Edward Topham
The owner of Wold Cottage in Yorkshire, where a 25 kg stone fell in 1795, who put it on show in London and built a monument where it landed.
Key facts
- Born
- 1751
- Died
- 1820
- Nationality
- British
- Field
- Landowner, journalist and playwright
Edward Topham led a colourful life. He served as an army officer, founded and edited a London newspaper called The World, wrote plays and was well known in fashionable society. Later he settled at Wold Cottage, his estate near the village of Wold Newton in the East Riding of Yorkshire, where he served as a magistrate.
On the afternoon of 13 December 1795, there were loud explosions over the estate and a stone of about 25 kilograms plunged into a field close to a labourer, John Shipley. It buried itself in the soil and chalk. Topham was not at home that day, but on his return he gathered sworn statements from the people who had seen and heard the fall.
Topham was convinced the stone had come from the sky and set out to prove it. He took it to London and put it on public show in Piccadilly, with the witnesses' accounts printed for visitors to read. The stone was later bought by the naturalist James Sowerby, and it is now in the Natural History Museum in London.
In 1799 Topham raised a brick obelisk on the spot where the stone landed, with an inscription recording the fall. The monument still stands in a field near Wold Newton. The Wold Cottage stone is the largest single meteorite seen to fall in Britain, and samples of it were among those Edward Howard analysed in 1802.
Did you know?
The Wold Cottage monument is one of the oldest memorials to a meteorite fall anywhere in the world.
The stone is an L6 ordinary chondrite.
On the timeline
- 13 December 1795The Wold Cottage stone lands in Yorkshire