KEEP WATCHING ELENIN:COMET BIELA "DISINTEGRATED" LIKE COMET ELENIN, NOW WE HAVE ANNUAL ANDROMEDID METEOR SHOWER.

Sunday evening, October 8, 1871 marked the beginning of one of the most devastating fires in U.S. history. Legend has it that “The Great Chicago Fire” resulted from an agitated cow kicking over a lantern in “Mrs O’Leary’s barn”. The dry leaves and parched wood of Illinois in early autumn were the perfect kindling for a wildfire, and the fire spread with extraordinary rapidity, consuming homes and buildings, leaping from rooftop to rooftop with the speed of a locomotive. Between October 8 and 10, an estimated 350 people perished. The fire destroyed the homes of up to one-third of the city's population, about 1,600 stores, 60 factories, and 28 public buildings. Four square miles of the city burned to the ground.

Contrary to popular folklore, the Chicago fire is not the worst in U.S. history. It was not even the worst to occur on October 8 that year. The same evening—in fact, at the same time, about 9:30—a fierce wildfire struck in Peshtigo, Wisconsin, over 200 miles to the north of Chicago, destroying the town and a dozen other villages. Estimates of those killed range upward from 1200 to 2500 in a single night. It was not the Chicago fire but the simultaneous “Peshtigo Fire” that was the deadliest in U.S. history.

And there is more. On the same evening, across Lake Michigan, another fire also wreaked havoc. Though smaller fires had been burning for some time—not unusual under the reported conditions—the most intense outburst appears to have erupted simultaneously with the Chicago and Peshtigo fires. The blaze is said to have then burned for over a month, consuming over 2,000,000 acres and killing at least 200.

The comet was named after Austrian officer W. von Biela, who observed the body in February 1826. By following the path of Biela, the French astronomer Marie-Charles-Théodore de Damoiseau estimated the time of its return. He said the comet would cross the orbit of the Earth about one month ahead of our planet’s arrival at the same spot.

Donnelly does not mention that ten days after Biela’s announcement, a French astronomer John Felix Adolphe Gambart also sighted the comet. Both Biela and Gambert calculated the orbit, recognizing that earlier comet apparitions in 1772 and 1805 were the same object that appeared in 1826. And Gambert, along with other astronomers, predicted that the comet would strike the earth on its return, which he projected for October 29, 1832.

Damoiseau’s prediction was correct. Earth missed the comet by about a month.

On its anticipated 1846 return, Biela was first sighted in late 1845 as it moved toward perihelion (its closest approach to the Sun), astronomers were surprised to see that the head of the comet had acquired a faint satellite. It had split in two



(picture above)

,something we now know to be fairly common for comets, but still mysterious to cometologists. In 1845, the event seemed unprecedented. As noted by Carl Sagan and Nancy Druyan in their book Comet, “the finding was so bizarre that the first astronomer to note this twinning dismissed it as some internal reflection in his telescope”.

In Robert Chapman’s and John Brandt’s The Comet Book certain details of Biela’s return are fascinating. The discovery of a partner occurred on January 13, 1846, when “a faint satellite comet was observed a small distance from the main comet”. Two tails were seen parallel to each other. “Over the next month the fainter of the two comets increased in brightness and finally became brighter than the ‘main’ comet. The situation then reversed and the main comet became the brighter one again. In addition, the main comet grew a second tail and a luminous bridge of material joined the two comets”. At this time the two nuclei were apart an estimated 250,000 kilometers, about two thirds of the distance separating Earth and the Moon.

Amazingly, and with the aid of a startling and unpredicted meteor shower on November 27, 1872, Professor W. Klinkerfues of Berlin, calculated the trajectories of the meteoric falls, concluding that they were the remains of the comet. This, in turn led him to send instructions to Norman Pogson, Government Astronomer at the Madras Observatory in India (far enough south to allow a good view). Pogson’s answer to Klinkerfues, dated December 6, said he “found Biela immediately” on the first clearing of the sky, and on the second day he saw it again. It showed no tail, he said.

As Chapman and Brandt put it, this was either an “incredible coincidence”, or it was the actual last view of the comet.

It remains to be asked, then, whether the fragmentation of Biela, a comet on a path intersecting the orbit of the Earth, and predicted by some astronomers to collide with the Earth in 1832, might have been the source of the “great conflagration” in 1871. The comet had split at least 25 years earlier (the 1846 appearance), and the two partners had separated by more than 2 million kilometers by 1852. So whether or not Klinkerfues observed Biela after the spectacular shower of November 1872, we know he did not report seeing two bodies. Hence, at least one of the partners intersecting Earth’s path had presumably already disintegrated entirely, leaving the possibility that on a subsequent orbit the Earth moved into debris left by the body.

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But of all the scientific details about comet Biela, perhaps none stands out more dramatically than the fact almost never mentioned—a jet forming between the two nuclear fragments when they were 2 million kilometers apart. In the purely gravitational and mechanical terms that astronomers have sought to apply to comets, this jet is inconceivable. But when we remember how inconsequential is gravity in the presence of the electric force, the improbability disappears.

In fact, the jet is a clue more vital by far than the popular “scientific” commentary on Donnelly’s hypothesis. By directing our attention to the electrical nature of comets, it also invites us to look again at the historic testimony, with an eye to details long unnoticed or forgotten.

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On the evening of October 8, 1871 devastating fires erupted at virtually the same moment in three different states in the region of the Great Lakes—Wisconsin, Illinois, and Michigan. The outbursts included the notorious “Chicago fire”, but also an even more devastating fire in Wisconsin, the worst in U.S. history, covering some 400 square miles. At the same time, wildfires also erupted across much of Michigan. In his book Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel, published in 1883, Ignatius Donnelly proposed that the simultaneous outbursts were no coincidence; they were the effect of our Earth meeting up with a fragment, or fragments, of comet Biela, a body that had disintegrated a few years earlier while on an Earth-threatening path.

As Donnelly reports it, in the Wisconsin fire near Lake Michigan, a large area including the town of Peshtigo and several neighboring cities was "swept bare by an absolute whirlwind of flame”. His review of the event, based on eyewitness accounts, was taken primarily from the book "History of the Great Conflagration", by James W. Sheahan and George P. Upton (1871). It includes the following report:

"At sundown there was a lull in the wind and comparative stillness. For two hours there were no signs of danger; but at a few minutes after nine o'clock, and by a singular coincidence, precisely the time at which the Chicago fire commenced, the people of the village heard a terrible roar. It was that of a tornado, crushing through the forests. Instantly the heavens were illuminated with a terrible glare. The sky, which had been so dark a moment before, burst into clouds of flame. A spectator of the terrible scene says the fire did not come upon them gradually from burning trees and other objects to the windward, but the first notice they had of it was a whirlwind of flame in great clouds from above the tops of the trees, which fell upon and entirely enveloped everything”.

It came in great sheeted flames from heaven', says another. 'There was a pitiless rain of fire and SAND. The atmosphere was all afire'. Some speak of 'great balls of fire unrolling and shooting forth, in streams’. The fire leaped over roofs and trees, and ignited whole streets at once".


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A writer in the New York "Evening Post" says he saw "buildings far beyond the line of fire, and in no contact with it, burst into flames from the interior”.

To these references, Donnelly adds a quote from The Annual Record of Science and Industry" for 1876, page 84:

"The flames that consumed a great part of Chicago were of an unusual character and produced extraordinary effects. They absolutely melted the hardest building-stone, which had previously been considered fire-proof. Iron, glass, granite, were fused and run together into grotesque conglomerates, as if they had been put through a blast-furnace. No kind of material could stand its breath for a moment."

Another quote from Sheahan & Upton's Work:

"The huge stone and brick structures melted before the fierceness of the flames as a snow-flake melts and disappears in water, and almost as quickly. Six-story buildings would take fire and disappear for ever from sight in five minutes by the watch. . . . The fire also doubled on its track at the great Union Depot and burned half a mile southward in the very teeth of the gale--a gale which blew a perfect tornado, and in which no vessel could have lived on the lake. . . . Strange, fantastic fires of blue, red, and green played along the cornices of buildings".