“A Wonderful Meteor”

Following on from my post yesterday, I found a copy of the Stockton Evening Mail for 23 Oct 1896 (p.5) in newspapers.com, which (to my delight) told the story of what happened in Sacramento really rather well. Rodney (John Ahern’s dog) even gets a starring role, which will no doubt please many passing animal lovers. The best thing I can do is reproduce the article in full…

A Wonderful Meteor

Three Balls of Fire with a Trail Pass Across the Northern Sky

A wonderful meteor consisting of three parts connected by a fiery band was seen last evening at ten minutes past six o’clock.

“Four of us had as good a point of observation as anybody, I suppose,” remarked Dr. Foreman to a Mail reporter to-day. “There was myself, John Ahern, the night watchman at the Sacramento-street railway station, a policeman and a fourth party whose name has slipped my memory just at present. We were standing at the corner of Main and Sacramento streets. I happened to see it first. It appeared to start just a little north of west and to traverse space on a level, taking a course just a bit north of east. Three large balls of fire were strung together, the first appearing to be the largest. From the third a tail of fire extended apparently fifteen feet long, while the balls seemed to be ten feet apart. Of course, the distances were much greater than that, but that is how it appeared. It gradually faded from our view, going beyond the range of our vision, I suppose. The Aurora mill obstructed our view of a portion of it for a moment.

“A rather singular thing in connection with it,” continued the doctor, “was the inexplicable conduct of John Ahern’s dog. You know the dog carries his master’s lantern, and has never been known to drop it even when he sees a handsome lady dog that takes his eye. But as soon as the meteor disappeared the dog dropped the lantern and blew the light out. Ahern, who never saw such a phenomenon as a triple meteor before, thought that the end of the world was at hand, and when he witnessed the strange action of the canine he turned pale.”

At Wheatland, Yuba county, about 75 miles north of Stockton, the meteor appeared in about the same quarter of the heavens as it did here. A telegram from there says: “It appeared in the west as a star of the magnitude of the evening star and in close proximity to Jupiter. It increased in size until it gradually separated first into one comet-shaped meteor, thin in two, and finally into three distinct comet-shaped meteors. Tandem it sped toward the east, parallel to the horizon and when five degrees north of east it suddenly disappeared.

“Parties who witnessed this rare sight are at a loss to explain what it really was. In brilliancy it resembled ordinary meteors, but in view of the fact that it moved very steadily and slowly when compared with a meteor’s flight and was not attracted to the earth, but traveled parallel to it, it is believed to have been in space beyond the atmosphere of the earth.

“Its sub-division into three parts, which resembled as a whole three comets joined one to another, is unprecedented and beyond explanation.”

It is possible that the supposed meteor was really a group of asteroids which, in their journey around the sun, chanced to pass near the earth’s orbit. In that case the light they shed was reflected sunlight.

Associated Press

The Wheatland part of the above article had been run by Associated Press Wire, which is why it also appeared in the Los Angeles Daily Times, the Los Angeles Herald, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Berkeley Gazette (all with different levels of abridgement).

However, there was a completely separate article in the San Francisco Examiner on the same day from Nevada City (close to Grass Valley, 50 or so miles north of Sacramento):

Three Meteors In Line

Residents of Nevada, Cal., Witness a Thrilling Light in the Heavens

NEVADA, October 22. – A triple connected meteor was observed in the northern heavens at ten minutes past six o’clock this evening. Three balls of fire all in a row and connected like a train of cars with a long fiery tail flashed in view just a few degrees above the western horizon and traveled in a direction a little north of east. In half a minute it disappeared from view high in the heavens, apparently somewhere over the great Dipper and North Star.

From all accounts this grand sight was not generally observed as the hour and time did not find many people on the streets. The sight was magnificent and awe-inspiring, and one long to be remembered as it did not appear to be over forty or fifty miles above the earth. A splendid view of the triple-connected meteor was taken by W. M. Richards.

Coincidentally, the Examiner printed this on p.7 immediately below “A Queer Thing In The Sky”, which was its report of Mayor Sutro’s staff witnessing a “novel spectacle” on the very same night, which started at “6.15” and “only lasted for a few minutes”.

Timey Wimey Problems

Before Standard Railway Time zones were introduced in 1883, US railways used a complicated mesh of close to 100 local times, while local communities used possibly several thousand different local times. Yet Standard Railway Time only fixed the railways’ use of time: many communities still used their own local time. Standard Time (which imposed a similar but different set of timezones onto the USA) only became legally binding with the Calder Act in 1918 (which, controversially, also brought in Summer Time).

Hence we have the awkward situation that while railway employee John Ahern may well have been working in Standard Railway Time (which, for California, would be Pacific Time), Dr Foreman might equally well have been using Sacramento’s local time. So even in one town, you could very easily have two timezones active at the same, ummm, time. Perhaps someone will now tell me that that was why waistcoats had two pockets, one for each timezone.

Anyway, a good first step here would be to dig up some kind of local historical ‘time map’ or database that says what time each time was, e.g. in Grass Valley, Sacramento, San Francisco, etc. But… if there is such a thing, I haven’t found it yet. So there’s still plenty of work to do here, alas.