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.
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: