Scare tactics and end of the world predictions are nothing new to our time. In 1912, a newspaper published this story, claiming that our planet was going to crash into the sun. The article then does a switcheroo on the reader stating that it is normal for the earth to rotate and change its distance to the sun. This must have have scared the poop out of some people.
Mother Earth Dashes Three Million Miles Nearer the Sun
Washington, Jan. 3. — This earth has dashed 3,000,000 miles nearer the fiery furnace of the sun in the past few months, according to statements given out here today and verified from the highest astronomical sources.
If this rate of speed continues, we will crash into the sun on Thanksgiving day, 1927, and be totally destroyed in one puff of smoke.
According to astronomers at the United States observatory here we have been on this mad fall toward the sun since 2 a.m. last July 3. Each day since that hot July morning this terrestrial sphere, in its mad flight through space, has “dropped” more than 16,000 miles toward the sun.
This morning we are only 91,000,000 miles from the sun; July 3 — you remember how hot it was then? We were 94,000,000 miles distant.
At this tremendous speed of 683 miles an hour we would go smash! bang! right into the celestial conflagration in 1927.
But long before then we would all be roasted to a good dark brown; oceans would be dried up, a thimbleful of ice would be worth more than all the diamonds in the world, and J. Pierpont Morgan wouldn’t be able to swap all his bank trusts and railroads for a palm leaf fan.
If this old planet keeps up her slanting slide towards the sun.
But don’t worry. Mother Earth already has decided that 91,000,000 miles is near enough for her. Before bedtime tonight she will begin steering away from Old Sol. While we are celebrating the next Fourth of July she will slip into the place she occupied July 3, 1911 — the point farthest from the sun.
Uncle Sam’s astronomers gravely remarked “the earth’s orbit is an ellipse of small eccentricity, in one of whose foci is the sun; it follows therefore that the earth is at perihelion at the beginning of the year, and at aphelion about the middle of the year.
All of which means — in plain United States — that the earths path around the sun is shaped something like a goose egg, the sun being at one side on the center. In January we are at the point nearest the sun; in July, farthest.
But a little thing like 3,000,000 miles doesn’t cut much ice with the weather man; he goes right along giving us the blizzards and zero stuff. He says that a few million miles more or less doesn’t effect our climate because of the slanting way the sun’s rays strike us.
Source: (1912, January 03). Mother Earth Dashes Three Million Miles Nearer the Sun. The Day Book, p. 14-15.
