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Ignatius Donnelly Biela’s
Comet (Chicago 1887)
Humboldt says: “It
is probable that the vapor of the tails of comets mingled with our atmosphere
in the years 1819 and 1823” [“Cosmos” vol i, 100]. There
is reason to believe that the present generation has passed thorugh the
gaseous prolongation of a comet’s tail, and that hundreds of human beings
lost their lives, somewhat as they perished in the Age of Fire and Gravel,
burned up and poisoned by its exhalations. And,
although this catastrophe was upon an infinitely smaller scale than that of
the old time, still it may be throw some light upon the great cataclysm. At
least it is a curious story, with some marvelous features: On
the 27th day of February, 1826, (to begin as M. Dumas would
commence one of his novels,) M. Biela, an Austrian officer, residing at
Josephstadt, in Bohemia, discovered a comet in the constellation Aries, which,
at that time, was seen as a small round speck of filmy cloud. Its course was
watched during the following month by M. Gambart at Marseilles and by M.
Clausen at Altona, and those observers assigned to it an elliptical orbit,
with a period of six years and three quarters for its revolution. M.
Damoiseau subsequently calculated its path, and announced that on its next
return the comet would cross the orbit of he earth, within twenty
thousand miles of its track, and but about one month before the earth would have arrived at the same spot! This
was shooting close to the bull’s-eye! He
estimated that it would lose nearly ten days on its return trip, through the
retarding influence of Jupiter and Saturn; but, if it lost forty days instead
of ten, what then? But
the comet came up to time in 1832, and the earth missed
it by one month. And
it returned in like fashion in 1839 and 1846. But here a surprising thing
occurred. Its proximity to the earth had
split it in two; each half had a head and tail of its own; each had set up
a separate government for itself; and they were whirling through space, side
by side, like a couple of race-horses, about sixteen thousand miles apart, or
about twice as wide apart as the diameter of the earth. Here is a picture of
them, drawn from life.
Did
the Fenris-Wolf, the Midgard-Serpent, and the Dog-Garm look like this? In
1852, 1859, and 1866, the comet should
have returned, but it did not. It was lost. It was dissipated. Its material
was hanging around the earth in fragments somewhere. I quote from a writer in
a recent issue of the “Edinburgh Review”: “The
puzzled astronomers were left in a state of tantalizing uncertainty as to what
had become of it. At the beginning of the year 1866 this feeling of
bewilderment gained expression in the Annual Report of the Council of the
Royal Astronomical Society. The matter continued, nevertheless, in the same
state of provoking uncertainty for another six years. The third period of the
perihelion passage had then passed, and nothing had been seen of the missing
luminary. But on the night of November 27, 1872, night-watchers were startled
by a sudden and a very magnificent display of falling stars or meteors, of
which there had been no previous forecast, and Professor Klinkerflues, of
Berlin, having carefully noted the common radiant point in space from which
this star-shower was discharged into the earth’s atmosphere, with the
intuition of ready genius jumped at once to the startling inference that here
at last were traces of the missing luminary. There were eighty of the meteors
that furnished a good position for the radiant point of the discharge, and
that position, strange to say, was very much the same as the position of in
space which Biela’s comet should have occupied just about that time on its
fourth return toward perihelion. Klinkerflues, therefore, taking this spot as
one point in the path of the comet, and carrying the path on as a track into
forward space, fixed the direction there through which it should pass as a ‘vanishing-point’
at the other side of the starry sphere, and having satisfied himself of that
further position he sent off a telegram to the other side of the world, where
alone it could be seen — that is to say, to Mr. Pogson, of the Madras
Observatory – which may be best told in his own nervous and simple words. “Herr
Klinkerflues’s telegram to Mr. Pogson, of Madras, was to the following
effect: “’November
30th — Biela touched the earth on the 27th November.
Search for him near Theta Centauri.’ “The
telegram reached Madras, through Russia, in one hour and thirty-five minutes,
and the sequel of this curious passage of astronomical romance may be
appropriately told in the words in which Mr. Pogson replied to Herr
Klinkerflues’s pithy message. The answer was dated Madras, the 6th
of December, and was in the following words: “’On
the 30th November, at sixteen hours, the time of the comet rising
here, I was at my post, but hopelessly; clouds and rain gave me no chance. The
next morning I had the same bad luck. But on the third trial, with a line of
blue break, about 17¼ hours mean time, I
found Biela immediately! Only four comparisons in successive minutes could
be obtained, in strong morning twilight, with an anonymous star; but direct
motion of 2.5 seconds decided that I had got the comet all right. I noted it
— circular, bright, with a decided
nucleus, but no tail, and about
forty-five seconds in diameter. Next morning I got seven good comparisons with
an anonymous star, showing motion of 17.9 seconds in twenty-eight minutes, and
I also got two comparisons with a Madras star in our current catalogue, and
with 7,734 Taylor. I was too anxious to secure one good place for the one in
hand to look for the other comet, and the fourth morning was cloudy and rainy.’ “Herr
Klinkerflues’s commentary upon this communication was that he forthwith
proceeded to satisfy himself that no provoking accident had led to the
discovery of a comet altogether unconnected with Biela’s, although in this
particular place, and that he was ultimately quite confident of the identity
of the comet observed by Mr. Pogson with one of the two heads of Biela. It was
subsequently settled that Mr. Pogson had, most probably, seen both heads of
the comet, one on the first occasion of his successful search, and the second
on the following day; and the meteor-shower experienced in Europe on November
27th was unquestionably due to the passage near the earth of a
meteoric trail travelling in the track of the comet. When the question of a
possible collision was mooted in 1832, Sir John Herschel remarked that such an
occurrence might not be unattended with danger, and that on account of the
intersection of the orbits of the earth and the comet a rencontre would in all
likelihood take place within the lapse of some millions of years. As a matter
of fact the collision did take place on November 27, 1872, and the result, so
far as the earth was concerned, was a magnificent display of aërial fireworks!
But a more telling piece of ready-witted sagacity than this prompt employment
of the telegraph for the apprehension of the nimble delinquent can scarcely be
conceived. The sudden brush of the comet’s tail, the instantaneous telegram
to the opposite side of the wold, and the glimpse thence of the vagrant
luminary as it was just whisking itself off into space toward the star Theta
Centauri, together constitute a passage that stands quite without parallel in
the experience of science.” But
did the earth escape with a mere shower of fireworks? I
have argued that the material of a comet consists of a solid nucleus, giving
our fire and gas, enveloped in a great gaseous mass, and a tail made up of
stones, possibly gradually diminishing in size as they recede from the nucleus,
until the after-part of it is composed of fine dust ground from the pebbles
and bowlders; while beyond this there may be a still further prolongation into
gaseous matter. Now,
we have seen that Biela’s comets lost their tails. What became of them?
There is no evidence to show whether they lost them in 1852, 1859, 1866, or
1872. The probabilities are that the demoralization took place before 1852, as
otherwise the comets would have been seen, tails and all, in that and
subsequent years. It is true that the earth came near enough in 1872 to
attract some of the wandering gravel-stones toward itself, and that they fell,
blazing and consuming themselves with the friction of our atmosphere, and
reached the surface of our planet, if at all, as cosmic dust. But where were
the rest of the assets of these bankrupt comets? They were probably scattered
around in space, disjecta membra,
floating hither and thither, in one place a stream of stones, in another a
volume of gas; while the two heads had fled away, like the fugitive presidents
of a couple of broken banks, to the Canadian refuge of “Theta
Centauri” — shorn of their splendors and reduced to first principles. Did
anything out of the usual order occur on the face of the earth about this
time? Yes.
In the year 1871, on Sunday, the 8th of October, at half past nine
o’clock in the evening, events occurred which attracted the attention of the
whole world, which caused the death of hundreds of human beings, and the
destruction of millions of property, and which involved three different States
of the Union in the wildest alarm and terror. The
summer of 1871 had been excessively dry; the moisture seemed to be evaporated
out of the air; and on the Sunday above named the atmospheric conditions all
through the Northwest were of the most peculiar character. The writer was
living at the time in Minnesota, hundreds of miles from the scene of the
disasters, and he can never forget the condition of things. There was a
parched, combustible, inflammable, furnace-like feeling in the air, that was
really alarming. It felt as if there were needed but a match, a spark, to
cause a world-wide explosion. It was weird and unnatural. I have never seen
nor felt anything like it before or since. Those who experienced it will bear
me out in these statements. At
that hour, half past nine o’clock in the evening, at
apparently the same moment, at points hundreds of miles apart, in three
different States, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Illinois, fires of the most
peculiar and devastating kind broke out, so far as we know, by spontaneous
combustion. In
Wisconsin, on its eastern borders, in a heavily timbered country, near Lake
Michigan, a region embracing four
hundred square miles, extending north from Brown County, and containing
Peshtigo, Manistee, Holland, and numerous villages on the shores of Green Bay,
was swept bare by an absolute whirlwind of flame. There were seven
hundred and fifty people killed outright, besides great numbers of the
wounded, maimed, and burned, who died afterward. More than three million
dollars’ worth of property was destroyed [See “History of the Great
Conflagration” Sheahan & Upton, Chicago 1871, pp 393, 394, etc.]. It
was no ordinary fire. I quote: “At
sundown there was a lull in the wind and comparative stillness. For to hours
there were no signs of danger; but at a few minutes after nine o’clock, and
by a singular coincidence, precisely the
time at which the Chicago fire commenced, the people of the village heard
a terrible roar. It was that of a tornado, crushing through the forests. Instantly
the heavens were illuminated with a terrible glare. The sky, which had
been so dark a moment before, burst into
clouds of flame. A spectator of the terrible scene says the fire did not
come upon them gradually from burning trees and other objects to the windward,
but the first notice they had of it was a
whirlwind of flame in great clouds from above the tops of the trees, which
fell upon and entirely enveloped everything. The poor people inhaled it, or
the intensely hot air, and fell down dead. This is verified by the appearance
of many of the corpses. They were found dead in the roads and open spaces, where there were no visible marks of fire near by, with not a trace of
burning upon their bodies or clothing. At the Sugar Bush, which is an
extended clearing, in some places four miles in width, corpses were found in
the open road, between fences only slightly burned. No mark of fire was upon them; they lay there as if asleep. This
phenomenon seems to explain the fact that so many were killed in compact
masses. They seemed to have huddled together, in what were evidently regarded
at the moment s the safest places, far
away from buildings, trees, or other inflammable material, and there to
have died together [Ibid 372]. Another
spectator says: “Much
has been said of the intense heat of the fires which destroyed Peshtigo,
Menekaune, Williamsonville, etc., but all that has been said can give the
stranger but a faint conception of the reality. The heat has been compared to
that engendered by a flame concentrated on an object by a blow-pipe; but even
that would not account for some of the phenomena. For instance, we have in our
possession a copper cent taken from the pocket of a dead man in the Peshtigo
Sugar Bush, which will illustrate our point. This
cent has been partially fused, but still retains its round form, and the
inscription upon it is legible. Others, in the same pocket, were partially melted,
and yet the clothing and the body of the man were not even singed. We do not
know in what way to account for this, unless, as is asserted by some, the
tornado and fire were accompanied by electrical phenomena” [Ibid 373]. “It
is the universal testimony that the prevailing idea among the people was, that
the last day had come. Accustomed as they were to fire, nothing like this had
ever been known. They could give no other interpretation to this ominous roar,
this bursting of the sky with flame, and
this dropping down of fire out of the very heavens, consuming instantly
everything it touched. “No
two give a like description of the great tornado as it smote and devoured the
village. It seemed as if ‘the fiery fiends of hell had been loosened,’
says one. ‘It came in great sheeted flames
from heaven,’ says another. ‘There was a
pitiless rain of fire and sand.’
‘The atmosphere was all afire.’ Some speak of ‘great
balls of fire unrolling and shooting forth in streams.’ The fire leaped
over roofs and trees, and ignited whole streets at once. No one could stand
before the blast. It was a race with death, above, behind, and before them”
[Ibid 374]. A
civil engineer, doing business in Peshtigo, says: “The
heat increased so rapidly, as things got well afire, that, when about four hundred feet from the bridge and the nearest building,
I was obliged to lie down behind a log that was aground in about two feet of
water, and by going under water now and then, and holding my head close to the
water behind the log, I managed to breathe. There were a dozen others behind
the same log. If I had succeeded in crossing the river and gone among the
buildings on the other side, probably I should have been lost, as many were.” We
have seen Ovid describing the people of “the earth” crouching in the same
way in the water to save themselves from the flames of the Age of Fire. In
Michigan, one Allison Weaver, near Port Huron, determined to remain, to
protect, if possible, some mill-property of which he had charge. He knew the
fire was coming, and dug himself a shallow well or pit, made a thick plank
cover to place over it, and thus prepared to bide the conflagration. I
quote: “He
filled it nearly full of water, and took care to saturate the ground around it
for a distance of several rods. Going to the mill, he dragged out a four-inch
plank, sawed it in two, and saw that the parts tightly covered the mouth of
the little well. ‘I kalkerated it would be tech and go,’ said he, ‘but
it was the best I could do.’ At midnight he had everything arranged, and the
roaring then was awful to hear. The clearing was ten to twelve acres in extent,
and Weaver says that, for two hours before the fire reached him, there was a
constant flight across the ground of small animals. As he rested a moment from
giving the house another wetting down, a horse dashed into the opening at full
speed and made for the house. Weaver could see him tremble and shake with
excitement and terror, and felt a pity for him. After a moment, the animal
gave utterance to a snort of dismay, ran two or three times around the house,
and then shot off into the woods like a rocket.” We
have, in the foregoing pages, in the legends of different nations,
descriptions of the terrified animals flying with the men into the caves of
the earth to escape the great conflagration. “Not
long after this the fire cam. Weaver stood by his well, ready for the
emergency, yet curious to see the breaking-in of the flames. The roaring
increased in volume, the air became oppressive, a cloud of dust and cinders
came showering down, and he could see the flame through the trees. It did not
run along the ground, or leap from tree to tree, but it came on like a tornado,
a sheet of flame reaching from the earth to the tops of the trees.
As it struck the clearing he jumped into his well, and closed over the planks.
He could no longer see, but he could hear. He says that the flames made no
halt whatever, or ceased their roaring for an instant, but he hardly got the
opening closed before the house and mill were burning tinder, and both were
down in five minutes. The smoke came down upon him powerfully, and his den was
so hot he could hardly breathe. “He
knew that the planks above him were on fire, but, remembering their thickness,
he waited till the roaring of the flames had died away, and then with his head
and hands turned them over and put our the fire by dashing up water with his
hands. Although it was a cold night, and the water had at first chilled him,
the heat gradually warmed him up until he felt quite comfortable. He remained
in his den until daylight, frequently turning over the planks and putting out
the fire, and then the worst had passed. The earth around was on fire in spots,
house and mill were gone, leaves, brush, and logs were swept clean away as if
shaved off and swept with a broom, and nothing but soot and ashes were to be
seen” [Ibid 390]. In
Wisconsin, at Williamson’s Mills, there was a large but shallow well on the
premises belonging to a Mr. Boorman. The people, when cur off by the flames
and wild with terror, and thinking they would find safety in the water, leaped
into this well. “The relentless fury of the flames drove them pell-mell into
the pit, to struggle with each other and die — some by drowning, and others
by fire and suffocation. None escaped. Thirty-two
bodies were found there. They were in every imaginable position; but the
contortions of their limbs and the agonizing expressions of their faces told
the awful tale” [Ibid 386]. The
recital of these details, horrible though they may be, becomes excusable when
we remember that the ancestors of our race must have endured similar horrors
in that awful calamity which I have discussed in this volume. James
B. Clark, of Detroit, who was at Uniontown, Wisconsin, writes: “The
fire suddenly made a rush, like the flash of a train of gunpowder, and swept
in the shape of a crescent around the settlement. It is almost impossible to
conceive the frightful rapidity of the
advance of the flames. The rushing fire seemed to eat up and annihilate
the trees.” They
saw a black mass coming toward them from the wall of flame: “It
was a stampede of cattle and horses thundering toward us, bellowing, moaning,
and neighing as they galloped on; rushing with fearful speed, their eyeballs
dilated and glaring with terror, and every motion betokening delirium of
fright. Some had been badly burned, and must have plunged through a long space
of flame in the desperate effort to escape. Following considerably behind came
a solitary horse, panting and snorting and nearly exhausted. He was saddled
and bridled, and, as we first thought, had a bag lashed to his back. As he
came up we were startled at the sight of a young lad lying fallen over the
animal’s neck, the bridle wound around his hands, and the mane being
clinched by the fingers. Little effort was needed to stop the jaded horse, and
at once release the helpless boy. He was taken into the house, and all that we
could do was done; but he had inhaled the smoke, and was seemingly dying. Some
time elapsed and he revived enough to speak. He told his name — Patrick
Byrnes — and said: ‘Father and mother and the children got into the wagon.
I don’t know what became of them. Everything is burned up. I am dying. Oh!
is hell any worse than this?’” [Ibid 383] How
vividly does all this recall the book of Job and the legends of Central
America, which refer to the multitudes of the burned, maimed, and wounded
lying in the caverns, moaning and crying like poor Patrick Byrnes, suffering
no less in mind than in body! When
we leave Wisconsin and pass about two hundred and fifty miles eastward, over
Lake Michigan and across the whole width of the State of Michigan, we find
much the same condition of things, but not so terrible in the loss of life.
Fully fifteen thousand people were rendered homeless by the fires; and
their food, clothing, crops, horses, and cattle were destroyed. Of these five
to six thousand were burned out the same
night that the fires broke out in Chicago and Wisconsin. The total
destruction of property exceeded one million dollars; not only villages and
cities, but whole townships, were swept bare. But
it is to Chicago we must turn for the most extraordinary results of this
atmospheric disturbance. It is needless to tell the story in detail. The world
know is by heart: “Blackened
and bleeding, helpless, panting, prone, On
the charred fragments of her shattered throne, Lies
she who stood but yesterday alone.” I
have only space to refer to one or two points, The
fire was spontaneous. The story of Mrs. O’Leary’s cow having started the
conflagration by kicking over a lantern was proved to be false. It was the
access of gas from the tail of Biela’s comet that burned up Chicago! The
fire-marshal testified: “I
felt it in my bones that we were going to have a burn.” He
says, speaking of O’Leary’s barn: “We
got the fire under control, and it would not have gone farther; but the next
thing I knew they came and told me that St. Paul’s church, about
two squares north, was on fire” [Ibid 163]. They
checked the church-fire, but — “The
next thing I knew the fire was in Bateham’s planing-mill.” A
writer in the New York “Evening Post” says he saw in Chicago “buildings
far beyond the line of fire, and in no
contact with it, burst into flames from the interior.” It
must not be forgotten that the fall of 1871 was marked by extraordinary
conflagrations in regions widely separated. On the 8th of October, the same day the
Wisconsin, Michigan, and Chicago fires broke out, the States of Iowa,
Minnesota, Indiana, and Illinois were severely devastated by prairie-fires;
while terrible fires raged on the Alleghenies, the Sierras of the Pacific
coast, and the Rocky Mountains, and in the region of the Red River of the
North. “The
Annual Record of Science and Industry” for 1876, page 84, says: “For
weeks before and after the great fire in Chicago in 1872, great areas of
forest and prairie-land, both in the United States and the British Provinces,
were on fire.” The
flames that consumed a great part of Chicago were of
an unusual character and produced extraordinary effects. They
absolutely melted the hardest
building-stone, which had previously been considered fire-proof. Iron, glass,
granite, were fused and run together into grotesque conglomerates, as if they
had been put through a blast-furnace. No kind of material could stand its
breath for a moment. I
quote again from Sheahan & Upton’s work: “The
huge stone and brick structures melted before the fierceness of the flames as
a snow-flake melts and disappears in water, and almost as quickly. Six-story
buildings would take fire and disappear
for ever from sight in five minutes by the watch... The fire also doubled
on its track at the great Union Depot and burned half a mile southward in the very teeth of the gale — a gale which blew a perfect
tornado, and in which no vessel could have lived on the lake... Strange,
fantastic fires of blue, red, and green played along the cornices of buildings”
[“History of the Chicago Fire” 85, 86]. Hon.
William B. Ogden wrote at the time: “The
fire was accompanied by the fiercest tornado of wind ever known to blow here”
[Ibid 87]. “The
most striking peculiarity of the fire was its intense heat. Nothing exposed to
it escaped. Amid the hundreds of acres left bare there is not to be found a
piece of wood of any description, and, unlike
most fires, it left nothing half burned... The fire swept the streets of
all the ordinary dust and rubbish, consuming it instantly” [Ibid 119]. The
Athens marble burned like coal! “The
intensity of the heat may be judged, and the thorough combustion of everything
wooden may be understood, when we state that in the yard of one of the large
agricultural-implement factories was stacked some hundreds of tons of pig-iron.
This iron was two hundred feet from any building. To the south of it was the
river, one hundred and fifty feet wide. No large building but the factory was
in the immediate vicinity of the fire. Yet, so great was the heat, that this
pile of iron melted and run, and is now in one large and nearly solid mass”
[Ibid 121]. The
amount of property destroyed was estimated by Mayor Medill at one hundred and
fifty million dollars; and the number of people rendered houseless, at one
hundred and twenty-five thousand. Several hundred lives were lost. All
this brings before our eyes vividly the condition of things when the comet
struck the earth; when conflagrations spread over wide areas; when human
beings were consumed by the million; when their works were obliterated, and
the remnants of the multitude fled before the rushing flames, filled with
unutterable consternation; and as they jumped pell-mell into wells, so we have
seen them in Job clambering down ropes into the narrow-mouthed, bottomless pit. Who
shall say how often the characteristics of our atmosphere have been affected
by accessions from extraterrestrial sources, resulting in conflagrations or
pestilences, in failures of crops, and in famines? Who shall say how far great
revolutions and wars and other perturbations of humanity have been due to
similar modifications? There is a world of philosophy in that curious story,
“Dr. Ox’s Hobby,” wherein w are told how he changed the mental traits of
a village of Hollanders by increasing the amount of oxygen in the air they
breathed. Chicago 1887 |