Edward Howard
The English chemist who found nickel in fallen stones in 1802, and after whom the howardite meteorites are named.
Key facts
- Born
- 1774
- Died
- 1816
- Nationality
- British
- Field
- Chemist
Edward Charles Howard was a younger brother of the 12th Duke of Norfolk and one of the most skilled chemists in London. In 1800 he discovered mercury fulminate, the explosive later used in percussion caps for firearms, and was awarded the Royal Society's Copley Medal.
At the end of the 1790s reports of stones falling from the sky were piling up, from Siena in Italy, Wold Cottage in Yorkshire and Benares in India. The naturalist Joseph Banks encouraged Howard to analyse them. Working with the French mineralogist Jacques-Louis de Bournon, Howard took samples of several of these stones and compared them with an iron mass said to have fallen.
Their results, read to the Royal Society in 1802, were striking. The stones from different countries were remarkably alike. Each contained small round grains, a little iron sulphide, and grains of metallic iron that always held nickel. Nickel-bearing iron was not known in ordinary rocks at the Earth's surface. Whatever these stones were, they shared an origin, and it was not the ground they were found on.
Howard's chemistry gave the first hard laboratory evidence that fallen stones were a distinct kind of matter. A year later Biot's investigation at L'Aigle settled the question. In 1863 the German mineralogist Gustav Rose named a group of stony meteorites the howardites in his honour. Those meteorites are now known to come from the giant asteroid Vesta, and they give this website its name.
Did you know?
The nickel test Howard pioneered is still one of the first checks made on a possible meteorite.
Howard also invented an improved way of refining sugar using a vacuum pan, which made him wealthy.
On the timeline
- 19 December 1798A shower of stones falls at Benares
- 1802Howard finds nickel in fallen stones
See more
The Wold Cottage meteoriteThe L'Aigle meteorite