Great Chicago Fire - Questions About The Fire

Questions About The Fire

Catherine O'Leary seemed the perfect scapegoat: she was an Irish Catholic immigrant, who were unpopular because of their high numbers in the city. This story was circulating in Chicago even before the flames had died out, and it was noted in the Chicago Tribune's first post-fire issue. In 1893 the reporter Michael Ahern retracted the "cow-and-lantern" story, admitting it was fabricated.

The amateur historian Richard Bales has suggested the fire started when Daniel "Pegleg" Sullivan, who first reported the fire, ignited hay in the barn while trying to steal milk. Anthony DeBartolo reported evidence in the Chicago Tribune suggesting that Louis M. Cohn may have started the fire during a craps game. Cohn may also have admitted to starting the fire in a lost will.

Bales' account does not have consensus. The Chicago Public Library staff had criticized his account in their web page on the fire.

An alternative theory, first suggested in 1882 by Ignatius L. Donnelly in Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel, is that the Great Chicago Fire was caused by a meteor shower. At a 2004 conference of the Aerospace Corporation and the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, engineer and physicist Robert Wood suggested that the fire began when Biela's Comet broke up over the Midwest. That four large fires took place, all on the same day, all on the shores of Lake Michigan (see Related Events), suggests a common root cause. Eyewitnesses reported sighting spontaneous ignitions, lack of smoke, "balls of fire" falling from the sky, and blue flames. According to Wood, these accounts suggest that the fires were caused by the methane that is commonly found in comets.

But as meteorites are not known to start or spread fires and are cool to the touch after reaching the ground, this theory has not found favor in the scientific community. A common cause for the fires in the Midwest can be found in the fact that the area had suffered through a tinder-dry summer, so that winds from the front that moved in that evening were capable of generating rapidly expanding blazes from available ignition sources, which were plentiful in the region. Methane-air mixtures become flammable only when the methane concentration exceeds 5%, at which point the mixtures also become explosive. Methane gas is lighter than air and thus does not accumulate near the ground; any localized pockets of methane in the open air would rapidly dissipate. Moreover, if a fragment of an icy comet were to strike the Earth, the most likely outcome, due to the low tensile strength of such bodies, would be for it to disintegrate in the upper atmosphere, leading to an air burst explosion analogous to that of the Tunguska event.