H. H. Nininger Papers

Harvey Harlow Nininger was born to James Buchanan (1857-1931) and Mary Ann Bower (1857-1938) Nininger in Conway Springs (Sumner County) Kansas on January 17, 1887. He was one of six children, including Jacob Christian (1882-1978), John Alvin (1884-1965), Roy William (1889-1930), an unnamed infant boy (1897-1897), and Naomi Ruth (Nininger) Hicks Arps (1899-). H. H. Nininger began his education at Northwestern State Normal in Oklahoma (1907-1909) and went on to earn his A.B. in Biology from McPherson College in McPherson, Kansas (1914) and his M.S. from Pomona College in Claremont, California (1919). He completed additional coursework at the University of California at Berkeley (1915-1918) and received several honorary degrees, including an Honorary Doctorate from McPherson College (1937), an Honorary LLD from Arizona State University (1963), and an Honorary Doctorate of Science from Pomona College (1976). Nininger married Nancy Adeline Addie Delp (1892-1978) in 1914 and the couple had three children, Robert D. (1919-2004), Doris Elaine (Nininger) Banks (1921-2012), and Margaret Ann (Nininger) Huss (1925-2007). He remarried Gladys L. (Griffin) Dawson (1903-2000) on March 28, 1979.

H. H. Nininger began his career as a biologist, serving as the Substitute Head of the Biology Department at Northwestern State Normal (1912-1913), as a Professor of Biology at LaVerne College in California (1914-1918), as an Instructor in Pomona College’s Marine Laboratory (Summer 1916), and as a Zoology Laboratory Assistant at the University of California, Berkeley (Summer 1918). During World War I, he worked as a Special Field Agent for the U.S. Bureau of Entomology in North Dakota as part of a war program (1918-1919). Nininger’s position was terminated at the end of the war and he returned to Kansas, where he worked as a Field Agent for the Kansas State Agricultural College in Manhattan (Summer 1919) and as a Professor of Biology at Southwestern College (1919-1920) before accepting a position as a Professor of Biology at McPherson College in 1920. He founded the Rocky Mountain Summer School, designed to train teachers through field courses in such subjects as geology and botany, in 1922 and served as the program’s director until lack of funds caused by the Great Depression forced its closure in 1930.

Nininger’s career as a meteoriticist began at 8:57pm on November 9, 1923 when he witnessed a meteor pass over McPherson, Kansas. The sighting [threw] him out of his routine pedagogical orbit and he resolved to find the meteor’s fragments. Although his search did not locate the remnants of the November 9 fireball, he did discover evidence of two other meteorites. Nininger believed this discovery proved that meteorites were far more abundant on earth than previously thought and hoped that educating the general public about the existence and scientific importance of meteorites would facilitate their discovery and subsequent study. Although Nininger was unable to secure financial support for his proposed educational program, he continued it as best he could.

In 1929, Nininger resigned his position at McPherson College, moved his family to Denver, Colorado, and established the Nininger Laboratories in October of 1930. The institution’s name was changed to American Meteorite Laboratory in 1936. Under both names, the organization was dedicated to the discovery and study of meteorites, including undertaking field work to collect new meteorites, running a shop to cut and polish meteorites, and conducting an educational program interacting with public schools, scientific organizations, service clubs, chambers of commerce, farm organizations, and churches. Nininger also bought meteorites from, sold meteorites to, and exchanged meteorites with numerous individuals and organizations around the world.

Dr. F. C. Leonard convinced Nininger to help found a society dedicated to furthering research on meteorites in 1932. The first meeting of the Society for Research on Meteorites was held at the Field Museum in Chicago, Illinois on August 21, 1933. Leonard served as president from 1933 to 1936. Nininger succeeded him in 1937 and led the organization until 1941. In the spring of 1946, the Niningers left Colorado and founded the American Meteorite Museum, which displayed over 6,000 specimens from the Nininger collection, on Route 66 in Arizona opposite Meteor Crater. In addition to continuing the previous Laboratory’s scientific and educational work, the Museum’s location allowed H. H. and Addie Nininger to conduct extensive fieldwork at Meteor Crater between 1946 and 1953.

Shortly before establishing the Museum, Dr. Lincoln La Paz of the University of New Mexico’s Physics Department offered Nininger a position at UNM’s newly established Meteoritical Institute if Nininger would agree to donate his meteorite collection. Nininger initially declined, although he may have eventually accepted the offer. Possibly as a result of this interaction, Nininger and La Paz came into direct conflict at the 1946 annual meeting of the Society for Research on Meteorites when Nininger presented a paper discussing the scientific importance of meteorites. F. C. Leonard (Nininger believed at La Paz’s instigation) criticized Nininger’s use of the term meteorite and La Paz went on to accuse Nininger of having mounted falsely labeled specimen[s] of worthless shale rather than meteorites on the covers of his A Comet Strikes the Earth. La Paz called for a vote of censure, which failed but cemented the animosity between Nininger and La Paz. Nininger withdrew from the Society as a result of the conference. He rejoined in 1963, having come to agree with his friend Peter M. Millman that there was not any point in rehashing old matters [of] which neither of us approve us and ... [that s]uch things are best forgotten and allowed to sink quietly into the limbo of the past.

After setting up the Museum, Nininger contacted La Paz and proposed that he would not encroach upon … New Mexico territory if La Paz would keep out of Arizona with his field activities. Although La Paz agreed, he violated the agreement in under a year. He also ridiculed the Museum as a glorified hot dog stand and a disgraceful commercialization of science, falsely asserted that Nininger was stealing meteorites from Meteor Crater, and attempted to block publication of Out of the Sky on the grounds that it was not fit to print. The book did not go to press until several independent scientists confirmed its intellectual worth.

Perhaps Nininger’s most serious altercation with La Paz took place in 1948. A meteorite fell in Norton, Kansas in February of that year and the Niningers traveled to Kansas to investigate. In keeping with his usual practice, H. H. Nininger ran advertisements in the local newspapers requesting information about the fall and spoke with many locals personally, asking that they alert him if they found any meteorite fragments. After the Niningers departed, two teams from La Paz’s Institute investigated the same phenomenon. Nininger believed these researchers also conducted a smear campaign against him: when the Niningers returned to the area, the editor of the local paper told him that La Paz had poisoned the people with his propaganda and people who had previously been friendly to the Niningers were now cold. Nininger went to work north of his original target area, where he believed the larger masses had landed. After identifying the field he thought the meteorite had landed in, he asked its owner, Harold Hahn, to watch for any unusual hole in the earth when harvesting his wheat. Nininger received a call from Hahn after harvest, reporting the discovery of a large hole with a 39” meteorite at the bottom. Nininger returned to Norton and was wrapping pieces of the meteorite dislodged during the initial excavation when F. C. Leonard and La Paz arrived. La Paz insisted that Nininger cease his investigation and proceeded to unwrap and damage the fragments that Nininger and his helpers had previously packed. In Nininger’s opinion, the meteorite was never properly excavated. As a result of this failed exploration, H. H. and Addie Nininger began considering cataloging their collection and selling it in pieces.

The Niningers sold a significant portion of their meteorite collection to the British Museum in 1958. Arizona State University’s Coordinator of Research, George A. Boyd, worked with Chemistry Department Chair Clyde A. Crowley and University President Grady Gammage to obtain a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant to purchase the remainder of the collection. The meteorites arrived at ASU in 1960 and the University’s Center for Meteorite Studies opened in the spring of 1961 under the direction of Carleton B. Moore. The Niningers established the Nininger Meteorite Award, which annually awards $1,000 to the students who present the best papers describing their original research on meteorites, in the same year.

After the sale, the Niningers traveled extensively in Europe and Asia, visiting famous meteorite collections, exploring suspected and confirmed meteorite craters, and searching for new meteorites. During this time, the couple surveyed meteorite collections in Europe (1960), conducted a tektite survey in South Vietnam (1958-1964), explored and described the Dalgaranga Crater in Western Australia, and discovered the Bondoc Meteorite in the Philippines (1959-1962). The Bondoc meteorite, which is believed to be a fragment of an asteroid that disintegrated in the atmosphere, was a new type of meteorite.

Over the course of his career, Nininger wrote over 140 papers on meteorites and 10 books: Our Stone-Pelted Planet (1933), Chips from the Moon (1943), A Comet Strikes the Earth (1942), The Nininger Collection of Meteorites (1950), Out of the Sky (1952), Arizona’s Meteorite Crater: Past, Present, Future (1956), Ask a Question About Meteorites (1961), The Published Papers of Harvey Harlow Nininger: Biology and Meteoritics (1971), Find a Falling Star (1972), and Meteorites: A Photographic Study of Surface Features (1977, 1981). He also contributed to the Encyclopedia Brittanica and to Volume IV Gerard Kuiper’s The Solar System (1963). Nininger considered his most significant contributions to the field to be:

• Developing a successful system of recovering meteorites from witnessed fireballs
• Discovering and excavating a meteorite crater in Haviland, Kansas and excavating the Dalangaranga crater in Western Australia
• Discovering and naming meteorodes (geode-like oxidized meteorite fragments)
• Developing a system to find meteorites of unwitnessed fall by educating farmers, who often found meteorites in their fields but believed them to be rocks
• Discovering several new types of meteorites, proving that meteorites are far more abundant on earth than previously believed, and proving that many falls overlap
• Proving that the construction of meteorites is much less basic than previous literature had indicated
• Proving that meteorites are predominantly stone rather than iron as had previously been asserted and that rare meteorites were only rare because scientists had not learned to recognize them
• Proving that a rain of small particles often, and probably always, accompanies stony meteorites
• Discovering and describing metallic spheroids and thus proving that the bulk of the meteorite that formed Arizona’s Meteor Crater had vaporized on impact and so was not buried as previously believed
• Discovering zonal heat effects and demonstrating that the heat and pressure of the impact/explosion of the meteorite that formed Meteor Crater formed the diamonds found in specimens of that meteorite
• Discovering a new type of impactite (country rock fused by and impregnated with an exploding meteorite during crater formation)
• Discovering at least three, possibly six or more, distinct meteorite masses in the fragments found at Meteor Crater
• Predicting that coesite (a form of silicon dioxide created when very high pressure and moderately high temperature are applied to quartz) must be present in various meteorite craters, including the Arizona crater, where it was discovered three years later
• Using the surface features to meteorites to realize the potential of a blunt-nose design for missiles and astronaut reentry capsules.