Americans Fell in Love With Science When the Breathtaking Leonid Meteor Shower Lit Up the Skies Across the Nation

In the wee hours of November 13, 1833, the skies over the United States were splashed with a barrage of meteors.

“There was a war of shooting stars in the northwest,” the Boston Evening Transcript reported. “For an hour, meteor succeeded meteor in such rapid succession that it was impossible to count them; at times the sky seemed full of them, and the earth was illuminated as with morning light.”

It was an unexpected and frightening sight, as between 50,000 and 150,000 meteors were visible each hour. A man in Hartford, Connecticut, alleged that his window had been struck by one. (“We think he must have been dreaming,” the Greenfield Gazette replied.)

In the ensuing days, a meteor craze swept across the nation. Americans were talking about the night the stars fell from the heavens, trying to find meaning, inspiration or prophecy in the spectacle. The sight later inspired “Stars Fell on Alabama,” a jazz standard and a phrase plastered on the state’s license plates in the first decade of the 2000s. Some speculated that the meteor shower was a telltale sign of a hard winter to come or that it was an “omen of evil.”

According to the famed poet Walt Whitman, a young Abraham Lincoln watched the event in rural Illinois and retold the anecdote during the Civil War to prove that “the world did not come to an end then, nor will the Union now.”

Despite these rich stories, however, no real scientific consensus existed about what, exactly the astonishing meteor shower meant in an astronomical sense.

“With respect to the cause of these meteors, I do not consider it as hitherto explained,” Denison Olmsted, a professor at Yale College, wrote in a letter which was reprinted by newspapers across the country. “Everything of this kind is loosely attributed to electricity; but in my view without any just grounds.”

Olmsted sought to improve the science community’s understanding of the phenomenon by crowdsourcing information from the American public. He asked those who saw the meteor shower to send detailed observations to their local papers, which then forwarded the letters back to him.

“It is my wish to obtain as many facts as I can respecting this phenomenon, and hope then to be able to deduce some rational conclusions,” his letter continued. “At present, all I can say is that I think it evident that the point from which the fire-balls emanated was beyond the limits of our atmosphere.”

The public was eager to help and sent in long observations from across the country.

Olmsted sifted through the letters and made his “rational conclusions” in the American Journal of Science and Arts.

In the article, Olmsted offers detailed descriptions of the meteor shower at different latitudes and longitudes based on the responses to his open letter. In nearly all locations, for instance, the temperature dropped, the winds hushed and the sky cleared. The meteor shower began at 9 p.m., reached a peak at 4 a.m. and lasted through until sunrise, he observed.

Most significantly, Olmsted argued that meteors were a cosmic event, not an atmospheric one. He deduced from the collected observations that the meteor shower came from a single “fixed point in the heavens.”

“Those who marked its position among the fixed stars observed it to be in the constellation Leo,” he wrote.

Olmsted’s early, crowdsourced research was surprisingly accurate. The Leonids, as they are now known, have their radiant, or center point, in the constellation Leo. They’re visible every mid-November, but it’s only every 33 years or so that the skies are streaked with hundreds of thousands of falling stars like that night 191 years ago.

Eli Wizevich | | READ MORE

Eli Wizevich is a history correspondent for Smithsonian. He studied history at the University of Chicago and previously wrote for the El Paso Times.