Barringer, Daniel Moreau (1860–1929)
A successful mining engineer who, in 1902, first heard of the crater in
Arizona that would eventually be named after him (see Barringer
Crater). A Princeton graduate (1879), Barringer came from a well-connected
family, went hunting with Theodore Roosevelt, and owned a silver mine. When
he learned that beads of iron were mixed in with the rocks of the crater's
rim, Barringer immediately concluded that the great pit had been blasted
out by an iron meteorite, roughly
as wide as the crater, that now lay buried under the crater floor. Before
even visiting the site, he formed the Standard Iron Company and began securing
mining patents. But his excavation was doomed to failure. As we now know,
the impacting body, though huge by everyday meteorite standards, was much
smaller than Barringer had supposed, and most of it was broken apart and
showered over a wide surrounding area. Barringer was wrong about the physics
of hypervelocity cratering, and, after more than a quarter of a century
of searching, his Meteor Crater Exploration and Mining Company ran out of
money and shut down in 1929. He died shortly after, having lost nearly all
his fortune. However, Barringer had by then succeeded in convincing most
of the scientific community that his impact theory was correct.
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• ASTRONOMERS
AND ASTROPHYSICISTS
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