100 years on, meteorite set to be a big hit all over again
A CENTURY ago stargazers watched with wonder as it streaked across our skies before blasting into pieces.
And now the four fragments of Scotland’s largest recorded meteorite are to be reunited in an exhibition.
On December 3, 1917, the ‘Strathmore Meteorite’ was seen falling through the Earth’s atmosphere across much of the UK. The 26lb stone broke up and its four pieces fell in Angus and Perthshire. One crashed through a cottage roof.
The National Museum of Scotland’s Down to Earth exhibition includes more than 20 eyewitness accounts which were tracked down thanks to detective work by Henry Coates, curator of the Perthshire Museum of Natural History, who died in 1935. He visited each site to record and photograph them.
Two fragments are going on loan from the Perth Museum and the Natural History Museum in London for the show, which opens on November 10. The other two pieces were already held by the National Museum.
The exhibition will reveal how Mr Coates doctored a photograph to show where one fragment had gone through the roof of the cottage, where a couple lived with their daughter. The damage had been repaired before he got there, so he ‘embellished’ the picture for dramatic effect.
National Museum senior curator of mineralogy Peter Davidson said: ‘A fragment definitely did go through the lodge house of the Keithick Estate, near Perth. The next day a joiner went up to repair the roof. Henry Coates went up there later on to photograph.
‘He published two images which are almost identical – one with a hole in the roof and one without.
‘He basically scratched off part of the negative to reveal a black hole.’