Fantastically Wrong: That Time People Thought a Comet Would Gas Us All to Death

Halley’s comet in 1910 before not wiping out life on Earth.

On May 6, 1910, Halley’s comet approached Earth and killed England’s King Edward VII, according to some superstitious folk. No one could definitively say how it did, but it certainly did. And that wasn’t its only offense. The Brits also figured it was an omen of a coming invasion by the Germans, while the French reckoned it was responsible for flooding the Seine.

Yet there was even more apocalyptic hype surrounding the 1910 return of Halley’s comet, which is named for astronomer Edmond Halley, who calculated that the celestial body would appear on average every 76 years. Writing to the Royal Observatory, one worrywart warned the comet would “cause the Pacific to change basins with the Atlantic, and the primeval forests of North and South America to be swept by the briny avalanche over the sandy plains of the great Sahara, tumbling over and over with houses, ships, sharks, whales and all sorts of living things in one heterogeneous mass of chaotic confusion.”

Throughout history, there’s always been a bit of panic when comets approached the sun, burning off into long, ominous tails. But in the months preceding Halley’s flyby of Earth on May 19, 1910, folks got real creative with their anxiety. It didn’t help that a few months earlier, The New York Times had announced that one astronomer theorized that the comet would unceremoniously end life as we know it.

French astronomer Camille Flammarion sure knew how to part a head of hair.

He was a Frenchman named Camille Flammarion, and in typical French despair, he reckoned that as we passed through the comet’s tail, “cyanogen gas would impregnate the atmosphere and possibly snuff out all life on the planet,” The Times reported. Astronomers had detected the cyanogen in the tail using spectroscopy, which reveals an object’s composition by analyzing the light coming off it. “Cyanogen is a very deadly poison, a grain of its potassium salt touched to the tongue being sufficient to cause instant death,” the paper wrote. To its credit, though, The Times noted that most astronomers did not agree with Flammarion.

One skeptic was Percival Lowell, who noted the gas was “so rarefied as to be thinner than any vacuum,” and therefore posed no threat. Also stepping in was Robert Ball, director of the Cambridge Observatory, who noted that another famed astronomer, John Herschel, reckoned “the whole comet could be squeezed into a portmanteau.” In a hilarious response to the question of whether a comet should be shoved in a suitcase (turns out it’s actually 9 miles long), The New York Times hit back with a short piece that begins with a vocabulary lesson:

    “The rising generation hereabout may need to be told that ‘portmanteau’ is a word of French origin used in England to describe the useful article called in vulgar American circles a ‘grip,’ and among the truly cultured a ‘suitcase.’

    “If Sir John Herschel really said this comet could be packed in a suitcase (Sir Robert is not quite sure that the hyperbolical remark originated with Herschel), he was talking nonsense. The proposition suggests three factors—the comet, the suitcase, and the packer. The comet will soon be visible, and there are plenty of suitcases, but who will undertake the packing? We do not believe that comet could be packed into a suitcase. Experience teaches that mighty little can be packed in a suitcase by any man. It takes a woman to pack one properly. There are plenty of women, of course, but Sir John’s lighthearted assertion, now gayly step-fathered by Sir Robert, will not tempt them to do any unnecessary packing. A comet, once packed in a suitcase, or even in a trunk of the largest size, would be mussed beyond recognition and of no further use to anybody. Better leave the comet where it is. We shall all feel safer.”

Halley’s comet, as seen in its 1986 pass by Earth. And it didn’t even end the world…yet.

 Others also adopted a jovial outlook for the comet’s approach. “Tunesmiths composed songs to serenade the heavenly visitor, and poets burst into verse,” writes Ian Ridpath in A Comet Called Halley. “Products such as Bird’s Custard and Pears’ Soap featured the comet in their advertising: ‘Pears’ soap is visible day and night all over the world’ was one slogan.”

But other enterprising capitalists hatched more nefarious schemes. Fraudsters hawked anti-comet pills, with one brand promising to be “an elixir for escaping the wrath of the heavens,” while a voodoo doctor in Haiti was said to be selling pills “as fast as he can make them.” Two Texan charlatans were arrested for marketing sugar pills as the cure-all for all things comet, but police released them when customers demanded their freedom. Gas masks, too, flew off the shelves.

The spokesman for Hope’s completely worthless anti-comet pills was apparently a hobo.

 It’s little wonder, then, that some people were getting a tad riled up. Writes Ridpath: “A shepherd in Washington State was reported to have gone insane with worry about the comet, while in California a prospector nailed his feet and one hand to a cross and, despite his agony, pleaded with rescuers to let him remain there.” Churches found themselves packed to the brim with worried followers, while at home people were going so far as to plug up keyholes to keep out the comet’s vapors. (Sound familiar? If you think these people were nuts, remember that in 2003 our government told us to seal our homes with duct tape in the event of a terrorist attack. In 2003. The 21st century.)

More rational humans saw the comet for what it really was: A truly spectacular event that a lot of us see but once in a lifetime. As Earth passed through the comet’s tail on May 19, 1910, curious onlookers packed rooftops around the world, while the French—other than Flammarion, presumably—enjoyed special comet dinners. Indeed, Flammarion seemed to stick to his theory right until the end of the comet’s show, claiming that four observers “had certain olfactory experiences, which are described variously as a smell of burning vegetables, or a marsh, or of acetylene.”

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