Departures of note

Rudolf Falb, an Austrian popularizer of natural history, built a public career on a theory that academic science rejected: that earthquakes and volcanic eruptions were caused by tidal forces acting on subterranean lakes of lava. He called the days when the sun and moon were aligned or in certain orbital positions “Critical Days” and predicted that geophysical disasters were more likely then. His reputation soared after the 1873 Belluno earthquake and an 1874 eruption of Mount Etna seemed to confirm his forecasts, and he lectured widely across Europe, giving 108 talks in the winter of 1876–77 alone.

Falb was born in 1838 in Obdach, Styria, the son of a miner turned miller. After his father’s early death, a local school teacher sponsored his education at a Benedictine-run abbey, and he studied theology at the University of Graz. He was ordained a Catholic priest in 1862 and served briefly as a chaplain, but soon became a teacher of religion and German at a merchants’ academy in Graz, where the writer Peter Rosegger was among his pupils. Falb grew estranged from Catholicism, renounced his priesthood in 1866, and converted to Protestantism in 1872. He later studied mathematics, physics, astronomy, and geology at universities in Prague and Vienna, though there is no record of his earning a degree.

In 1877 Falb traveled to South America to study volcanic phenomena and stayed far longer than planned, traveling from Chile to Cuzco, Lake Titicaca, and Bolivia. He became a favorite of Bolivian president Hilarión Daza but had to leave when Daza was removed from office in 1879. After interludes in California and New York, he returned to Austria, then moved to Leipzig, where he married Petrine von Labitschburg, a school teacher, and renounced his Austrian citizenship. In the 1880s he published books on the Inca civilization, claiming that languages such as Aimara and Quechua were the “original languages of mankind” and linked them to Semitic languages, though these writings did not gain the publicity of his earthquake theory.

Falb’s predictions were so broad that about a third of all days in a year met some criterion of “criticality,” and he insisted that actual events were not mandatory, which let him claim successes while dismissing failures. His most determined opponents included the seismologist Rudolf Hoernes, the meteorologist Josef M. Pernter, and the seismograph inventor John Milne. Despite their sustained opposition, his ideas influenced public opinion enough that major German encyclopedias mentioned him and his theory in late-19th-century editions. Afflicted by a paralytic spinal disease, Falb continued publishing “Critical Day” calendars and increasingly eccentric writings on deluge myths and ice ages. He spent his final 15 years under dire economic conditions, moving between Berlin, Obdach, and Leipzig, and died in Berlin in 1903 at age 65.