I was watching a tv show set in 1913. There was a shooting star across the night sky and a man said it was “commonly known as a meteorite. It’s just dust and rocks falling to earth”. It seemed to me to be a rather up-to-date thing for a man in 1913 to know.
So I was wondering, does anyone have any idea when we began to understand what meteors were? And when did we distinguish between meteor and meteorites?
This should help.
http://www.meteorite.fr/en/basics/history.htm
http://www.meteorite.fr/en/basics/meteoritics.htm
Today, we can hardly believe that meteorites didn’t attract much serious scientific attention during the early centuries of the Enlightenment. When they did, they were usually explained by atmospheric processes, such as showers of hail condensing in clouds, or terrestrial rocks that had been struck by lightning - hence the name “thunderstones”. Others believed that meteorites were volcanic rocks, violently spewed out during major eruptions. Nobody even thought of the possibility that meteorites might be rocks from space. Until the early 19th century, most scientists shared Isaac Newton’s view that no small objects could exist in the interplanetary space - an assumption leaving no room for stones falling from the sky.
Pallas’ subsequent report encouraged a German physicist, Ernst Florens Chladni, to publish his audacious thesis that this and other finds actually represent genuine rocks from space. In his booklet, “On the Origin of the Pallas Iron and Other Similar to it, and on Some Associated Natural Phenomena”, published in 1794, he compiled all available data on several meteorite finds and falls. From this, he was forced to conclude that meteorites were actually responsible for the phenomena known as fireballs, and, more importantly, that they must have their origins in outer space. His view received immediate resistance and mockery by the scientific community. In the late 1790s, rocks from space just didn’t fit into the concept of nature. However, nature itself came to Chladni’s aid in the form of two witnessed meteorite falls, making him the father of a brand-new discipline - the science of meteoritics
BTW–the site I linked to seems very good. A close read would be in order.