Dr. Harvey Harlow “H.H.” Nininger is one of the most important figures in all of meteorite history. He began his science career as a biology teacher in Kansas but, after witnessing a fireball one night, became fascinated with meteorites and devoted his life to their study and recovery.
Nininger founded the American Meteorite Laboratory (AML), co-founded The Meteoritical Society, opened his own meteorite museum, wrote numerous books and scores of scientific articles, and carried out pioneering and groundbreaking work at Canyon Diablo (Arizona), Brenham (Kansas), and many other meteorite sites. Entirely self-taught, yet eventually lauded as one of the most brilliant experts on meteoritics, Nininger was both a serious researcher and a successful commercial meteorite dealer. He bought, sold, traded, and donated meteorite and impactite specimens all over the world and there is likely hardly a museum meteorite collection that does not contain one or more of his pieces. In order to keep track of his large inventory, Nininger devised a rather ingenious numbering system, made up of two sets of digits and separated by a period. The first set denoted the specific meteorite name; while the second recorded its place in the collection. For example, “34.001” tells us a particular example was Canyon Diablo number 001 in the AML collection, “34” being Nininger’s citation for that famed Arizona meteorite. In 1950, Nininger published a modest hardback book — now desirable and long out of print — “The Nininger Collection of Meteorites,” which lists the large number of specimens in his collection at that time. It is an invaluable reference work for those interested in historic meteorites.
Nininger’s catalog records that, in 1950, he had in his collection just under 100 Odessa specimens of varying sizes. “91” was his denotation for Odessa, and the last recorded number at that time was 91.95. It is probably fair to assume, therefore, that the spectacular Odessa iron offered here, numbered 91.126, was acquired by Nininger and the AML sometime in the 1950s — in other words, reasonably soon after the publication of the catalog.
The hand-painted black figures on a small white rectangle are unmistakably Nininger numbers, giving this specimen a double provenance — an early Odessa find plus a highly desirable place in the Nininger Collection. Of particular interest is a faded letter in front of the “91” — a handprinted letter “D.” We know from consulting Nininger’s “Catalog” that he included the prefix “D” on early Odessa irons, but not other comparable finds such as, for example, Canyon Diablo (except when an “O” was used to denote an oxide specimen). This practice of adding the “D” is very clearly seen in multiple entries in the 1950 book. It is possible that the letter indicated the source or finder of the pieces (the other great meteorite collector of the era, Oscar Monnig, is known to have used a similar secret coded system). In-depth research has also suggested that the “D” could have be used to subdivide a group of similar specimens, in the sense that “D91.xxx” may have been intended to be kept in the permanent collection, while “91.xxx” was destined for the sale catalog. What the letter precisely stood for, we will probably never know for sure, but it is intriguing that Nininger did not attach a letter character to the majority of his other meteorite specimens, and the letter’s exact meaning will likely remain a meteorite mystery.
So, this rare crater-forming iron carries within it a wealth of meteorite history. Given its authentic Nininger AML number, its outstanding shape and impressive size, and its doubtless relatively early discovery at the Odessa site, it is a unique and important iron, and it is extremely unusual to see a meteorite of such significance available for sale today.
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