On Nov. 9, 1923, Harvey Nininger saw his future explode across the Kansas sky. He would become perhaps the single most accomplished collector of meteorites ever, and that collection would seed generations of cutting-edge space research at Arizona State University.
But at that moment, Nininger had only just become aware that meteorites even existed.
He was teaching biology and geology at the small McPherson College in Kansas, about an hour’s drive north of Wichita. And he considered himself a knowledgeable man, especially about the sciences. So when he read, that previous summer, an article in Scientific Monthly about meteorites, he was fascinated.
“All during my childhood meteors were regarded in about the same light as ghosts and dragons: mentioned rarely and never discussed seriously,” he wrote in his 1972 memoir, “Find a Falling Star.”
Now, Nininger longed to see a meteor, and a meteorite, for himself. As fate would have it, he did not have to wait long.
That chilly November evening, Nininger was walking home from campus, chatting with another McPherson professor. They paused in front of the colleague’s house when suddenly, Nininger wrote, “A blazing stream of fire pierced the sky, lightening the landscape as though Nature had pressed a giant electric switch.”
His companion was speechless. Nininger, however, bent over and made a mark on the sidewalk, beginning to calculate where the space rock, as he immediately suspected it to be, might have landed. He vowed to hunt for it.
“And his friend said, ‘You’re nuts!’ But he wanted to find it,” recalls Nininger’s grandson, Gary Huss, the director of W.M. Keck Cosmochemistry Laboratory at the University of Hawai‘i, who was previously a research scientist at ASU. “He thought that was the most fascinating thing he’d ever seen.”
That first hunt would lead him to meteorites — though not, as it would turn out, the ones he saw streaking over his head that autumn night. And it would inspire him to commit, first to a hobby, then to a life, of searching for and cataloging them.
“He was just obsessed, if you will, with finding meteorites,” says Kenneth Zoll, the author of a recent biography of Nininger called “H.H. Nininger: Master of Meteorites.” “And he was convinced that nobody was paying good attention to the field. And he was right.”
Nininger worked without institutional support: He wasn’t part of a university, he didn’t cash checks from the government. Very few meteorites had been found up to that point, and for the most part scientists thought everything that could be learned from them had been.
But Nininger proved that belief wrong. Working with his wife, and later with his children and their families, Nininger expanded knowledge of both the number and kinds of meteorites that had fallen to Earth, while developing the “collecting methods, cataloging and displaying of meteorites (that) are in many ways still the standard,” Zoll writes.