Sir – Your statement (Property, page 1, October 4) that Professor Edward Thomas Hall “analysed the remains of the Piltdown Man and unmasked it as a fraud after finding iron filings in the jaw” is inaccurate.
Professor Hall used X-ray chromatography to confirm that the Piltdown cranial fragments contain chromate and to show that the associated flints are iron-stained, which supported the fraud theory.
This is documented in J.S. Weiner, The Piltdown Forgery (2003) pages 46 and 52, where Hall’s apparatus is described as ‘ingenious’. Hall had no other involvement in the unmasking of the Piltdown fraud, which was the work of J.S. Weiner.
Incidentally, you also state that Hall ‘exposed the Turin Shroud as a fraud’. Actually, Hall and his colleagues carried out carbon dating on a small fragment taken from the Shroud which produced a medieval date. This is not logically the same thing.
Edmund Weiner, Oxford
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