On May 25 in 1860, geologist Daniel Moreau Barringer is born in Raleigh, North Carolina. In 1905 he suggested that an enormous crater in Arizona had been created by a meteor strike, rather than by a volcano. Although laughed at originally, the theory is now accepted, and the Great Barringer Meteor Crater is world famous.
—from The Illustrated Almanac of Science, Technology, and Invention