegla, confirmed for Biault what was already obvious. The stones had indeed fallen from the sky. They had been part of a larger body, which had entered the atmosphere at an incredible speed and broken up, spreading a shotgun-like pattern of shrapnel over the town. Biault's report was so thorough and compelling that it practically ended the debate over the existence of meteors single-handedly. It didn't put to bed the possibility that they might come from moon volcanoes, a possibility that Biault was somewhat enthusiastic about, actually. It would take a few more decades to totally validate Claudine's hypothesis. But after Laegla, it became easier to go back and look through history at the many reports of meteors and meteorites and see that they were clearly in line with exactly how such things happen. Including Plutarchs until that moment, impossible description of the Battle of Atroria, which had failed to take place because of a metallic meteorite that fell smack dab in the middle of the battlefield. Claudine and Biault proved that it wasn't impossible, just highly, highly, almost inconceivably, improbable. But Plutarchs' description is spod on, the clear blue sky, the boom of thunder, the falling stone, the shake of earth, the hot metallic rock. And Plutarch had no other way to have dreamed this up other than by either seeing it himself or hearing of its second hand. And almost has to be true, which I find kind of chilling, and kind of amazing. That's the way with possible things, however you feel about them, they can still happen. Music for this episode provided by Epidemic Sound and Blue Dot Sessions. The show is made possible by an elite group of subscribers who contribute to its production and get ad-free early episodes and monthly bonus content in exchange. We've identified you as our newest recruit, go to patreon.com/theconstant2signup. Until next time, from Chicago, Illinois, just north of Park Forest, where a meteor fell in 2003, breaking up and raining over the town in the most densely populated meteor strike in known history, this has been the constant. I don't know if it's true, but one chunk legendarily fell into a boiling pot of water on a kitchen. Is that interesting? Yeah. [Music]