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INTRODUCTION

Comets have been celebrated and revered throughout all human history, and they are as old as the solar system itself. Indeed, comets, or more specifically the icy nuclei that constitute the heart of the cometary display, are older than the Earth. Literally giant icebergs in space, cometary nuclei were among the firstborn, being the icy planetesimals that grew in the frigid bulk of the nascent solar nebula. Cometary nuclei coalesced in the primordial alchemy that took place 4.56 billion years ago, and they have harassed and hydrated the Earth and planets ever since – indeed, since the proverbial day one they have spread long bedazzling tails across the darkness of the night sky.

Most comets appear entirely at random; they are renegades that work against the clockwork certainty of the celestial sphere. Mercurial, temporary, different and unlike anything else in the heavens, humans could not fail to find comets strange and unsettling – they literally and figuratively rebel against the order and permanency of the stars. Perhaps it was some ancient rumor or mythological-twisting of a past collision that resulted in comets being cast in the role of unwelcome strangers; for certainly, from the earliest of surviving records, the sighting of a new comet has invariably been taken as a cause for concern. We may well wish upon a falling star, but the sudden appearance of a comet is not something to be wished for. Portentous messengers of doom, especially for any ruling aristocracy, Shakespeare reminds us that comets are a special heavenly sign, “when beggars die there are no comets seen; the heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes”. In parallel sympathy, Erasmus, that great medieval humanist, impressed upon society, with both ancient and modern-day resonance, that only by “the good influence of our conduct may we bring salvation to human affairs; or like a fatal comet we my bring destruction in our train”. Indeed, comets have long taken the rap for instigating extraordinary earthly proceedings – being cast as the purveyors of famine, the bringers of war, the harbingers of political downfall, and the agents of flood, drought, and plague.

Victorian novelist Thomas Hardy, who was well read in astronomy, further deepens the mystery of comets when he describes their properties as being “erratic, inapprehensible, [and] untraceable” [1]– all characteristics that run counter to the human ideal of a world full of order, understanding and certainty. Indeed, public suspicion (and gullibility) runs deep when it comes to comets. The great Christian apologist C. S. Lewis portrayed a lurking comet in his science-fiction work, Out of A Silent Planet (first published in 1938): the book’s philologist hero Dr. Elwin Ransom seeing, on his way to Malacandra (the planet Mars), against a backdrop of splendid stars and majestic planets, a “comet, tiny and remote”. Here the comet image is one of implied malevolence, a cowardly evil ready to stir-up trouble when the time is right. Never was comet-angst and disharmony more rampant than during the 1910 return of Halley’s Comet. People fretted over the uncertainty of what might happen as the Earth traversed its extended tail, and the ‘snake oil’ industry went into overdrive. A comet-born demon was about to be unleashed upon our hapless globe, and only the well-prepared and cautious would survive the ordeal. The comet-sent killer, an invisible and silent stalker, was to be the deadly gas cyanogen (HCCN), a molecule that spectroscopists had previously identified within cometary light. Clearly, many reasoned, therefore, all humanity was to be asphyxiated when the Earth swept through the comet’s noxious out-gassings – it was literally the sting in the comet’s tail. Panic, of a sort, ensued and sugar-coated quinine pills, along with mouth inhalers and gas masks could be purchased to ward off the deadly effects of the comet’s emanations. Submarines were made available for hire so that the discerning few might ride-out the encounter under the safety of the ocean waves, for indeed, as one newspaper clipping extolled, “deadly cyanogen gas does not travel through the water”. In Arizona “comet proof” rooms were constructed by the Malapai Mining Company – guests, the Arizona Republican newspaper for 16 May reported, would be walled-in for 10 days in order to “counteract any poisonous comet gas”. For those more inclined to celebrate the end of days, however, other products were made available to ease their would-be passage into the afterlife – for the hard drinker there was Comet Whiskey, especially distilled by Bernheim Brothers in Louisville, Kentucky; the more bohemian of taste could imbibe a Halley Highball or a Cyanogen Flip. If drinking was not a personal preference, then the more temperate in nature could while away their final hours to the rolling refrains of Ed Mahoney’s especially composed Comet Rag. At other times in history the hapless comet observer could have consoled the desperation of existence by taking a sip of prized comet wine [2] - but history tells us that 1910 was not to be a vintage year. The grapes did not wither upon the vine as Earth passed through the tail of Halley’s Comet on 19 May 1910, nor, for that matter, did they especially flourish, but no one died of cyanogen poisoning. Deaths, however, were reported, with a desperate few choosing to take their own lives before cometary devastation descended upon the Earth. Eighty-seven years later the same sad story played itself-out when comet Hale-Bopp came in from the frozen depths of the outer solar system. Lost to the resources of sensibility and apparent reason, 39 members of the Heaven’s Gate Cult tragically committed mass suicide on 26 March 1997, convinced that they would be teleported to salvation aboard an alien spaceship that was following the comet towards the Sun [3].

In contrast to the news that was to prevail in 1910 and the Heaven’s Gate tragedy of 1997, renowned author H. G. Wells chose to run against tradition in his short novel In The Days of the Comet (published in 1906). For Wells the nameless comet was a catalyst, with the storyline seeing the Earth pass through its gaseous tail and thereby ushering-in a wonderful atmospheric transformation. Echoing ideas popularized by Isaac Newton in the early 18th Century, Wells had the comet invigorate Earth’s atmosphere: “the nitrogen of the air [was changed into] a respirable gas, differing indeed from oxygen, but helping and sustaining its action, a bath of strength and healing for nerve and brain”. In short, because of the comet encounter Earth’s atmosphere becomes a kind of happy-gas, resulting in the end of war, hatred and strife. The chemistry and transformation, of course, is nonsense, but it enables the story to develop. Indeed, In The Days of the Comet is one of Wells’s more gentle works [4], evoking as it does, the development of a Utopian society that actually appears to work – a conclusion at odds with his more famous earlier work The Time Machine (published in 1895).

Writing several decades before Wells’s The Days of the Comet, Jules Verne explored the consequences of an Earth grazing encounter (which supposedly took place on “January 1, 188x”) in his 1877 novel, Off on a Comet. The comet, given the name Gallia, causes a fragment of the Earth to be launched into space, and the story follows the journey undertaken by the hapless survivors. The Earth-fragment undergoes a miraculous and astronomically revealing tour of the solar system, and exactly one year after being launched it returns to the Earth’s orbit – at which point the survivors return to terra firma by hot air balloon. As with most of Verne’s fantasy stories many facts and numbers are presented, but, too admittedly over nit-pick, it is clear that he woefully misunderstood cometary orbits and Kepler’s laws. The intriguing aspect of the comet inspired novels by Wells and Verne, however, is that when they were written their somewhat bizarre story lines would have been deemed entirely plausible, or at least not impossible.

Comets have long been the celestial mirrors to reflect human hopes and fears. They have brought-out individual weaknesses, and they have inspired intellectual triumphs. The story of discovery, however, is far from complete and much yet remains to be unraveled with respect to the physical origins and evolution of the wayward slips of light called comets. And, while many volumes have been written about the history of comets, it is not my intention to overly dwell upon that long-explored material here. Yes, comets are special and they certainly have a prominent place in human history – indeed, their unexpected appearance, on occasion, has literally changed the course of history – but here it is the taming of the comet that I wish to study. What, indeed, are the wayward paths followed by comets? More than straightforward geometry, however, it is also the history and development of one specific machine, the cometarium, which will be explored in this text. Indeed, the cometarium is the tamed comet; it is the comet placed in clockwork with its path and appearance constrained to the rhythmical turn of a mechanical crank. As an artifact of that great, if not innate, human desire to build models, both physical and mental, the cometarium is a tactile expression of a comet’s curving path – we can literally hold the dynamics of a comet within our hands - rotate it before our eyes and change our perspective view like some omnipotent observer. Indeed, the cometarium brings the unimaginable scale of a comet’s orbit down to Earth, making it human-sized and perceptible as a single entity. The cometarium turns the complex physics that underlies a comet’s motion in space into the indomitable and certain roll of meshed gearing – it literally cuts to the chase. For all this, however, the tameness portrayed by the cometarium, as we shall see, turns out to be a chimera; the comet is a beast that moves beyond the certainty encoded within finely interlocking gears. But all is not lost, and nor were the skills and labor of the instrument-maker deployed in vain; the cometarium, as part of the great panoply of planetary models, is an enduring art form, and a work reflective of great human intellect.

While the original cometaria were constructed using a non-standard set of twin elliptical pulleys, the more contemporary models are made of cardstock, thin wire, and on occasion glass and wood. These latter day cometaria capture, in freeze-frame format, the entire cometary path – the time and position variation of the comet being traced out upon a gently curving arc. Less elegant, perhaps, than their engineered forebears, modern card cometaria are no less useful in showing, even to the simplest tyro, how comets move through the inner solar system. The craftsmanship may well have gone, but the message endures. And, indeed, it is through such simple card models that the general public and the non-specialist have come to know the ways of the comet. Largely replaced now by animation sequences displayed on a computer screen, the card cometarium still has contemporary pedagogical relevance, and building, by ones own hand, such a display provides, even in our computer dominated age, a personal, tactile and tangible link to the world of the comet.

At its core the cometarium is a demonstration device – built to illustrate the highly elliptical nature of cometary orbits, and to mimic the phenomenon of changing orbital speeds. Indeed, the cometarium is the mechanical embodiment of the first two laws of planetary motion as outlined by Johannes Kepler in his great thesis Astronomy Nova published in 1609. The cometarium, as traditionally designed, however, fails in one of its prescribed tasks. The failure is only slight, indeed, not readily noticeable to the eye, and the failure in no manner distracts from the cometarium’s intended demonstration function. The sticking point, for those that wish to quibble, is Kepler’s second law. While the cometarium illustrates this second law, revealing the characteristic speeding up of a comet’s motion as it rounds the Sun, it does not actually solve-for the full requirements of Kepler’s second law. The cometarium is not an analog computer. For all this, however, specialist mechanical-cousins to the cometarium were constructed during the early to mid 20th Century in order to solve the equations associated with Kepler’s Problem. As we shall see later on, while Kepler’s three laws of planetary motion tell us about the orbital shape and characteristic motion of an object (a planet, comet, asteroid, or spacecraft) moving under the influence of a central force, they do not actually tell us where the object will be in its orbit at some specified time. It is this latter question that constitutes Kepler’s Problem. In the modern era the equations behind Kepler’s Problem are easily and rapidly solved for on a PC, but before the time of electronic computation much pencil-work was required to extract a solution. Necessity, as ever, being the mother of invention, resulted in the design and construction of several remarkable mechanical devices to help speed-up the astronomers’ number-crunching. These analog devices, which have no specific group name, were very much scientific instruments; built with the aim of extracting an actual number from a set of variable input parameters. Ingenious, complex, delightful and now entirely obsolete, these devices, just like the original cometarium, had a relatively short ascendancy, but it is their remarkable story that will be revealed in the following chapters.

A few final introductory comments about units and notation are now probably called for. Astronomers notoriously mix and match their units in almost any fashion; in general, however, the SI system will be used through this text, with astronomical distances being given in astronomical units (AU), light years (ly) or parsecs (pc). The astronomical unit corresponds to the Earth’s orbital semi-major axis and is equivalent to some 149.6 million kilometers. The light year and the parsec build upon the AU scale, with 1 ly = 63,240 AU and 1 pc = 3.262 ly. Comet designations have a somewhat complex history and format, and not every text applies them consistently. Most comets don’t have a specific common name, but all comets have a designation number that is now provided for by the Minor Planet Center (MPC) at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The current designation system is based upon the year of discovery and a letter plus number pair indicating the month and order of discovery. A comet with an orbital period less than 200 years which has been observed to pass perihelion at least twice is given a P/ designation – so Halley’s Comet, for example, is known as comet 1P/ Halley since it was the first known periodic comet, and its orbital period was determined by Edmund Halley to be about 75 years. Halley’s Comet is also cataloged according to each of its recorded returns, and is additionally designated, for example, as 1P/1982 U1 (the U1 indicating that it was the first comet to be detected in the first half of the month of October). A non-periodic comet or a comet observed just once is given a C/ designation – so, for example, the recently observed comet Hale-Bopp (discovered by Alan Hale and Thomas Bopp) is designated C/1995 O1 (with the O1 indicating that it was first detected in the second half of the month of July). A lost and/or destroyed comet is given a D/ designation: comet D/1894 F1 (Denning), for example, was discovered by the famed amateur astronomer William Frederick Denning in March of 1894, and although the observational data at that time indicated an elliptical orbit and an orbital period of about 7.5 years, the comet has not been seen since Denning first swept it up. And, finally, in terms of applying names to comets, the current rules set by the MPC dictate that up to three independent discoverer names can be applied to any one comet.