Comet Madness

Halley's Comet returns to Earth's neighborhood about every seventy-five years, and for most of history people took comets as evil omens. In 1705 Edmond Halley seemed to free humanity from that superstition by showing that Newtonian mechanics, not the will of the gods, brought comets near. Yet when the comet came back in 1910 and astronomers announced that Earth would pass through its poisonous tail, newspapers eagerly stirred up a worldwide hysteria that ended in tragedy.

In Comet Madness, author and historian Richard J. Goodrich recounts the 1910 appearance of Halley's Comet and the frenzy that followed, driven by media manipulation, bogus science and outright deception. The result is a narrative history of how people behave when facing a potential catastrophe, then and now.

As the comet approached, scientists and journalists struggled to get the story straight while people everywhere panicked. The popular astronomer Camille Flammarion tried to calm readers in a newspaper article, but the press ignored his actual view that the passage would be harmless. Irl Hicks, a weather prophet who published an annual pseudo-scientific almanac, claimed the comet would upset the world's weather. Religious leaders searched the Book of Revelation for signs of the apocalypse. Newspapers saw profit in these alternative theories, gave every crackpot a platform and sold more copies as the fear spread.

The consequences were real. Workmen put down their tools, farmers declined to plant crops they believed they would never harvest, and people who had always paid their debts stopped paying creditors. Some opportunists sold "comet insurance", others suffered mental breakdowns, and some took their own lives. The book shows how people respond to the unknown, how scientists come to understand the world, and how everyone from outright hucksters to opportunistic journalists has turned fear into profit.