Locke and the Perseids

On August 11, 1834, the Cincinnati Daily Gazette published a letter to the editor from John Locke, headmaster of a girls' school. (Locke was about to begin, at age 43, a highly productive career as a physicist, geologist, and scientific instrument maker.) Locke had seen a meteor shower on the evening of August 9th and, impressed with Olmsted's writings on the radiant of the Leonid storm less than a year earlier, watched the display carefully and detected that it too had a radiant. It was in Perseus (true), near the star Algol (about 17° too far south).

Locke's letter in a small newspaper on the Western frontier went completely unnoticed. But he read and contributed to the scientific journals and was angry when Herrick and Quetelet gained acclaim for discovering both the August meteors and their radiant. He wrote to Silliman (for whom he had once worked as a lab assistant) claiming credit and snubbing the later discoverers. Silliman passed the letter to Herrick, who immediately wrote up a notice for the American Journal of Science and Arts acknowledging Locke's observations. So now there were three independent discoverers of the Perseid meteor shower.

Well, not three after all, it turned out. Thousands.

The Tears of Saint Lawrence

The earliest discoverers of the Perseids were anonymous, and their feat lay buried in an English farmer's almanac. Both Quetelet and Herrick chanced upon it. Bravely, Herrick acknowledged, "The annual occurrence of a meteoric display about the 10th of August appears to have been recognized for a very great length of time." Thomas Furley Forster of London had recorded it in 1827 in his Pocket Encyclopaedia of Natural Phenomena. "According to Mr. T. Forster," Herrick reported in October 1839, citing Quetelet, "a superstition has 'for ages' existed among the Catholics of some parts of England and Germany that the burning tears of St. Lawrence are seen in the sky on the night of the 10th of August; this day being the anniversary of his martyrdom."

Saint Lawrence was tortured and killed in Rome on August 10, 258, during the reign of the anti-Christian emperor Valerian. "The peasants of Franconia and Saxony have believed for ages past that St. Lawrence weeps tears of fire which fall from the sky every year on his fete (the 10th of August)," Herrick wrote, quoting a Brussels newspaper. "This ancient popular German tradition or superstition has been found within these [past] few years to be a fact which engages the attention of astronomers."

Herrick never seemed bitter about being repeatedly upstaged. He continued to tend his August meteors with great faithfulness and to report their activity in Silliman's journal all the remaining years of his life.

In 1838, soon after his first scientific articles appeared in print, Herrick lost his bookstore. But Yale was so impressed by his scholarship that it awarded him an honorary master of arts degree. Five years later, Yale built a new library and made Herrick college librarian. It was a pleasant irony for a man whose eye trouble had kept him from college and who had complained about New Haven's poor libraries. Herrick spent the next 15 years vigorously developing the Yale library collections. He never married. He never took a vacation.

Later he assumed the duty of writing and publishing Yale's obituaries of graduates and faculty. Herrick was so organized and efficient that he wrote his own death notice a few days before he died in 1862 at the age of 51.