Comet Madness
How the 1910 Return of Halley's Comet (Almost) Destroyed Civilization
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Narrated by:
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Peter Lerman
About this listen
Since the dawn of civilization, humans had believed comets were evil portents. In 1705, Edmond Halley liberated humanity from these primordial superstitions, proving that Newtonian mechanics rather than the will of the gods brought comets into our celestial neighborhood. Despite this scientific advance, when Halley's Comet returned in 1910, newspapers gleefully provoked a global hysteria that unfolded with tragic consequences.
In Comet Madness, author and historian Richard J. Goodrich examines the 1910 appearance of Halley's Comet and the ensuing frenzy sparked by media manipulation, bogus science, and outright deception.
As the comet neared Earth, scientists and journalists alike scrambled to get the story straight as citizens the world over panicked.
As a result, workmen shelved their tools, farmers refused to plant crops they would never harvest, and formerly reliable people stopped paying their creditors. Others suffered mental breakdowns, and some took their own lives.
Comet Madness reveals how humans confront the unknown, how scientists learn about the world we inhabit, and how certain people—from outright hucksters to opportunistic journalists—harness fear to produce a profit.
©2023 Richard J. Goodrich (P)2023 TantorListeners also enjoyed...
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Story
Laki is Iceland's largest volcano - and its most fearsome. Its eruption in 1783 is one of history's great untold natural disasters. Spewing out sun-blocking ash and then a poisonous fog for eight long months, the effects of the eruption lingered across the world for years. It caused the deaths of people as far away as the Nile and created catastrophic conditions throughout Europe.
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Interesting and Pertinent Topic!
- By Catherine Puma on 01-23-22
By: Alexandra Witze, and others
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Falling Upwards
- How We Took to the Air
- By: Richard Holmes
- Narrated by: Gildart Jackson
- Length: 13 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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Falling Upwards tells the story of the enigmatic group of men and women who first risked their lives to take to the air and so discovered a new dimension of human experience. Why they did it, what their contemporaries thought of them, and how their flights revealed the secrets of our planet in wholly unexpected ways is its subject.
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A Significant Factual-Interpretative Error
- By William P. Mitchell on 04-01-20
By: Richard Holmes
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A Furious Sky
- The Five-Hundred-Year History of America's Hurricanes
- By: Eric Jay Dolin
- Narrated by: Bob Souer
- Length: 10 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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With A Furious Sky, Eric Jay Dolin has created a vivid, sprawling account of our encounters with hurricanes, from the nameless storms that threatened Columbus's New World voyages to the destruction wrought in Puerto Rico by Hurricane Maria. Weaving a story of shipwrecks and devastated cities, of heroism and folly, Dolin introduces a rich cast of unlikely heroes and puts us in the middle of the most devastating storms of the past, none worse than the Galveston Hurricane of 1900, which killed at least 6,000 people, the highest toll of any natural disaster in American history.
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Good start but went political at the end.
- By thebreeze on 03-24-21
By: Eric Jay Dolin
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The Day We Found the Universe
- By: Marcia Bartusiak
- Narrated by: Erik Synnestvedt
- Length: 10 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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From one of our most acclaimed science writers: a dramatic narrative of the discovery of the true nature and startling size of the universe, delving back past the moment of revelation to trace the decades of work--by a select group of scientists--that made it possible.
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Worth the Effort
- By Roy on 08-13-09
By: Marcia Bartusiak
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The Sun and the Moon
- Hoaxers, Showmen, and Lunar Man-Bats in 19th-Century New York
- By: Matthew Goodman
- Narrated by: Malcolm Hillgartner
- Length: 12 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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The Sun and the Moon tells the delightful and surprisingly true story of how a series of articles in the Sun newspaper in 1835 convinced the citizens of New York that the moon was inhabited. Purporting to reveal discoveries of a famous British astronomer, the series described such moon life as unicorns, beavers that walked upright, and four-foot-tall flying man-bats. It quickly became the most widely circulated newspaper story of the era.
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some very good some very bad
- By peter on 10-30-10
By: Matthew Goodman
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Desert Notebooks
- A Road Map for the End of Time
- By: Ben Ehrenreich
- Narrated by: David Bendena
- Length: 11 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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Layering climate science, mythologies, nature writing, and personal experiences, Desert Notebooks offers a vital and necessary chronicle of our past and our present - perfect for fans of Robert Macfarlane and Elizabeth Rush - that’s unflinching, urgent, and yet timeless and profound.
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Not about the desert, Not about Joshua Tree
- By Steve on 07-12-20
By: Ben Ehrenreich
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The Human Cosmos
- Civilization and the Stars
- By: Jo Marchant
- Narrated by: Jo Marchant
- Length: 11 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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For at least 20,000 years, we have led not just an earthly existence, but a cosmic one. Celestial cycles drove every aspect of our daily lives. Our innate relationship with the stars shaped who we are - our art, religious beliefs, social status, scientific advances, and even our biology. But over the last few centuries we have separated ourselves from the universe that surrounds us. It's a disconnect with a dire cost.
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This book has changed the way I think about my own mortality!
- By Jerry on 02-04-21
By: Jo Marchant
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A Crack in the Edge of the World
- America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906
- By: Simon Winchester
- Narrated by: Simon Winchester
- Length: 12 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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San Francisco Earthquake that leveled a city symbolic of America's relentless western expansion. Simon Winchester has also fashioned an enthralling and informative informative look at the tumultuous subterranean world that produces earthquakes, the planet's most sudden and destructive force. In the early morning hours of April 18, 1906, San Francisco and a string of towns to its north-northwest and the south-southeast were overcome by an enormous shaking that was compounded by the violent shocks of an earthquake, registering 8.25 on the Richter scale.
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7 Hours and 45 minutes . . .
- By Tim on 12-09-05
By: Simon Winchester
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Tambora
- The Eruption That Changed the World
- By: Gillen D'Arcy Wood
- Narrated by: Tom Pile
- Length: 8 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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When Indonesia's Mount Tambora erupted in 1815, it unleashed the most destructive wave of extreme weather the world has witnessed in thousands of years. The volcano's massive sulfate dust cloud enveloped the Earth, cooling temperatures and disrupting major weather systems for more than three years. Amid devastating storms, drought, and floods, communities worldwide endured famine, disease, and civil unrest on a catastrophic scale.
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An unexpected pleasure
- By Anonymous User on 09-04-16
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18 Miles
- The Epic Drama of Our Atmosphere and Its Weather
- By: Christopher Dewdney
- Narrated by: Angelo Di Loreto
- Length: 8 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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We live at the bottom of an ocean of air - 5,200 million million tons, to be exact. It sounds like a lot, but Earth’s atmosphere is smeared onto its surface in an alarmingly thin layer - 99 percent contained within 18 miles. Yet, within this fragile margin lies a magnificent realm - at once gorgeous, terrifying, capricious, and elusive. With his keen eye for identifying and uniting seemingly unrelated events, Chris Dewdney reveals to us the invisible rivers in the sky that affect how our weather works and the structure of clouds and storms and seasons, the rollercoaster of climate.
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10% science, 90% other stuff
- By Daniel W. Fox, Jr. on 10-09-20
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When We Cease to Understand the World
- By: Benjamin Labatut, Adrian West - translator
- Narrated by: Adam Barr
- Length: 5 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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When We Cease to Understand the World is a book about the complicated links between scientific and mathematical discovery, madness, and destruction. Fritz Haber, Alexander Grothendieck, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger - these are some of the luminaries into whose troubled lives Benjamín Labatut thrusts the listener, showing us how they grappled with the most profound questions of existence.
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the true heir w.g. sebald
- By Thomas on 12-23-21
By: Benjamin Labatut, and others