The Millerite chart "proved" the end was near in the 1840s.

The end is coming soon or sooner, sure, but Kathryn Schulz recalls a time in 1844 when the sky was also supposedly crashing into the sea:

“On the morning of October 22, 1844, a group of people gathered to await the end of the world. They met in homes, in churches, and in outdoor revival meetings, primarily in New York and New England but also throughout the United States and Canada, and as far away as England, Australia, and South America. Nobody knows how numerous they were. Some scholars put the number at 25,000 and some put it at over a million, but most believe it was in the hundreds of thousands. Whatever the figure, the assembled group was too large to be dismissed as a cult and too diverse to be described as a sect. The believers included Baptists, Methodists, Episcopalians, Lutherans, and members of various other Christian denominations, plus a handful of unaffiliated former atheists. They also included an almost perfect cross-section of mid-nineteenth-century society. Sociologists often argue that apocalyptic creeds appeal primarily to the poor and the disenfranchised – those for whom the afterlife promises more than life itself has ever offered. But on that day in 1844, judges, lawyers and doctors, farmers and factory workers and freed slaves, the educated and the ignorant, the wealthy and the impoverished: all of them gathered as one to await the Rapture

What this otherwise diverse group of people had in common was faith in the teachings of one William Miller, a do-it-yourself preacher who had analyzed the Bible and determined the date of the Second Coming. Miller was born in Massachusetts in 1782, the eldest of sixteen children and the grandson of a Baptist minister. When he was four, his family moved to upstate New York, where the nationwide religious revival that would become known as the Second Great Awakening was just beginning to stir. In later years, the part of the state near Miller’s home would be called the Burned-Over District, because it was so ablaze with religious conviction that there was scarcely anyone left to convert.” (Thanks Longreads.)