Richard J. Goodrich

Fear and Loathing in the Heavens: The 1910 Return of Halley's Comet

In 1705, Edmond Halley liberated humanity from the belief that comets were portents of doom; two centuries later, in 1910, as Halley’s Comet returned to perihelion, newspapers and magazines, religious leaders, misguided theorists, and shameless grifters managed to rekindle that fear. When astronomers announced that the earth would pass through the comet’s tail, opportunists exploited human anxiety—often with fatal consequences.

Drawing on material from his book Comet Madness: How the 1910 Return of Halley’s Comet (almost) Destroyed Civilization historian Richard J. Goodrich offers an entertaining lecture about the limits of human rationality and the ways a media more interested in profits than the truth can terrorize society.