Futility Closet - 002-Mass Hysteria, Airborne Sheepdogs and Mark Twain's Brother

Episode Date: March 24, 2014

As skywatchers prepared for the return of Halley's comet in 1910, they heard some alarming scientific predictions: Poisonous gases in the comet's tail might "snuff out all life on the planet," "leaving the burnt and drenched Earth no other atmosphere than the nitrogen now present in the air." How should a responsible citizen evaluate a dire prediction by a minority of experts? In this week's episode of the Futility Closet podcast, we explore the Halley's hysteria, remember the alarming predictions made for Y2K, and recall a forgotten novella in which Arthur Conan Doyle imagined a dead Earth fumigated by cosmic ether.We also consider the odd legacy of an Australian prime minister who disappeared in 1967, investigate the role of balloon-borne sheepdogs during the Siege of Paris, learn why Mark Twain's brother telegraphed the entire Nevada constitution to Washington D.C. in 1864, and offer a chance to win a book in the next Futility Closet Challenge.

Welcome to Futility Closet, a celebration of the quirky and the curious, the thought-provoking and the simply amusing. This is the audio companion to the popular website that catalogs more than 7,000 curiosities in history, language, mathematics, literature, philosophy, and art. You can find us online at futilitycloset.com. Thanks for joining us. Welcome to Episode 2. I'm Greg Ross, the creator of Futility Closet, and with me is my wife and co-host Sharon. In today's show, we'll look at the hysteria that accompanied the return of Halley's Comet in 1910, consider the odd legacy of an Australian Prime Minister who disappeared in 1967, investigate possible balloon-borne sheepdogs during the Siege of Paris,

and offer you a chance to win a book in the next Futility Closet Challenge. of Paris, and offer you a chance to win a book in the next Futility Closet Challenge. Last week, we discussed an odd sequence in Alfred Hitchcock's 1958 film, Vertigo, in which Kim Novak seemingly disappears from a San Francisco hotel room. Tim H. wrote in, Very nice first podcast. Regarding the hotel scene in Vertigo, I haven't seen the movie, but could someone else have driven off in the car while Novak's character simply moved from one room to another? That's a good question, but if you watch the whole movie, I think the answer

is no. We didn't mention it in the first podcast, but the very next scene after she disappears, you see Jimmy Stewart driving past her apartment building, and he sees her green Jaguar in the parking lot with this telltale bouquet of flowers on the dashboard. years, you see Jimmy Stewart driving past her apartment building, and he sees her green jaguar in the parking lot with this telltale bouquet of flowers on the dashboard. So you know she got back to the apartment building. You never actually see her drive there, but it's strongly implied that she did, and if you watch the rest of the movie, there's no other alternative explanation that's ever given.

To my mind, that just makes the whole thing even more perplexing, because the presence of that scene shows that Hitchcock saw that the audience would be confused by her disappearance, but it doesn't give you any more clues as to how she got out of the hotel. So the whole thing, to my mind at least, still remains just a big riddle. Another listener wrote in to say, Hi, loved the first episode. RSS is great.

Extra bonus would be the addition of availability via Stitcher.com. Thanks and keep up the good work. We'll definitely look into that. Thank you for the tip. We're still new to this podcasting business and still getting set up. So we'll look at Stitcher and if anyone else out there has any tips or suggestions or requests, please send them in. We'd love to get them. If you have any questions or comments about the podcast, the website, or the book, you can always send them to us at podcast at futilitycloset.com, or leave a comment in our show notes at blog.futilitycloset.com. On March 4th, we ran a post on the worldwide hysteria that accompanied the return of Halley's

Comet in 1910. It hadn't been seen since 1835, and people were anticipating its return eagerly until a French astronomer and science writer named Camille Flammarion noted that the comet's tail would pass through Earth's atmosphere, and he voiced some concerns that cyanogen gas in the tail might poison all of us. I'm getting this account from an excellent book by Robert Bartholomew and Benjamin Radford called The Martians Have Landed, which is a history of media scares and hoaxes. Halley's Comet was due to appear on May 18th, and Flammarion started voicing his concerns about three months before that, and the media picked them up. On February 6th, which is three months before the comet's arrival, the Washington Post reported that, quote, a mixture of this gas, meaning cyanogen gas,

with air would lead to certain poisoning, unquote. And quoted a different French astronomer who said that, quote, in the presence of fire or a small electric spark, a mixture of cyanogen gas and air will explode, close quote. That's bad enough. But that's the Washington Post, which is a very reputable paper. Reputable newspaper, yeah. And the very next day, the New York Times reported that, quote, I like the way he puts that, snuff out all life on the planet, close quote.

I like the way he puts that, snuff out all life. Yeah. We should note that both of those newspapers acknowledge that this was a minority view, and in fact Flammarion himself recanted that position shortly afterward. But that's certainly more than enough to start spreading hysteria throughout the wider media, which is exactly what happened. And the recantation didn't get nearly as much play as the original quote did. That's right, which is very unfortunate.

So that was about three months before the comet arrived. Seven days before it arrived, the Washington Post ran the memorable headline, Comet quits its path, wanders from predicted orbit, surprises may follow, which must have been interesting to encounter over your cornflakes. Four days, so three days after that, now we're just four days out from the comet appearing, Harper's Weekly quoted an astronomer named D.J. McAdam of Washington and Jefferson College, quote, when we pass through its tail in May, we will be in a stream of hydrogen,

probably mixed with marsh gas and other cometary gases. Disease and death have frequently been ascribed to the admixture of cometary gases with the air. Enough of such gases, as are in the comet's tail, would be deleterious. Close quote. There's no scientific

basis whatsoever for any of that. I don't know where he got it or why he was sharing it with Harper's Weekly. And one more quote. There's no scientific basis whatsoever for any of that. I don't know where he got it or why he was sharing it with Harper's Weekly. And one more quote. English astronomer Richard Proctor said that if the comet's tail, which was rich in hydrogen, were to pass through Earth's atmosphere, which is rich in oxygen, it could produce an explosion. Quote, this is my favorite one. Leaving the burnt and drenched Earth no other atmosphere than the nitrogen now present in the air, together with a relatively small quantity of deleterious vapors, close quote. So you can

guess what happened from the fact that we're doing a podcast here in 2014. We passed through the comet's tail on the evening of May 18th and nothing happened. Most of the scientists had predicted correctly that if there were any poisonous substances at all in the tail, they'd be so rarefied that they wouldn't have any effect. And sure enough, that's what happened. To be fair, most people didn't panic. But with that kind of coverage, even if there's a low probability, it's a huge high consequence. So you can't just dismiss it out of hand. And it seems like in some pockets of the world, in some places, more people did panic than others.

Like there were some communities where there was a high level of anxiety and concern. Yeah. I think I thought as I was researching this that when you get a scare like this, the world divides into three groups of people. The vast majority just go about their daily business and don't think that much about it. Credulous people panic, and opportunists prey on the credulous people. And that's what happened here. There were prayer vigils around the world.

People were selling comet pills and leather inhalers that supposedly would help you get through the crisis. And selling comet pills at exorbitant prices, too. Well, they're valuable. Yes, of course. It had an odd effect on miners. Kind of two different effects on miners. Miners in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania refused to go underground because they wanted to stay on the surface and pray. But miners in Denver insisted on going underground in order to limit their exposure to calamity,

whatever it turned out to be. Pope Pius X pleaded with people to stop hoarding oxygen cylinders, and in South Africa, a man placed a newspaper ad that read, Gentlemen having secured several cylinders of oxygen and having bricked up a capacious room wishes to meet others who would share the expense for Wednesday night. Numbers strictly limited. Close quote. So the good news is we all got through it, and in fact there was nothing to get through, but it's hard to know what kind of conclusion to draw from this. You know, in thinking about it this week, I was thinking, well, what was the right way to play that? If you wanted to be sort

of a hard-headed, rational person, there's a chance that Flammarion was right, or that these other sort of, you know, sky-is-falling scientists had something real to warn us about. So you can't dismiss it out of hand, but at the same time, it seems that you don't want to just fly off the handle and panic. And panic everybody with you. Yeah. The whole thing kind of reminded me of the Y2K scare. Yeah. Some of us are old enough to have lived through and remember pretty clearly.

For those who don't remember it or who weren't around yet, at the end of 1999, there were a number of experts predicting that all kinds of calamities might happen when the clock ticked over to January 1st, 2000, because many computer programs coded years with only two digits instead of four. So we were going to go, you know, 96, 97, 98, 99, 00. Right. And that there were two problems with that. One, there was going to be this lack of progression that might confuse some computer programs.

And two, computer programs might interpret it as being the year 1900 instead of the year 2000. So they thought it was one nine blank blank. And so you go from 1999 to 1900. Yes. That was the fear. That was the fear. Also, that just the lack of progression was just going to throw off the computer program completely.

Just the confusion about going 96, 97, 98, 99, 00. That sounds plausible. So there was a lot of concern about what operating systems and things controlled by computers might just crash and fail or begin operating very strangely. There was a little bit of further confusion because the year 2000 is actually not a leap year, unlike most years that end in 00. So the calendar was going to be even further confused for that year, which could throw off financial institutions and anything else that's sort of date dependent. I guess that was sort of a minor thing compared though to the fear of how the zero zero thing was going to just crash all these computer systems. And I mean, to be fair,

not everybody kind of like with the astronomers, they weren't all warning doomsday, but there were enough of them saying, well, we can't really know what's going to happen. And so many things are dependent on computers these days. So there were these dire predictions of literally planes would stop working and fall out of the sky, or the air traffic control systems would be messed up and planes would crash into each other. Elevators would stop working with people trapped on them, or subways would just suddenly stop with people trapped underground. There were predictions that utilities might go out, so we'd have no power, no water. Financial institutions would fail, so you couldn't get your money out of the banks. Your credit cards wouldn't work. There was just these catastrophic predictions. Life support systems would fail in hospitals. I mean,

if you just think of how many things are dependent to some extent or another on computer systems, you know, telecommunications would go down. So you can just imagine this absolute chaotic world where we have, you know, no power, no water, you have no way to buy anything, the stores don't have any food anyway. So about $300 billion were spent worldwide trying to prepare for these potential catastrophes. With people trying to upgrade their computer systems or put in redundant systems or patches or have all these backup and contingency plans in case these horrible things happened. have all these backup and contingency plans in case these horrible things happened. Insurance policies were being issued for businesses who wanted to insure themselves against liabilities for these catastrophic failures. Attorneys were mobilizing for major class action lawsuits so they could sue for the people harmed by these failures. People stocked up on generators and food and water and clothing.

I remember those. Cash, make sure to have cash at home. And state departments were issuing warnings about travel to countries that were seen as being less prepared for this. So I thought it was amusing. For example, Australia evacuated most of their embassy personnel from Russia because it was thought that Russia was going to be one of these ill-prepared countries that was going to descend into chaos and madness. Barbarism. Barbarism, exactly. So people were being warned not to go to certain countries and staff were being withdrawn. And, you know, as with the Halley's Comet, very little, well, with the Halley's Comet, nothing happened

in here. Very little happened. There were some minor glitches here and there, but nothing serious. Now, to be fair, a number of IT people worked very, very hard to avert any possible disaster. And you want to give them credit and possibly some of their hard work paid off. little to prepare, there was very little seen in the way of consequences. So it's kind of an open question of all that hard work that was done by IT people in the countries that did prepare, how much of that really was necessary. And this was, I remember enough of this, that it was getting play in major media. It wasn't at the time dismissed as sort of this crackpot scare. Right. There was enough, it sounds like this is what was happening in 1910 with the commons, that you couldn't, it was getting enough serious attention that you sort of, I think most of the public who followed the news were aware that this was sort of in the air. And you didn't really know who to believe because as with the 1910 scare, you had a number of,

you know, experts predicting this could happen and that could happen. And if it means descending into chaos, you know, if you don't buy a generator, then maybe you ought to buy a generator. I still don't know what the right position is to take on that. If you have a small vocal minority of experts telling you there's great cause for concern here, you seem like you don't want to just write them off. Yeah. I mean, that is a hard, it is hard to know which way to go because you don't want to just write them off. Yeah, I mean, it is hard to know which way to go because you don't want to panic at every possible catastrophe that anybody could predict.

But on the other hand, if, for example, there had been poison gas at the 1910 comet, and most of the people had been killed by it, those who had stocked up on their oxygen cylinders would have been laughing at, you know, see, you didn't believe me. And in hindsight, it would look obvious that, you know, everyone else should have stocked up as well. Related to that, there's an interesting footnote on the Halley's Comet story. Jason Holt wrote in to note that Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, published a novella in 1913, so that's just three years after the Halley's Comet scare,

in which Earth passes through a belt of poisonous ether. One of the characters says, We are all poisoned. Our planet has swum into the poison belt of ether and is now flying deeper into it at a rate of some millions of miles a minute. Our young friend has expressed the cause of all our troubles and perplexities

in a single word, poison. It's called the poison belt. And I can't find any authoritative reference that shows that Doyle was directly inspired by the Halley's business, but I think he must have been because there's so many similarities to it. Characters seal themselves up in a room with cylinders of oxygen to avoid this poisonous gas. When the cylinders are finally empty, they emerge and explore this dead post-apocalyptic England, go to London and back. Doyle seemed really interested in the effects on technology if its human operators die, so there are ships that plow into the beach and locomotives that run into hillsides and stuff. But it's kind of funny.

He doesn't seem to know how to end the story. So what happens in his story is that everyone just wakes up. They were just put to sleep by the ether and wake up after 28 hours. Professor Challenger, the, I guess, protagonist of the novella, at the end tells an American reporter, quote, it may interest you to know that the world has swum through the poisonous current which swirls like the Gulf Stream through the ocean of ether. You will also kindly note for your own future convenience that today is not Friday, August the 27th, but Saturday, August

the 28th, and that you sat senseless in your cab for 28 hours upon the Rutherfield Hill. We'll have a link to the original post on Haley's Comet and the Arthur Conan Doyle story in our show notes at blog.futilitycloset.com. Readers have sent us updates to a few recent posts. In a January post on Futility Closet, we mentioned that Australia misplaced its prime minister in 1967. His name was Harold Holt, and he went swimming against the advice of friends in the ocean near Portsea and disappeared and was never seen again. There were strong rip currents on that beach, which is why he was given the warning. So it's strongly presumed that he drowned, but his body was never found. And officially,

I think he's still just missing. The addition there is that in order to mark his memory and sort of commemorate his service, the country sought some kind of memorial by putting his name on a municipal project. And the one they chose that was currently under construction when he disappeared happened to be a swimming pool. So it's still there. The Harold Holt Memorial Swimming Center in Melbourne is a substantial swimming pool. It gets 400,000 visitors a year, and it's a thoughtful gesture, but it's kind of unfortunate that a swimming pool was named after what was probably a drowning victim. Kind of unfortunate that a swimming pool was named after what was probably a drowning victim.

The other update we had this week concerns a story we ran on March 7th about the Nevada Territory during the Civil War. In 1864, Abraham Lincoln was fighting for re-election, and the Nevada Territory was just about to join the Union. And as it happened, the population of that territory was both pro-Union and largely Republican. So it would have helped Lincoln's chances in the election if he could get them in to the Union before Election Day so they could participate in the election.

The problem with that is that technically, if you want to join the Union, you have to send your state or territory constitution to Washington, D.C. just before you can be admitted. Nevada had kept trying to do that by sending a copy of it over land, but this was 1864, and it was late October, and Election Day was coming up, and they hadn't managed to get a copy of it all the way to D.C. yet. So sort of in desperation, they finally took the unusual step of transmitting the whole thing, the whole territory's constitution, in one big telegram to Washington, D.C. This poor man named James H. Guild, the telegrapher, worked for seven hours tapping the whole thing out in Morse code. And worse than that, there's no direct line, or there wasn't then, between Carson City, the capital, and Washington, D.C. So he had to send it to Salt

Lake City, which then related to Chicago, then to Philadelphia, and then to Washington, D.C. So it was a huge undertaking. But it succeeded. They got it there on time, and Lincoln was re-elected. So they got what they wanted. It just took a huge effort at the end there. When I published this story, I included an image of the final page of the transcript. Basically, in D.C., they took the incoming telegram and wrote it all out. It filled 175 pages. And on the last page of the transcript, someone had written out the final word count, which is $16,543, and the cost, which was at the time $4,303.27, which is about $60,000 today. But I overlooked the best part. On that same page, there's the signature of the Secretary of the Nevada Territory, a man named Orion Clemens.

And three readers wrote in to tell me that that Orion Clemens is Mark Twain's brother. Jim Russell, Michael Kindell, and Bruce Barnfield. Thanks to all of you for writing in about that. I think it's fantastic. Michael even notes that the book Roughing It was about exactly this. Sam Clemens went west to Nevada to be an assistant to his brother, who was the first and only secretary of the Nevada Territory. So that's a great capper to a great story. The man who authorized the telegraphing of the entire Constitution of the Nevada Territory to Washington, D.C. in 1864 was Mark Twain's brother. We'll have a link to both posts and the image of Orion Clemens' signature in our show notes.

Okay, factor fiction. For years I've been interested in the Siege of Paris, which was an episode in French history during the Franco-Prussian War in 1870. The Prussian army surrounded Paris for four months, and it was just terribly dramatic. The sieges tend to be very dramatic, and this was no exception. So they surrounded Paris and basically starved it for four months and cut the telegraph line. So if you lived in Paris, not only did you have no food, but you couldn't communicate with your countrymen outside the city. And they came up with all kinds of wonderful expedients to get around that. One of which, which is well-documented is known as the pigeon post, where if you live in Paris and you're very adventurous, you get a bunch of homing pigeons and put them in a wicker basket and climb into a balloon and float out of the city over the Prussians who try to shoot you down and you shake your fist at them.

And if you get past them, then you can come down into friendly territory in France, communicate with them, and now you have a sort of primitive but working way to get messages back into Paris. You can attach a message, they use microfilm, to the legs of these homing pigeons and release them and they'll fly back into the city. That's well documented. I find that whole pigeon post thing to be endearing. It's so primitive, but it's so clever at the same time.

I think it's wonderful that they came up with it and that it actually worked. But in reading about that, I've come across, I think, three different accounts. They tend to mention it in passing. The same thing was tried with dogs. And this is sat in my notes because it's interesting enough that I'd like to write about it, but I can't find an account that's authoritative enough that I think I can go ahead and be sure I've got the facts straight. Anyway, here's what I think I understand. There was a resident of Paris whose name was Hurel, H-U-R-E-L, who had five dogs.

Some accounts say they were sheep dogs. Some say they were bulldogs. And his plan was something like the Pigeon Post. He would attach messages to the dogs' collars, send them up by balloon, hoping they would float out of Paris and come down somewhere in friendly territory where they would be discovered, the message would be read, and then dispatches could be attached to the dogs' collars and they would, seeking to return to their masters, hopefully run through the Prussian lines to get back into the city. So it's sort of the same principle, but done with dogs. That is such an outlandish story that normally I would dismiss that out of hand, but there were so many outlandish things happening in Paris that winter

that I think it might just be true. I mean, there's the pigeon post, which seems crazy, but actually happened. People were eating elephants and zoo animals because they were so hungry. Just out of desperation. Yeah, so this isn't something that I think, I think this is something that could actually have occurred to someone and they would have been desperate enough to try it. Anyway, the story goes, at least according to the brief accounts that I found, is that they did

send the dogs up and they were never seen again. That's the part of the story I hate. Yeah, which is kind of a puzzle too because it makes you wonder what happened to the dogs. But that's all I've been able to find out. I can list the sources I've found so far that mention this. We'll put those in the show notes.

But if there's anyone out there who knows more about the siege of Paris or airborne sheepdogs or anything about this, please write to us because I'd really love to know if it's true. And if we hear from anyone or I can find any more details about it, I'll certainly let you know in a future show. Now for the weekly challenge. In last week's challenge, we asked you to remove or change one letter in a familiar phrase to make a new phrase. This was inspired by a competition in New York Magazine in the 1970s, and some entries in that contest were, To be or not to be, what is the question? Love's labor's cost.

I've come to bury Caesar, not to raise him. What is so rare as a May in June? I like that one. Thanks to all of our listeners who sent in entries of their own. Here are some of our favorites. Boon Lien Eng said, killing me softly with his son. David sent in, the only thing we have to wear is fear itself. Tommy offered, a nose by any other name would smell as sweet. And Steve Martin gave us, madam, I'm a ham, which is a clever play on the palindrome, madam, I'm Adam. From my notes, this is just, I think, just pure coincidence. James Thurber, in his

last book, Lanterns and Lances, from 1961, he liked to play with language, and he set himself the same challenge, just by coincidence, I think. Anyway, some of his offerings were A Stitch in Time Saves None, There's No Business Like Shoe Business, Lafayette, We Ate

Here, and my favorite, Don, Give up the shit for this week's challenge I want to base this one on a book that Douglas Adams and John Lloyd wrote in 1983 called The Meaning of Lif which they described as a dictionary of things that there aren't any words for yet basically they took place names and then made up fanciful definitions for them

hopefully definitions of things that we ought to have words for anyway, but don't. For example, they say to Plymouth is to relate an amusing story to someone without remembering that it was they who told it to you in the first place. A shepi is a measure of distance, they say about seven-eighths of a mile, defined as the closest distance at which sheep remain picturesque. say, about seven-eighths of a mile, defined as the closest distance at which sheep remain picturesque. Cromartie is the brittle sludge which clings to the top of ketchup bottles and plastic tomatoes in nasty cafes. And a cotterstock is a piece of wood used to stir paint and thereafter stored uselessly in a shed in perpetuity. One that I've added that I think this language needs a word for is, I'll use the word Sheboygan for it,

to recognize an actor in a movie but not be able to place him. Because this is happening all the time to me now where we're watching some movie and I recognize a guy and I cannot remember anything except that we saw something, some other film that was very unlike this one where he wore a monocle and had a German accent. And he played a completely different part and you can can almost picture it, but you just can't quite. And now you're missing half the movie, trying to remember where you've seen this guy before. Right, so you can't attend the movie you're trying to watch

because your brain's trying to remember you're Sheboyganing on this guy. Send your entries in to podcast at futilitycloset.com or post them in the show notes at blog.futilitycloset.com. The winner will receive a copy of our book, Futility Closet, an Eiler's Miscellany of Compendious Amusements, which contains hundreds of time-wasting curiosities, oddities, and puzzles. That's it for this episode. You can see the show notes at blog.futilitycloset.com,

where you can leave comments or feedback, ask questions, enter the challenge, and see the links and images mentioned in today's episode. You can also email us at podcast at FutilityCloset.com. If you enjoy Futility Closet, you can find the book on Amazon.com or visit us on the web at FutilityCloset.com, where you can browse over 7,000 time-killing posts. If you would like to support Futility Closet, you can tell your friends about us, leave a review of the book or podcast on Amazon or iTunes, or click the Donate button on the sidebar of the website. Our music was written and produced by Doug Ross.

Futility Closet is a member of the Boing Boing family of podcasts. Thanks for listening, and we'll talk to you next week.