On June 18th 1910, hail 6 inches in diameter fell in Sunbury Pa.
The ice smashed through store windows, sky lights, and greenhouses throughout Snyder & Northumberland Counties.
The Sunbury & Selinsgrove Trolley Car, caught in the storm, had nearly all of its windows broken.
"... one large one was hurled a distance of fifty yards with ease, after the manner of a baseball" The storm lasted for seven minutes, and the hail remained on the ground for half an hour.
The world had spent the first part of the year 1910 in a panic that earth would be destroyed by Halley's comet. A french astronomer theorized that as the earth passed through the comets tail, "“cyanogen gas would impregnate the atmosphere and possibly snuff out all life on the planet".
Fraudsters hawked anti-comet pills, with one brand promising to be “an elixir for escaping the wrath of the heavens,” and gas masks flew off the shelves. Worried citizens packed plugged up the keyholes of their homes to keep the comets vapors at bay.
While many panicked, others packed rooftops and held special Comet Dinners, to view the spectacular once in a lifetime event. Flammarion seemed to stick to his theory right until the end of the comet’s show, claiming that four observers “had certain olfactory experiences, which are described variously as a smell of burning vegetables, or a marsh, or of acetylene, " but at no point in 1910 was the Earth in danger of incineration. (A comet is not burning, so there is no heat.) And there was there any danger of poisonous gas from a comet “impregnating” the atmosphere.
Earth spent a total of six hours in the tail of Halley’s comet.
A month later, 6 inch hail fell in Sunbury. One local paper called it "Halley's Last Shot At Earth".
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More Stories & History From Sunbury Pa
And more Stories & History From surrounding towns:
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The Lewisburg Chronicle, 1910
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