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THE NININGER LEGACY
The American Meteorite Laboratory & the American Meteorite Museum
AML (1937-mid 80s) founded by Harvey H. Nininger and reestablished by Glenn Huss
AMM located in Arizona, on Highway 66 in 1946-1953 and in Sedona in 1953-1960
short bio
Notice: the following text is based on Nininger's autobiography Find a Falling Star [1972], except where referenced otherwise.
Harvey H. Nininger (1887-1986) was the first person ever to make a living out of finding, collecting, trading, selling, studying, and exhibiting meteorites [1]. Formely a biology professor at McPherson College, Kansas, Nininger became an expert in the field of meteorites very quickly, at a time when most scientists had no interest and even no education in that area. Nininger is nowadays usually refered to as the 'Father of Meteoritics' [ref. needed].
Momentarily Professor Craik was speechless. Then he saw that I was bent over, making a mark on the sidewalk. He asked me what I was doing. I remember telling him I was going to find that meteorite and that I was plotting its path from where I saw it. He laughted, but I was serious.
Excerpt from Nininger [1972]
This experience changed Nininger's life and led to his career in Meteoritics. He actually never found the meteorite that fell that night of late 1923, but his search in the regions where the bolide had been observed (Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma) led to another (greater?) surprise - many meteorite specimens from different ancient falls. Nininger used eyewitness accounts as a guide to locate the possible 1923 meteorite fall and, collaborating with locals, educating them and offering to pay a good price for any specimen found, developed a unique system of meteorite recovery, which was second to none. In the months and years following the falling star of November 1923, people came to him with strange rocks found in their backyard, but none fresh enough to be from the 1923 bolide. Nininger then understood that more meteorites, from many different falls, waited to be picked up.
In order to shift from an impossible expensive hobby to an enterprise yet irregular and unpredictable, Nininger traveled in 1929 to Mexico to purchase a stock of meteorites, especially irons from the small village of Xiquipilco near Toluca where tons of iron could be found in the fields since time immemorial (Fig 1). Once back home, Nininger discovered a new Kansas meteorite, Covert, thanks to a local boy who remembered one of Nininger's lectures made more than four years before. This assured Nininger that his program would be fruitful and he thus decided to resign from his teaching position to devote his time to meteorites.
Fig 2.
The American Meteorite Museum on Highway 66, AZ (1946-1953)
Fig 3.
Inside the American Meteorite Museum (1946-1953).
Fig 4.
The American Meteorite Museum in Sedona, AZ (1953-1960).
Fig 1.
Toluca (Xiquipilco) meteorite from the Nininger Collection.
In 1930, Nininger moved to Denver at the Colorado Museum of Natural History. In 1933, he published his first book, A Stone-Pelted Planet. With his wife, they established The Nininger Laboratory, renamed The American Meteorite Laboratory (AML) in 1937.
In 1946, Nininger leased a building, known as the 'observatory', on Highway 66 next to Meteor Crater, AZ, to create his own institution, the American Meteorite Museum (AMM) (Fig 2). This was the first museum in the world dedicated to rocks from space (Fig 3). If many visitors came in the first few years, the business went down in 1949 when the construction of a new highway made the museum more remote. In 1950, the catalogue of The Nininger Collection was published, in an attempt to sale the whole collection. Because of the unability to find a buyer and of the building lease, the museum remained opened until 1953.
Then the collection was transfered to a new location, in Sedona (Fig 4). In 1958, about 20% of the collection was sold to the British Museum, which allowed Nininger to travel abroad, to Australia for example, where he found meteorite specimens at the Wolf Creek and Dalgaranga craters. In the following years, Nininger's son-in-law Glenn Huss (TBD-1991) and Nininger's daughter Margaret (1925-2007) operated the museum. In 1960, the Arizona State University purchased the remaining 80% of the Nininger Collection, which led to the end of the museum. Huss and his wife went back to Denver and carried on the name and work of the American Meteorite Laboratory until the mid-1980s [ref. needed].
AML meteorites
Meteorites formerly from the AML can be identified by a collection inventory number, which is directly painted on the specimen. Under the Nininger era, specimens were indexed by two numbers separated by a dot. For example, 8.76 means the 76th specimen from locality no. 8, which corresponds to the Admire meteorite. One of the only exceptions to this simple rule is the Bondoc meteorite, which arrived to Nininger in 1961, once his collection was already sold. As a consequence, Bondoc's inventory number is (2)684.xxx, with (2) meaning part of the second Nininger Collection. Another exception is the Richardton meteorite for which the specimen identifier is a letter instead of a number (e.g., 100.C). Most of Nininger specimens come with a label from the AML but if missing, the correspondance between Nininger inventory numbers and meteorite locations can be verified in the Arizona State University meteorite collection catalogues [e.g., Lewis et al., 1985], where ASU inventory numbers match Nininger numbers from 1 to 684. Curiously, other specimens can carry a '2nd Nininger Collection' number, such as Finney with number (2)707.xx, which does not match the ASU number for the same locality.
The Huss meteorite inventory system followed a similar rule, but with the letter H added in front of the number, for example H39.375, which means the 375th specimen from locality no. 39, which corresponds to the Wellman (c) meteorite. It is important to note that the Nininger and Huss locality indexes differ. For example, the Boxhole meteorite is represented by 432 by Nininger and by 125 by Huss (Fig 5). The correspondance between Huss numbers and meteorite locations is available in the Huss Collection catalogue [Huss, 1976]. Once this collection was sold (year TBD), Huss built a second collection with the inventory number system changed to (2)Hxxx.xxx, for example (2)H459.5 for the Parnallee meteorite specimen part of the Tricottet Collection (Fig 6). Contrary to the first collection, which was part of the AML, the second one was the personal collection of Glenn and Margaret Huss, begun in 1958 [Huss, 1986] and finally sold in the mid-1980s [to be confirmed].
Fig 7.
Examples of labels from the AML and AMM.
Fig 5.
Boxhole specimens with Nininger number 432.30 and Huss number H125.116. Note the 2 different ways Nininger and Huss numbers can be painted (black inscription on white oval or white inscription).
Fig 6.
Parnallee meteorite specimen from the Second Huss Collection.
Meteorite specimens from Nininger and from Huss usually come with a label, handwritten or typed, from the AML. Labels from the AMM are much rarer (Fig 7).
in the tricottet collection
Several memorabilia from the Nininger estate complete this collection, as shown in Figures 8-9.
Fig 8.
AML stamp plate from the Nininger estate. This is one of the only three AML stamp plates in existence, part of the antique printing press Nininger used. Reads: 'American Meteorite Laboratory
P.O. Box 2098 * Denver, Colorado, 80201'.
Size: TBD
Fig 9.
Science Magazine, Nininger personal copy. The cover has 'p1115 Moon' note hand-written by Nininger and on the back is 'Prof Harvey H Nininger' magazine address label.
REFERENCES IN THE TRICOTTET LIBRARY
Huss, G. (1976), The Huss Collection of Meteorites of the American Meteorite Laboratory, Denver, 58 pp.
Huss, G. (1986), The Second Huss Collection of Meteorites, Denver, 30 pp.
Lewis, C. F., J. A. Wrona and C. B. Moore (1985), Catalog of Meteorites in the Collections of Arizona State University, Publ. no. 20, Tempe, 290 pp.
Nininger, H. H. (1933), Our Stone-Pelted Planet, a Book about Meteors and Meteorites, Boston, Houghton Mifflin Co., 237 pp.
Nininger, H. H. (1946), A Comet Strikes the Earth, Denver. Signed by the author
Nininger, H. H. (1948), American Meteorite Museum Opposite Meteor Crater On Highway 66, in: Sky & Telescope, vol. 7, no. 6, pp. 151-152
Nininger, H. H. (1957), A Comet Strikes the Earth, Denver. In Meteorite Crater Study Kit
Nininger, H. H. (1969), A Comet Strikes the Earth, Denver. In Meteorite Crater Study Kit
Nininger, H. H. (1950), The Nininger Collection of Meteorites, Popular Astronomy, vol. LVIII, no. 6
Nininger, H. H. (1956), Arizona’s Meteorite Crater, Past, Present, Future, Denver, 232 pp.
Nininger, H. H. (1959), Out of the Sky, an Introduction to Meteoritics, Dover
Nininger, H. H. (1961), Ask a question about meteorites, Denver, 87 pp.
Nininger, H. H. (1972), Find a falling star, Paul Eriksson, Inc., New York, 254 pp.
FOOTNOTES
1. While Ward and Foote preceded Nininger in the sale of natural history specimens, meteorites represented only a small fraction of their business. In the scientific community, no researcher specialized on the study of meteorites at that time although some contributed a lot to this nascent discipline.