How Nature Altered Human History:
The Chicago Fire
Nobody knows for sure what started the infamous Chicago fire that began on October 8, 1871. Starting on the city?s west side, it burned more than 3 square miles, killed 300, and left 90,000 homeless. The traditional story — that Mrs. O'Leary's cow started the blaze by kicking a lantern — may be fanciful, but the great fire probably began in some similarly mundane way. Still, an alternative theory implicating Biela?s Comet surfaced by 1883. The idea reappeared in a 1985 book by filmmaker Mel Waskin and again in a 2004 paper by former McDonnell Douglass employee Robert M. Wood. According to the theory, comet fragments started the Chicago fire and other fires near Lake Michigan that day — including the deadliest at Peshtigo, Wisconsin, which killed some 1200 people and burned more than a million acres. In preceding decades, Biela's comet had split in two. Wood ventured that as the pieces passed Jupiter, the planet?s gravity may have accelerated one piece toward Earth a year ahead of schedule — 1871 instead of 1872. He cited eyewitness reports of "fire balloons," and a rain of hot sand and argued that these reports and others matched the expected effects of comet fragments.
The claim that Biela's Comet started the 1871 fires hasn't carried the day though. Skeptics note that the eyewitness reports have more earthly explanations. Astronomers also doubt the theory, since meteorites are not known to cause fires. When space debris enters Earth's atmosphere, a thin surface layer heats violently for a short time, but that hot surface sheds during transit. Meteorites found soon after impact are often cool — sometimes even coated with frost. The true cause of the devastation that night may remain a mystery, but one thing seems clear: drought and high winds conspired to make the fires some of the most damaging and infamous in America's history.
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