Mass psychosis over doomsday predictions from various pseudoscientists and charlatans is quite common. People’s fears are always accompanied by dishonest entrepreneurs. Many are familiar with the surge in sales of primitive nuclear war shelter kits in the West on the eve of the Cuban Missile Crisis. But often, entrepreneurs (like journalists in pursuit of profit and sensationalism) themselves trigger an avalanche of panic, literally contrived.
For example, the following notes were published in the American and English press on August 24, 1899:
Reports from southern Russia to the effect that a belief of the approaching of the end of the world is causing a panic among the uneducated at Kharkov, the capital of the government of that name. Workmen are leaving in large numbers wishing to spend what they consider their last days at their village homes. The factory owners have asked the police to stop this immigration in order to prevent the ruination of business.
Kharkiv researcher A. Paramonov found information about this in the archives: an “apocalyptic crisis” engulfed workers at brick factories (one of which belonged to the renowned photographer Vasily Dosekin); people refused to work or went home. Fraudsters profited from these gullible people, buying their homes cheaply before the “end of the world.”
In one village near Kharkov, all the cattle were slaughtered in order to eat them before the apocalypse.
Panic was observed not only in Kharkiv, but also in the USA, Latin America, Europe and Asia.
The Austrian Rudolf Falb, whose pseudoscientific ideas were quite well known, became a prophet of the end of the world. For example, in his theory of the Earth’s “critical days,” Falb claimed that the frequency of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions is due to the influence of the Sun, Moon, or comets that pass too close and, with their gravity, cause disturbances in the Earth’s magma (similar to the Moon’s influence on the tides).
According to Falb’s predictions, a wandering comet in the Leonid meteor shower would collide with Earth on November 1, 1899. He made this prediction back in 1892.
But who stirred up the panic? Those same publishing houses. In 1899, they remembered the pseudoscientist’s prediction and began printing and distributing 15-kopeck pamphlets about the end of the world.
Four versions of a translation circulated in the Russian Empire, supposedly from a Polish brochure published in Łódź. Incidentally, I was unable to find any trace of the original.
The authorities, scientists and other publishers tried to quell the panic.
For example, the books by Marcin Ernst, professor of astronomy at the Lviv Polytechnic, “O końcu świata i kometach” or “There will be no end of the world” published by Ivan Sytin are well known.
But, of course, scientific refutation books with a bunch of obscure terms were of little interest to people.
By the way, different people expected the end of the world to happen on either November 1 or 13, because they believed that the apocalypse was calculated according to a “foreign” calendar, and therefore it needed to be translated in accordance with the local calendar.
The end of the world didn’t occur on either November 1 or 13. Not everyone accepted the deception, claiming humanity was simply lucky because the Americans shot the comet with a cannon, or that the comet was made of bread and was eaten by birds—the press openly mocked the ignorance of uneducated peasants. Modern researchers emphasize that the scale of the panic was exaggerated after the fact; not every chronicle of those days in 1899 mentions these events.
In any case, the psychosis surrounding the “catastrophe” of 1899 only confirms the theory that the demand for negative forecasts always outstrips the demand for positive ones, and that viral manipulation of people through the press is as old as the world, and arose long before the advent of viral messages in instant messengers.