The 1910 return of Halley’s Comet was greeted with rapture around the world—at least at first. Due to some irresponsible speculation about the theoretical dangers of a close encounter with a comet, many people grew terrified of Halley’s approach and took drastic measures. They fled their homes, hid out in wells or caves, and some even took their own lives. It’s a grave reminder of scientific communication gone very wrong.

About The Disappearing Spoon

Hosted by New York Times best-selling author Sam Kean, The Disappearing Spoon tells little-known stories from our scientific past—from the shocking way the smallpox vaccine was transported around the world to why we don’t have a birth control pill for men. These topsy-turvy science tales, some of which have never made it into history books, are surprisingly powerful and insightful.

Credits

Host: Sam Kean
Senior Producer: Mariel Carr
Producer: Rigoberto Hernandez
Associate Producer: Sarah Kaplan
Audio Engineer: Rowhome Productions

Transcript

In 1705, astronomer Edmund Halley made a bold prediction. He was studying the descriptions of three bright comets from the past. Each of them appeared roughly 76 years apart. Daringly, he suggested that these three comets were in fact the same comet, returning on a periodic orbit. Halley further claimed that the comet would return in 1758. 

Halley died before he could see his prediction fulfilled. But history has of course vindicated him, and Halley’s Comet remains an icon of astronomy to this day.

Halley’s work had consequences beyond astronomy, too. Comets had long been seen as portents of doom or heralds of great events. Halley’s discovery undermined that idea. Gods didn’t send comets hurtling through the sky as messages to humankind. Comets came and went on their own, on a mindless, predictable schedule. There was nothing special about them.

Later generations would take that notion even further. In the 1800s, an instrument called the spectrograph allowed astronomers to analyze the chemical components of comets, just like they’d analyze rocks or minerals from the ground. This helped banish fear and superstition from cometary science for good.

At least, in theory. Because when Halley’s Comet returned in 1910, a wave of primal terror returned with it, sparking panic across the world. And ironically, far from quieting people’s dread, it was science that actually caused the 1910 panic.

At first, the prospect of Halley’s Comet returning in 1910 thrilled the public. Remember all the excitement for the solar eclipses in 2017 and 2024. There was a similar buzz then. 

It began building months in advance. Only rarely do most people turn their eyes to the heavens and contemplate our place in the cosmos. The return of Halley’s Comet tapped into that sense of awe and wonder. The 1910 approach would be even more special than normal, because Earth would be passing through the comet’s tail—a sprinkling of celestial fairy dust.

Astronomers were excited as well. The late 1800s had seen significant advances in spectroscopy, the study of heavenly bodies through the light that their molecules emit. Plus, better telescopes allowed scientists to gather more of that light, and photography allowed them to preserve images for in-depth analysis. Halley’s would not be the first comet examined with spectroscopy, but the 1910 approach would allow astronomers to turn their most advanced instruments on this icon and impress the public with their insights.

As anticipation built, an English-language newspaper in Paris commissioned a piece on the comet from the astronomer Camille Flammarion. Flammarion was the Carl Sagan of his day, both a serious scientist and a science popularizer. Among many other people, the painter Vincent van Gogh avidly read Flammarion’s books and articles. Some historians even argue that Flammarion’s drawings and descriptions of spiral nebulae and other heavenly bodies influenced van Gogh’s brilliant starscapes—including the hypnotic swirls in The Starry Night.

In other ways, however, Flammarion lacked Sagan’s media savvy and even common sense. The newspaper article demonstrated this.

Partway through the article, Flammarion began musing about what would happen when the Earth drifted through the comet’s tail. He prefaced this discussion by pointing out that the tail was sparse—far sparser than a cloud. As a result, the consequences of our passage through it would almost certainly be nil.

Then, with those caveats out of the way, Flammarion proceeded to speculate wildly. Perhaps, he said, the hydrogen in the comet’s tail will somehow combine with the oxygen in our atmosphere. This could strip out every molecule of air we need to breathe, leaving us all choking to death. He offered no plausible mechanism for this reaction—he just threw the idea out there. 

Similarly, he speculated about carbonic acid forming somehow and searing our lungs. He added that other reactions might cause, “a diminution of nitrogen and an excess of oxygen.” This could result in “the human race … perish[ing] in a paroxysm of joy and delirium, probably delighted at their fate.” 

In his conclusion, Flammarion returned to responsible analysis. He wrote that the planet Earth plowing through the cometary tail would be akin to “a fog through which a locomotive was dashing at full speed.” But guess which part of the article people remembered: the sober reassurance that we need not worry, or the cinematic horror of mass death from the skies? 

To be fair, Flammarion was not the only one making irresponsible claims. Another French astronomer speculated, again with no supporting evidence, that the tail might somehow produce a barrage of x-rays. He said this might cause all the water vapor in our atmosphere to condense at once, producing the biggest flood the world has seen since Noah. As a result of such statements, the public fascination with Halley’s Comet became tinged with fear.

And soon, in February 1910, things got out of hand. 

That month, teams of astronomers at the Yerkes Observatory in Wisconsin were training more than a dozen telescopes on the comet. An observer compared the array to artillery guns on a battleship. Cots and blankets lay nearby for researchers to catch naps when necessary. 

On February 7th, these efforts paid off, at least somewhat. The Yerkes announced a modest discovery: the detection of cyanogen gas in the tail of Halley’s Comet. 

Cyanogen is related to cyanide. Just like its more famous cousin, cyanogen has a pungent almond odor. It kills people by preventing their cells from utilizing oxygen.

Now, after seeing this worrisome news—that Earth might be streaking toward a cloud of toxic gas—a reporter at the New York Times called up Camille Flammarion for his take on the matter.

The Frenchman once again showed an astonishing lack of awareness of the power of the media. Without saying it was likely, Flammarion mused that the cyanogen gas could theoretically, “impregnate the atmosphere and possibly snuff out all life on the planet.”

To be sure, other astronomers quoted in the story threw cold water on that idea. But no one paid any attention to them. The story’s headline sure didn’t help: “Comet’s Poisonous Tail.”

Other newspapers once again ran with the story, and many people’s fascination with the comet flipped to terror or despair—emotions that seemed all the more warranted because scientists were the source of the ruckus.

Different people reacted in different ways. Creditors began defaulting on bank loans. They decided to live it up while they had the time. Some farmers in Germany declined to plant crops that spring. They reasoned that they’d die before anything ripened. 

Snake-oil salesmen peddled “comet pills” to credulous patients. These were a supposed antidote to celestial toxins. The pills consisted of little more than sugar and quinine—the latter presumably added to make them “taste like” medicine. Bartenders made similar claims: they promised that if you had enough scotch or whiskey in your bloodstream, cyanogen couldn’t touch you.

Equally cynically, a broker in Los Angeles began selling “comet insurance.” He offered $500 cash to the families of anyone killed by Halley’s passage. Now, how the beneficiaries would actually collect the money during a worldwide apocalypse was never clear—nor what good money would even do in such circumstances. But at least fifty customers paid a quarter a week for the coverage. In wealthier Washington D.C., a copycat agent charged a dollar per week.

To be sure, not everyone took the proclamations of doom so seriously. As Earth approached the tail in early May, a socialite in Brooklyn threw a “comet party.” She purposely invited 13 people to thumb her nose at fate. Festivities began at 2am, and guests arrived to find skeletons and spiderwebs decorating the walls, like a Halloween gala; everyone wore masks, too. 

After a quick game of Pin the Tail on the Comet, they headed up to her roof deck to gaze at their would-be nemesis through a telescope she owned. Unfortunately, clouds prevented them from seeing much, but the fad spread to other cities.

All fun aside, though, the terror was real enough in some quarters. People committed suicide in at least four countries. They apparently calculated that a quick death now was preferable to the unimaginable suffering that might await them afterward. Other people lowered themselves into wells or sealed off their homes and papered over the keyholes. They were willing to risk suffocation in hermetically closed spaces rather than face heaven-sent death.

People also took refuge in caves, as researchers recently discovered in Puerto Rico.

In 2018, a speleologist at the University of Puerto Rico visited a cave in a secluded region in the southern half of the island. His name was Ángel Acosta-Colón. 

It was a standard cave geologically—mostly limestone, studded with stalactites and stalagmites. But the cave also contained ancient rock carvings, plus charcoal wall drawings of animals, humans, and geometrical figures. 

By analyzing the carbon-14 in the charcoal, Acosta-Colón dated some of the drawings to at least 400 B.C. That means they originated with the island’s native Taíno people. Ships and horses also adorned the walls from colonial times. There’s even a figure that could be a lion—possibly drawn, Acosta-Colón suggests, by “an early African slave.” In all, the array of pictures spanned the entire history of Puerto Rico.

Including modern history. To reach the deepest parts of the cave, Acosta-Colón had to crawl on his hands and knees through a low passage for ten to fifteen minutes. He finally emerged into a low-ceilinged chamber. 

He could stand up in the middle of the chamber, but he had to scoot along on his knees to reach some recesses in the corners. And while poking around in those recesses, he noticed an odd picture, quite unlike any others there.

The figure consisted of three small steps leading up to a thick slab. A Christian cross adorned the top. Acosta-Colón took it for a tomb or mausoleum. 

Most striking of all, a five-pointed star with a sweeping tail was streaking above the mausoleum—or crashing into it. A caption beneath read, “Recuerdos de Fernando Colón, Mayo 23, 1910.” That is, “Memories of Fernando Colón, May 23rd, 1910.”

Acosta-Colón didn’t know what to make of the drawing. So he snapped some photographs, then returned his attention to the older art. He and a colleague eventually published a paper analyzing it. 

But the strange star picture kept itching at his mind. And in 2023, he showed a photograph to a colleague at his university, the astronomer Abel Méndez.

Méndez declined to visit the cave himself. As he said, “I don’t like enclosed spaces.” The crawl there sounded like torture to him. But the image impressed Méndez. It clearly depicted a comet. And as an astronomer, his mind leapt right to the month and year as a probable reference to Halley’s. 

Méndez began researching the history of the comet panic in Puerto Rico. He suspected that Fernando Colón and possibly other people had hidden themselves in the cave to escape the supposedly deadly cloud of cyanogen gas. Méndez decided to find out the artist’s identity. 

People of Spanish heritage often have two last names, which they hyphenate in English documents. In this case, Colón was one of the artist’s surnames, and a common surname. He hadn’t listed the second, so Méndez consulted census records for Puerto Rico.

Puerto Rico was in flux at the time, having recently been handed over from Spain to the United States as a prize of the Spanish-American War. The island was still negotiating its status as an American territory. The U.S. government conducted a census in 1910 to get a better picture of the Puerto Rican people.

The census records revealed four men named Fernando Colón in the region near the cave, all with different second last names. But a few clues allowed Méndez to narrow the list. 

The caption used commas and accents properly, meaning the artist had access to good schooling—and likely American schooling. The U.S. government was emphasizing American-style education then. And the date in the caption, May 23rd, was not written in the Spanish format of day first, month second. It was written in the American format—month first, day second.

Helpfully, the 1910 census also asked each citizen whether they could read and write in both English and Spanish. Of the four Fernando Colóns, just one answered yes to both. 

The artist in question was Fernando Colón Vásquez. And to the surprise of Méndez and Acosta-Colón, he was just 15 years old in 1910. But the age made sense to Méndez upon reflection. As he said, “How obvious it was a kid. They’re prone to writing everywhere.” 

On a return trip to the chamber, Acosta-Colón found a similar steps-and-tomb drawing signed by Vásquez’s brother, named Monserate. This hinted that perhaps the entire family took shelter down there during the peak of the comet panic. 

Vásquez’s family lived in a small town six miles from the cave. And the trip there would not have been a pleasant country stroll. Southern Puerto Rico has an arid climate, with terrain full of thorny plants. Méndez and Acosta-Colón estimate that the walk there likely took two hours, if not longer. 

Plus, given how deep within the cave the chamber is, the family would have had to drag all their own food in, along with water, fuel for light, and other supplies. It would have been a miserable chore. But the fear of Halley’s Comet was apparently strong enough to justify all that toil. 

Whatever the motivation behind the brothers’ art, Méndez and Acosta-Colón view the work as keeping alive an ancient tradition of Puerto Rican cave art. As Acosta-Colón said, “I’m a speleologist. And for me, it’s interesting how we continue to use caves. We think, ‘Oh, only cavepeople used them long ago.’ But we continuously use them in Puerto Rico. It’s part of our history.” 

He notes that people have also taken shelter in caves recently during devastating hurricanes. So Vásquez and his family taking refuge in a cave is part of that tradition as well. 

So far, Méndez and Acosta-Colón have discovered only a small amount of information about Fernando Vásquez’s life. He served in the military as a young man, and later worked for a government insurance fund. He died in 1950, at age 54. He does have two children who seem to be alive, and Méndez and Acosta-Colón are currently tracking them down to ask if they know more about their father’s time in the subterranean refuge.

But even if nothing more emerges, Vásquez’s drawing remains a prime example of how comets in modern times can stir up tumultuous emotions. It’s also an example of how interactions between scientists and the public can go quite wrong: the prestige and imprimatur of science is such that people take even wild speculation at face value sometimes.

It’s easy to chuckle over the sillier manifestations of the 1910 panic—comet pills and comet insurance and the like. But Vásquez’s work also helps us appreciate what Méndez and Acosta-Colón call “the blend of fear, fascination, and artistic expression that such events can provoke.”