Did A Comet Trigger The Great Chicago Fire?

Alien54 writes "Perhaps it was not Mrs. O'Leary's cow kicking over a lantern that sparked the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, which destroyed the downtown area and claimed 300 lives. New research lends credence to an alternative explanation: The fire, along with less-publicized and even more deadly blazes the same night in upstate Wisconsin and Michigan, was the result of a comet fragment crashing into Earth's atmosphere."

Comments

Read that a couple of years ago

[Bravo_Two_Zero]

I don't recall where, but I'd read that a couple of years ago. The main support came from what happend to a small town about 40 miles outside Chicago that was essentially obliterated by a rapid, intense fire. I think it was the center of the activity mentioned as "north of Chicago" in the article. I'm glad to see the theory getting a little more publicity and play.

Disney vs. Discovery

[tepples]

Holy Crap! Disney owns Discovery?

I don't think so. Here's a list of what Disney owns. Discover magazine is on there (scroll up to magazine titles), but it has no connection to Discovery Communications that I can find (scroll down to cable TV).

Eisner demoted!

Easily explained by radiation physics

[Tau Zero]

Buildings burned on a timescale of minutes, it was reported. Unlike your normal everyday fire, nothing was left half-burned. It also burned INTO the wind, which is contrary for usual fires. A guy in the New York Evening Post wrote, "buildings far beyond the line of fire, and in no contact with it, burst into flames from the interior". The other facts I noted may be referenced in The Annual Record of Science and Industry for1876, pg. 84 and History of the Great Conflagration Sheahan & Upton, Chicago, Illinois, 1871

If you have a large and hot enough fire, heat radiation will be able to raise material to its ignition temperature some distance away. (This can be observed in forest fires; trees will burst into flame when the fire has not yet reached them. I understand that houses in the path of forest fires often burn when radiant heat ignites things like drapes.) This would also explain why a building would burn in minutes: when every room facing the front of the fire is ignited more or less at once, and the subsequent flashover ignites the far side a short time later, the building is going to burn much faster than if the blaze started at a single point.