Well, I've been researching that first chapter of Edith's Story, the follow up to Threshold Girl www.tighsolas.ca/page10.pdf.pdf
In this chapter, Edith's 'love' Charlie Gagne has just died in the Rossmore Hotel Fire at Cornwall. Under the influence of too much 'nerve tonic' she leaves the Institute on Greene and goes to Phillip's Square and sees some paintings by Mary Riter Hamilton that set her off.
Anyway, I re-read some accounts of the fire and it appears Mr. Gagne was from Levis. So I checked the 1901 census and sure enough, he's there. He lives with his mom, a couturier and his sister, also a couturier. Hmm. Catholics. Double HMMM. So I guess I will have to make it that he was converted to Presybertianism at Westmount Methodist.
His mom being widowed and all that.. I will have it that she is doing well, as she got a lot of work for the 1908 Tercentenary Celebrations, making costumes for the galas, etc.
The Rossmore was a luxury hotel, so I can assume he is in Cornwal to act as manager, that he on the fast track to success.
He had been in Danville, at the bank of Montreal.
Anyway, another account of the fire online, says that a hotel patron was watching for Halley's Comet when he smelled smoke.
This is great thing for my story...As the 1910 Gazettes and Montreal Stars aren't available online, I have to go to Concordia or McGill soon.. Charlie's pictures in the Montreal Star. Edith wrote as much in her letter. As the fire started in the early hours of the 29th, the news report is either in the paper of the 29th (Star) or 30th.(Gazette.)
Anyway, I remembered I have all the Technical World Magazines for 1910, and figured they'd have a story on Halley's Comet and they did.. In July, by the excellent writer Bailey Millard. But it's a puff piece, as it were. I can imagine Millard was told to write this story by his editor, because the 'tone' suggests he isn't quite into it... An excellent writer, you see.
"Staggering questions, not unlike some of the posers with which children stump their elders, have been put to many scientific men in rfelation to the supposed effect of Halley's Comet upon our pleasant planet. Over and over again have the wise ones been asked, Was the comet responsible for the unprecendented atmospheric and seismic disturbances that brought so much woe to the human race during the first half of the present year?
Is a man a superstitious fool to blame any of those cataclysmic upheavals, devestating inundations, terrible typhoons, frightful and unseasonable frosts and snows, or unprecedented heat upon the comet? On this misty subject of cometary influence upon mundane affairs, are the scientific any wiser than the unscientific.
Then he describes the Seine floods of February and a heatwave in the US in the Spring, and 86 degrees in Medicine Hat Alberta in April and 100 degrees in LA. And an eruption of Mount Etna and earthquake in Costa Rica and a shower of large meteors, one setting a fire in El Paso. And Northern Lights which played havoc with the wireless systems of steamers.
Well, well. Millard goes on to say, "Plainly we are children in this branch of research.." Well, we still are. Not much has changed when it comes to how humans think.
In and around the turn of the last century I do believe that a giant sunflare wrecked havoc on the embryonic electrical systems of the era. If such a thing happens again, well, imagine what will happen. I might lose my blog and website! Because a lot has changed in 100 years, when it comes to how humans store their information.
(Well, a lot worse will happen to me if the Montreal ice storm of January 1998 is any indication.)
