From the Middle Ages to Ensisheim
How Europe moved from omens to science.
In medieval Europe, falling stones were usually read as omens. Few were kept, and fewer were studied. One exception is the stone that fell at Ensisheim in Alsace in 1492, which was hung in the parish church and is still on display in the town.
By the 1700s, educated Europeans had swung the other way. Reports of stones from the sky were dismissed as peasant tales, and some museum curators threw out meteorites to avoid looking foolish.
The turning point came in 1794, when Ernst Chladni published a book arguing that stones and iron masses do fall from space. In 1802 the chemist Edward Howard showed that meteorites contain nickel, unlike Earth rocks. A year later, thousands of stones fell at L'Aigle in Normandy, and Jean-Baptiste Biot's investigation finally convinced the scientific world.