Meteorite

Long before anyone knew what it was, the Nama people of what is now Namibia were forging spearheads from a strange metal scattered across the veld. In 1836, Captain J. E. Alexander collected samples near the Fish River and sent them to London, where the astronomer John Herschel confirmed the material had come from space. It was the Gibeon meteorite: the shattered core of an asteroid, some 4.5 billion years old, strewn across one of the largest meteorite fields on Earth.

Slice it, polish it, pass it through acid, and it reveals the Widmanstätten pattern, interlocking bands of two nickel-iron alloys, named for Alois von Beckh Widmanstätten, who observed them in 1808. The pattern forms only where metal cooled inside an asteroid’s core over millions of years; no furnace on Earth can reproduce it, and no two slices repeat.

This is why iron meteorite, Gibeon, and the Swedish Muonionalusta, found near Kitkiöjärvi in 1906, became the quiet extravagance of the great dial makers. Each cut is the only one of its kind. HAS makes ten.