A rain of stones at L'Aigle proved rocks fall from space
On this day · 26 April 1803
When thousands of stones pelted a French town in 1803, one young physicist finally convinced science that rocks really do fall from the sky.
On April 26, 1803, more than 3,000 stones rained down on the town of L’Aigle in Normandy, France. For once, the timing was perfect: science was ready to take such a thing seriously, if only someone would investigate.
The Institut national, which had replaced the old Academy of Sciences, dispatched the young physicist Jean-Baptiste Biot. Rather than theorize from afar, he walked the fields, mapped where stones fell, and interviewed witnesses across several villages who had seen a fireball and heard the rain of rock.
The local foundries and mines, Biot noted, had nothing resembling these strange stones.
His two-pronged case — the rocks matched nothing made on Earth, and too many credible people had watched them fall — proved decisive. Within months the scientific community accepted that meteorites are extraterrestrial, ending centuries of doubt.
L’Aigle is now remembered as the fall that founded the science of meteoritics. Pieces of it are still held by France’s National Museum of Natural History in Paris.
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