Dinosaurs in the Attic (38 page)

When the exposition closed, however, the Oregon Iron and Steel Company, unmoved by this patriotic rhetoric, sold it to Mrs. William Dodge for $20,600, who gave it to the American Museum of Natural History. It was the highest price paid up to that time for a single specimen in the Museum's collection. Visitors will find this massive iron on the first floor of the Museum's Hayden Planetarium, where children still climb into its holes.

Meteorites have quaint names; in the Hall we find the Wold Cottage, the Canyon Diablo, the Krasnojarsk, the Guffey, the L'Aigle, and many more. Meteorites are normally named after the place where they fell. One of these, named Allende, is perhaps the most important meteorite fragment in the collection. Ironically, it is by appearance among the least interesting, looking more as if it came from a vacant urban lot than from outer space. It is small, gray, and utterly common. But its lack of distinction hides at least one startling fact: it is the oldest thing on earth. Indeed, it is slightly
older
than the earth, the sun, and all the planets, older than the solar system itself. As a result, one scientist has described this meteorite as possibly being more important scientifically than all the collected moon rocks put together.

In the early morning hours of February 8, 1969, a brilliant bolide flashed across the sky and illuminated almost one million square miles of Mexico and the Southwestern United States. High above the state of Chihuahua, Mexico, the bolide exploded in a series of sonic booms, and thousands of dark gray rocks—just like the one in the hall—rained down on a one-hundred-square-mile area near the Rio del Valle de Allende.

Over the next few days, scientists, local peasants, private collectors, Commercial rock dealers, and museum curators all converged on the Allende Valley and began a mad search for the peculiar dark stones. Four tons of the fragments were eventually recovered, making it the largest stony meteorite known at that time. Bits and pieces were dispatched to laboratories and museums all over the world. Large chunks were sliced up like loaves of bread and studied under microscopes and electron microprobes,
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and with X-ray diffraction machinery, mass spectrometers, and other equipment. Meteorite scientists had never had it so good.

As examination of the Allende progressed, it soon became apparent that it was no ordinary meteorite.

Scientists have known since the early 1950s that most meteorites formed at about the same time as the earth and other planets. While the earth has melted, cooled, eroded, and metamorphosed, erasing the evidence of its early history, meteorites have remained virtually unchanged for 4.5 billion years. Thus, by studying meteorites, scientists can gather information about the earliest history of the solar system. The Allende, at first, looked like any other meteorite seen under a microscope. Prominent in it were many white fragments and some spherical droplets (called inclusions and chondrules respectively) embedded in the meteorite's dark matrix. But when the composition of these inclusions was analyzed, they were found to contain unusual minerals. The scientists theorized that this was a particularly early meteorite—and that the inclusions had once actually been partly molten droplets floating in the primitive cloud that would eventually form the solar system. Thus, they had to be a little older than the solar system itself, which put their age at slightly more than 4.5 billion years.

In 1973 a University of Chicago scientist, Robert Clayton, made an even more startling discovery. In the frozen fragments he found some isotopes that had never been seen in nature. These once-radioactive elements could only have been formed by an exploding star—a supernova.

Clayton followed his discovery to its logical conclusion. He decided that the current theory about the formation of the solar system was inadequate. This theory hypothesized that a large cloud of gas and dust had slowly contracted, gradually forming the sun and planets. Instead, Clayton theorized that the solar system began when a dying star suddenly exploded in a supernova. The expanding shock wave plowed into a nearby dust cloud, heating the cloud and reducing its size. Molten droplets and fragments condensed out of the cloud, gradually coalescing to form the planets. Meanwhile, under gravitational attraction, a large pool of hydrogen gas was forming at the center of the cloud. This cloud would, in time, contract to form the sun. Had it not been for the chance explosion of this nearby supernova (a very rare event), we would still—according to this theory—be a cloud of diffuse gas, floating in empty space.

The Allende, like most other meteorites, comes from the asteroid belt that lies between Mars and Jupiter. For some reason, the planet-forming process failed in this zone. Instead ofone planet, a number of tiny planetesimals came into being. Hundreds of these tiny planets melted and cooled, with heavier minerals like metallic iron sinking to the core and lighter compounds like silicates rising to the surface. Many small planets formed, and over millions of years they jostled and bumped into each other, eventually breaking up into thousands of jagged fragments. These fragments continue to orbit the sun as asteroids in the asteroid belt. This explains why some meteorites are iron (because they came from the core of the primitive planetesimals), some are stone (because they came from the surface), and some a mixture, called stony-iron. A few chunks of primitive solar system material never got incorporated into the planetesimals, and were thus entirely unchanged from the beginning. The Allende is such a meteorite.

We know that most meteorites come from the asteroid belt by observing their trajectories as they blaze through the atmosphere—if one extrapolates their orbits back to the farthest point, they almost always originate in the asteroid belt. Scientists believe that from time to time asteroids bump into each other in the belt and knock chunks of material toward the earth. These pieces strike the earth's atmosphere at the rapid clip of up to twenty-five miles per second, and the sudden shock usually causes the missile to explode in a fireball. If the chunk is too small, it merely burns up; if it is too large, it actually punches a hole through the atmosphere and hits the earth with such violence that it blasts a crater and vaporizes. Thus, only intermediate meteorites survive for our collection and study.

EIGHTEEN

Minerals and Gems

Beyond the meteorite exhibits, a doorway leads us into the Hall of Minerals and Gems. This hall contains what is perhaps the single most famous object in the American Museum: the Star of India, a golfball-sized star sapphire donated by]. P. Morgan around the turn of the century. Its history in Ceylon and India stretches back three centuries, although for unknown reasons the history was concealed by the man who actually procured the gem for Morgan.

According to George Harlow, a curator in the Mineral Sciences Department, the Star of India is probably worth on the order of one million dollars or more today. "But because it's unique," he explains, "it's worth whatever someone will pay. We wouldn't know that unless we tried to sell it, and we're not about to do that."

Besides the Star of India, there are several other unique gems in the Museum: the Padparadscha Sapphire from Sri Lanka, a deep orange stone weighing 100 carats, which Harlow feels might be worth even more than the Star of India; the DeLong Star Ruby, the most famous star ruby in the world; and the 629-Carat Patricia Emerald, one of the finest natural emerald crystals ever found.

MURPH THE SURF

Any discussion of the Museum's gem collection must include the single most dramatic event in that collection's history: the great jewel robbery of 1964 At 9:00
A.M.
on October 30 of that year, John Hoffman, senior attendant at the American Museum of Natural History, unlocked the heavy metal gate at the entrance to the old Morgan Hall of Gems (since replaced by the present hall). Instead of an orderly row of cases glittering with jewels, he found himself gazing upon a riot of broken glass and empty cases. Worst of all, the heavy glass cases that held the famous Star of India and several other superb gems had jagged holes in them, surrounded by adhesive tape.

When the police arrived and the Museum was able to take inventory, the extent of the loss became clear. In addition to three priceless stars the thieves had stolen an eighty-eight-carat engraved emerald, a huge emerald "easter egg" from seventeenth-century Russia, and a number of smaller emeralds; a 737-carat aquamarine; the fifteen-carat Eagle Diamond, and well over a hundred other rare faceted and natural diamonds. While the newspapers reported the loss at $400,000, Museum officials acknowledged that the true value of the stolen gems was incalculable. The Star of India alone was one of the most extraordinary jewels in the world. A rich blue star sapphire, it weighed 563.35 carats and was the largest such stone in the world. The 116.75-carat Midnight Star was equally remarkable for its deep bluish purple tint; most star sapphires are a gray-blue or light blue color. The DeLong Star Ruby, weighing 100.32 carats, formed the third member of this priceless trio of gems.

Two men (as it later became known) masterminded the robbery: Jack Roland Murphy—better known as Murph the Surf—and Allan Dale Kuhn; a third man, Roger Frederick Clark, drove the getaway car.

Jack Murphy—who captured popular attention like no burglar since—was born in Los Angeles in 1937. His family moved frequently, and in 1957 he left his family's current home in Pittsburgh and headed for Miami Beach. The late fifties and early sixties were the heyday of Miami Beach, the glittery years before the decline set in. The beaches were lined with expensive hotels frequented by the jet set. There was plenty of work, especially for a seemingly charming, athletic young man like Murphy. Murphy became a beachboy. He worked for various hotels, became an expert surfer, and often found employment in stunt diving and water acrobatic shows. A beachboy's salary might be small, but the right type of person could pull down (in 1960 dollars) fifty to a hundred dollars a day in tips. And, of course, with so much loose money floating around, many of them supplemented their income with petty thefts. From his arrest record, it appears that Murphy specialized in jewels.

Murphy carried around business cards that had printed on them "Who Is Captain Kangaroo?" He was in perfect physical condition, and he always dressed impeccably. Pictures of him at the time reveal a strikingly handsome, deeply tanned young man, sporting sunglasses and slicked-back blond hair. Psychiatrists who later examined Murphy testified that he had an IQ of 139. He played the violin beautifully; one psychiatrist, Dr. Michael Gilbert, recalled in a recent interview that one day Murphy came over to his house for an evaluation. Gilbert had two violins, and Murphy asked if they could play together. They chose the Bach Double Concerto, an extremely difficult piece of music. "He played it just beautifully," Gilbert remembered. "He had perfect pitch, beautiful intonation, and a perfect ear." He was also, unfortunately, a brutal murderer and a psychopath as well as a thief.

In September of 1964, the three men, Murphy, Kuhn, and Clark—who all lived in Miami Beach—decided to visit New York City to see the World's Fair. According to an account of the robbery written by Kuhn for
True
magazine, entitled "How We Stole the Star of India," they arrived in the city on September 19, 1964, and checked into a sixty-dollar-a-day suite of rooms at the Stanhope Hotel.
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During the next few days they attended a movie called
Topkapi,
which had just been released. This film was about a jewel robbery at the Topkapi Palace Museum in Istanbul.

The plot of this movie contains striking similarities to the Museum theft. The prosecutor later alleged that this film had actually inspired the burglary, something the robbers never admitted. Later, by the way, Murphy himself became the subject of a movie,
Murph the Surf,
starring Robert Conrad in the role of Kuhn. They also visited the Guggenheim Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and—finally—the American Museum of Natural History.

Kuhn wrote in the article:

From previous burglaries, I knew as soon as I entered the J. P. Morgan Hall of Gems and Minerals the first time on September 30 that it would be fairly simple to rob if there were anything worth taking. Little did I know just how much surrounded us. When we first saw the three big "stars" no one said a word. We just stood and stared. Then, as if it was timed, we all looked at each other as if to say—how much is this worth? Can it be done?

The three men checked out of the Stanhope (after spending about $2,000 there) and rented a large apartment on West 86th Street. Here they began planning the theft. "Jack said it couldn't be done," Kuhn wrote. "I said it could and Roger wasn't sure." They decided to case the Museum first. They spent the following week wandering about the Museum, looking for exits and alarms, noting the routines of the guards, and spotting possible escape routes. They usually made two visits a day, one in the morning and another in the afternoon, after the guards had been changed. After ten days, they felt ready for a nighttime reconnaissance of the Museum—a dry run of the burglary.