Harvey Nininger
The schoolteacher who became the greatest meteorite hunter of the twentieth century, finding hundreds of new meteorites across the American plains.
Key facts
- Born
- 1887
- Died
- 1986
- Nationality
- American
- Field
- Meteorite hunter and educator
Harvey Harlow Nininger taught biology at McPherson College in Kansas. In 1923 he saw a brilliant fireball and decided to devote his life to meteorites. At the time they were rarely found, because few people knew what to look for.
Nininger's great idea was to teach farmers. He travelled the plains giving talks in schools and churches, showing people what meteorites look like and offering to buy any they found. Farmers began bringing him rocks they had moved from their fields, and many were meteorites. Over his career he found or acquired many hundreds of new meteorites, a large share of all those then known from the United States.
In 1933, with Frederick Leonard, he founded the society that became the Meteoritical Society. He dug at the Brenham pallasite field in Kansas, where he found meteorites in a shallow crater, and studied Meteor Crater in Arizona, where he discovered tiny droplets of metal mixed into the soil, condensed from the vaporised meteorite. In 1946 he opened the American Meteorite Museum near the crater, on Route 66.
Nininger's collection was eventually sold in the late 1950s and early 1960s, mostly to the Natural History Museum in London and to Arizona State University. He lived to 98 and wrote several popular books.
On the timeline
See more
The Brenham meteoriteThe Canyon Diablo meteoriteThe Norton County meteoriteBarringer Crater (Meteor Crater) crater