Linguistics
A constructed language boomed across Europe in the 1880s, then collapsed almost overnight
Before Esperanto, a German priest named Johann Martin Schleyer invented Volapük in 1879-80, hoping to give the world a shared second language. It spread fast, with hundreds of clubs and journals across Europe by the mid-1880s — then fractured under disputes over reforming its famously difficult grammar, and was overtaken within a decade by newer projects like Esperanto.