Warning to the Inhabitants of the City
Close your windows and keep indoors for the Earth will soon pass through the Tail of the terrible Comet and its poisonous gases will fill the heavens!
- Leaflet produced in 1910 as the Earth went through the tail of Halley's comet.
After the 1908 appearance of Morehouse's Comet, the scientists at Chicago's Yerkes Observatory were able to analyze a comet's tail using spectroscopy. They were able to detect the presence of poisonous cyanogen gas in the tail, which smells of almonds.
Two years later astronomers calculated that the Earth would pass directly through comet Halley's tail, and there was concern that the gas would saturate the Earth's atmosphere and kill every living thing.
This could well have been an influence behind Arthur Conan Doyle's novella, "The Poison Belt", published in 1912, where Professor Challenger has predicted that the Earth is moving into a belt of poisonous ether which will cause the end of humanity. Challenger and his friends seal a room, and use oxygen cylinders as they see people collapse outside - including his servants, who have not been included! But in the end, it turns out the belt only caused unconsciousness.
With regards to Halley's comet, swindlers were selling “comet pills” and gas masks to protect the public from poisoning. There were also "Comet Protecting Umbrellas."
Earth passed through the tail for six hours on May 19 in 1910. And those who took the pills survived … as did everyone else. In fact, cometary gas is spread so thinly that it cannot effect us here on Earth.
Comet Lovejoy gets its striking colour from two gases, one of which is the same cyanogen which caused panics - and the other is diatomic carbon (two carbon atoms bonded to one another), which both glow green when sunlight passes through them. It's much the same effect as a neon light, where gases are ionised.
Close your windows and keep indoors for the Earth will soon pass through the Tail of the terrible Comet and its poisonous gases will fill the heavens!
- Leaflet produced in 1910 as the Earth went through the tail of Halley's comet.
After the 1908 appearance of Morehouse's Comet, the scientists at Chicago's Yerkes Observatory were able to analyze a comet's tail using spectroscopy. They were able to detect the presence of poisonous cyanogen gas in the tail, which smells of almonds.
Two years later astronomers calculated that the Earth would pass directly through comet Halley's tail, and there was concern that the gas would saturate the Earth's atmosphere and kill every living thing.
This could well have been an influence behind Arthur Conan Doyle's novella, "The Poison Belt", published in 1912, where Professor Challenger has predicted that the Earth is moving into a belt of poisonous ether which will cause the end of humanity. Challenger and his friends seal a room, and use oxygen cylinders as they see people collapse outside - including his servants, who have not been included! But in the end, it turns out the belt only caused unconsciousness.
With regards to Halley's comet, swindlers were selling “comet pills” and gas masks to protect the public from poisoning. There were also "Comet Protecting Umbrellas."
Earth passed through the tail for six hours on May 19 in 1910. And those who took the pills survived … as did everyone else. In fact, cometary gas is spread so thinly that it cannot effect us here on Earth.
Comet Lovejoy gets its striking colour from two gases, one of which is the same cyanogen which caused panics - and the other is diatomic carbon (two carbon atoms bonded to one another), which both glow green when sunlight passes through them. It's much the same effect as a neon light, where gases are ionised.