September 1, 2018 • 23 mins
We're revisiting part two of the Great Moon Hoax! As the New York Sun's series of astonishing moon discoveries concluded, most people recognized that it was a hoax. But what made people buy into the tall tale in the first place?
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hi, and Happy Saturday. Today we are concluding our two
part podcast on the Great Moon Hoax of eighteen thirty five,
which is where the hoax gets really weird. I mean
it's weird from the beginning. Here's where it gets really weird, uh.
And it's also where we talk about how the hoax
was received by the end of the whole thing. We
(00:21):
hope you have fun and laugh a little bit. Enjoy.
Welcome to stuff you missed in history class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Polly Fry and I'm Tracy Vie Wilson. And today
(00:42):
is the second part of our two part episode on
a series that ran The New York Sun UH in
August of eighty five, detailing some incredible and amazing discoveries
that have been made by viewing the lunar surface through
a brand new type of telescope created Sir John Herschel.
(01:02):
It had discussed at some length bison that had been seen,
Flora goat like unicorns, and in the last chunk that
we talked about before we Cliff hung the first episode,
bat people right, and also the bipedal beavers with no
tails that carried their babies around like human babies. He Yeah,
(01:25):
I was telling our producer Nol that I want to
start a band called Lunar Beavers because that's funny to me.
I don't have any musical talent, but I'm going to
do it just the same. I figure I can at
least make band t shirts. Right, It's a great idea.
So now we're going to pick up with the fifth
entry in this sixth part series UH, and we will
(01:48):
go on to describe it and the sixth part UH
and what they contain, and then we will talk about
sort of the cultural context of all of this and
how it affected people. The fifth entry in this series
appeared in in the newspaper on Saturday, August twenty nine,
and this one started with the description of three oceans
(02:11):
on the surface of the Moon, which were visible even
with the puniest of telescopes. That also described seven seas
and innumerable smaller bodies of water. Additionally, there were all
matter of outcroppings that the astronomers really started to struggle
to name because there's not really a comparable geography on Earth.
(02:33):
And while they were surveying all of these lunar attributes,
and again this is after they had just this is
the the following session, after they had discovered these bat people, UH,
the astronomers identified an unusual architectural figure in the landscape.
So they paused for a moment and they adjusted their instruments,
lenses and its setting so that they could take a
(02:55):
closer look at it. What they discovered was a triangle
shape temple that was made entirely of sapphire or some
other bluestone that closely resembled sapphire. The temple had numerous
massive columns around its outside edges that were estimated to
be six ft or one pot eight meters wide and
seventy ft one tall. These columns were spaced at about
(03:19):
twelve feet or three point seven meters apart. Yeah, and
when we say triangle shaped, what we mean is the
footprint of it was triangle shaped. It wasn't a pyramid.
It was kind of like if you were looking at
it from above, it was a triangle, but it rose
like a column, uh in the sum of its parts.
And it was according to Dr Andrew Grant, who you
will recall if you listen to the first part was
(03:40):
the assistant to UH, Sir John Herschel, who was relaying
this information to UH in Edinburgh Scientific Journal and sharing
these notes with the press, and he said that this
was quite a beautiful structure. The roof was a golden
metal and it appeared to mimic the look of flames,
and with in the flames, as though it was being
(04:02):
consumed by them, was a sphere that the astronomers have
observed that looked as though it were made of a
clouded copper, And on each of the temple's three corners
was a smaller sphere of what appeared to be the
same copper material. A scroll made from the same metal
as the flames unfurled from the roof over the upper
walls of the building, and the temple was open and airy.
(04:24):
There weren't really any additional walls or are altars um
that existed in addition to all these columns. With the
inclusion of the flame ornamentation on the top, they estimated
that it was almost a hundred feet or thirty meters high.
There were no man, bats, or other humanoid moon beings
at the temple, only birds. And this fifth entry pretty
(04:49):
much just describes this temple UH and then it concludes
with speculation about the meaning of the temple and its
flame symbolism. It asked the question, quote, did they buy
this record any past calamity of their world or predict
any future one of ours. The sixth and final entry
in the New York Sun's Lunar series was printed on Monday,
(05:12):
August thirty one, eighty five. Yes, so that at this
point they've run basically for a week. Uh. Not far
from the temple discussed in the fifth entry, which they
referred to as the Veil of the Triads. The astronomers
saw similar beings to their man bats that they had
talked about in the fourth entry, which they had named
(05:33):
Vespertilio homo. These creatures, however, were a lot larger and
they were lighter colored than the ones that they had
seen in the Ruby Colosseum. Doctor Grant claimed that these
man bats were quote an improved variety of the race.
The team observed these larger man bats eating yellow gourd
(05:53):
like fruits and then sucking the juice from a red
fruit that was sort of shaped like a cucumber. Uh.
The astronomers observed these creatures and their group dynamics, and
they noted how polite they seemed to be in terms
of their society, and they're seeming serenity overall. They also
observed eight or nine previously unseen quadruped species, including a
(06:16):
really elegant stag like beast that had a white coat
and black antlers. Grant commented on the way that all
of the beings of the moon seemed to cohabitate peacefully
without any sort of predator prey kind of relationship, which
kind of contradicts the earlier accounts where they decided that
there must be fish in the water because the birds
were diving for them. Yeah, that's not brought up again
(06:40):
at all, um, And at this point, uh, they sort
of it's a shorter observational period. They kind of conclude
the day's observation. However, this is not the end of
this sixth entry in the newspaper series. After gawking at
all of this amazing stuff and the more advanced man
(07:01):
bats of the moon, the astronomers wrapped up for the
night by accidentally failing to correctly lower the lens and
place it horizontally. They lowered it, but they left it
in a perpendicular position, and consequently, Uh, the observatory that
Herschel and his team had constructed caught fire because of
the light that continued to reflect in the telescope because
(07:23):
it hadn't been laid down flat. So while the structure
and its contents were safe, there was a massive hole
that had been burned in the reflecting chamber of the observatory,
and that's why everything was abruptly cut short. Of course,
workmen were hired for a rush repair job, according to
this account by Grant, and within a week the telescope
(07:44):
and its supporting elements were once again fit to do
their work. But unfortunately, at that point the Moon had
moved out of observable position and it wouldn't come back
again for a bit. What follows is a whole section
where the telescope was then turned to Saturn and it's ings,
and the account detailed various things about that celestial body
rather than the moon, UH, which is all a very
(08:07):
fascinating read, but we're going to keep focused to the
moon stuff for UH for this UH. And by the
time the moon had moved back into an observable position UH,
Grants notes indicated that Herschel was still really deep in
his Saturn studies, so that he couldn't quite refocus back
to the Moon yet. But doctor Grant and the other
two assistants that were there did decide to take another
(08:29):
peak at the moon, and at this point the three
found an even more beautiful group of vespertilio homo, which
seemed to have a ceremonial social structure which was similar
to what they had seen among the bat people near
the Sapphire Temple, and an even more advanced proclivity for
producing art. But that's where the account of doctor Grant ends.
(08:53):
He said he wished to quote let the first detailed
account of them appear in Dr Herschel's authenticated it natural
History of this planet, which is so kind of him.
Did not want to steal the spotlight. So, uh, we
are going to talk next about how the world of
felt about all of this moon talk and these amazing
(09:17):
and fantastical discoveries. But before we do, we're going to
pause for a word from a sponsor. Okay, So back
to uh the New York Sun's published accounts based on
(09:37):
the notes of doctor Grant, of the things they had
seen on the Moon as part of Sir John Herschel's expedition.
Uh So, this newspaper series featured a Moon filled with
lush landscapes, of crystals and poppies, fauna similar to bison, unicorn,
and sheep, and a relatively advanced race of bat people.
(09:59):
Uh so you are probably wondering what on earth did
the public make of all this? And the short answer
was people were really excited. They've debated over the veracity
of these reports from the lunar surface. There were lectures
given and open panels to discuss the implications of this
new finding of life on the moon, and other news
(10:21):
outlets started picking up the story even before all of
the installments had been published, so like by the second one,
they began to reprint this and within weeks the tale
of lunar civilization had really kind of traveled around the world.
Uh it's as one outlet picked it up and shared
it with another, etcetera, etcetera. The Sun made a nice
chunk of cash from this hoax. The readership numbers might
(10:43):
have bumped up a little, but the paper also sold
really popular pamphlets about the discoveries, prints of artist renderings
of the various elements that have been described in the series,
and that included the solar temple and the bat people. Yeah,
those images are fantastic. I love them. Um and inter
of context in the greater cultural landscape. A decade before
(11:04):
the Great Moon Hoax, German professor at Munich University had
published a paper that translates to discovery of many distinct
traces of lunar inhabitants, especially of one of their colossal buildings.
And this one was not intended as a hoax. That
discusses the multicolored patches of the Moon and how they
(11:24):
might relate to gradations, uh how those gradations might relate
to possible different climate zones, different crops, and perhaps even
different cities and man made structures. Just a few months
before The New York Sun ran this story, there was
also an Edgar Allen Post short story that came out
called The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Fall And that
(11:47):
had been published in the Southern Literary Messenger. This was
the story of a man's return to Holland, and he
was filled with stories of a balloon adventure that had
taken him to the Moon. This had been intended, as
was the case for satire at the time, to fool
at least some of its readers, but post story was
quickly recognized as fiction by typical readers. Most of the time. Further,
(12:10):
the Southern Literary Messenger had a really small circulation, whereas
the New York Sun had a much larger readership. Yeah,
some of the numbers that you'll see, uh word like
in the nineteen thousands for distribution. There is some debate
about what the true numbers were and how much of
that was a bump from this story. But thousands versus
(12:32):
a much smaller group that we're reading, uh, the Southern
Literary Messenger, And whether the Hans Fall tale inspired this
lengthy faux scientific series of notes that the Sun published,
we don't know for certain. Uh, It's certainly entirely possible
that both were developed independently. But this was a time
when an expedition like Herschel's trip to South Africa, which
(12:54):
was a real thing to observe. Hayley's comment, was big news,
and astronomy and the possibility of life on other worlds
were really sparking the imaginations of the general public. And
in fact, forty years earlier, Sir John Herschel's father, William Herschel,
had published a paper speculating about life on other planets.
So this was a topic that was kind of rumbling
(13:16):
through culture already the Sun's series had been really carefully
designed to capitalize on all that interest in space and
life on other worlds, and all of that it was
grounded in true thanks to the use of Herschel's name
and his very well reported trip research trip to Cape Town.
It developed slowly, first establishing all of the scientific instruments
(13:39):
that were being used in the research, and then it
unwound the details of these lunar wonders bit by bit.
And while you will hear and read if you look
at many historians treatment of this different accounts of really
how this kind of UH came out in terms of
numbers of like what proportion of the population and believed
(14:00):
it versus what didn't. At least for the first several installments,
it seemed that a lot of people did believe these claims,
or were at least sort of wanted to believe them
enough to think about them of flora and fauna that
were being observed with this amazing fictional telescope. But the
fourth installment, so that's where they introduced these bat people, UH,
(14:22):
went a little too far past believability for a lot
of readers. That kind of tipped the scale of like, uh,
you've gone too far now. By the time the fifth
entry was published, most of the other papers had started
denouncing the entirety of this series as a hoax. Richard
Adams Lock, a British journalist who had moved to America,
was accused of penning the faux discovery narrative. Lock had
(14:45):
been hired as an editor of The Sun just two
months before this hoax began, and Locke actually addressed these
accusations with a nebulous denial letter that he wrote to
the New York Herald on August thirty one, so that
was the same day that the last installment of the
tale was published in the New York Sun. And in
this letter Locke wrote, quote, I beg to state, as
(15:08):
unequivocally as the words can express it, that I did
not make those discoveries. And it is my sincere conviction,
founded on a careful examination of the internal evidence of
the work in which they first appeared, that if made
at all, they were made by the great astronomer to
whom all Europe, if not an incredulous America, will undoubtedly
ascribe them. A Philadelphia paper reprinted Locke's letter along with
(15:32):
an advertisement for real estate auction to sell off newly
discovered property identified by Sir John Herschel, the sale of
which could include the native one horn sheep with the
fleshy lip flaps if the buyer so desired. Yeah. So,
some people were definitely kind of picking up the joke
and running with it in their own ways. Uh. And
even though at this point it clearly seemed to all
(15:54):
be one big lark and most people had accepted it
as such, there were still people who believed the account ounts.
Plus there was this added complication. Remember we're talking about
a hundred and eighty years ago that in some places
the news of the discovery had spread, but the follow
up hoax discussions had not. So they were only getting
(16:16):
the accounts as though they were real. They had not
had any of the follow up talk that was going
on in other papers. Of course, there was no doctor
Andrew Grant who had been traveling and working with Sir
John Herschel. He was completely made up. But Herschel did exist,
and he had been working on a new telescope, and
he did travel to the Cape of Good Hope in
(16:37):
eighteen thirty four. It was on that trip that he
made some important observations of Howe's comments, So that little
tiny kernel of truth fueled the fires of belief as
this whole hoax played out, and Edgar Allen Poe believed
that Locke was the author of the Great Moon Hoax
as the serial came to be known. It certainly wasn't
published that way, but later on people started calling it that,
(17:00):
and he suggested that Law had actually stolen the Hans
Fall idea and reworked it. And after almost ten years
of complaining about this, as though it had been a
slight to him, Poe wrote another story which was entitled
The Balloon Hoax. And this was about an intensely speedy
balloon trip across the Atlantic Ocean. If I'm remembering correctly,
it like took seventy five hours. And this too was
(17:21):
a hoax, apparently inspired by the Great Moon Hoax, and
it ended up being published in the New York Sun.
The Balloon Hoax fooled a lot more people than the
story of Hans Fall, so the New York Sun never
retracted this story. It also never named the true author,
although most historians do you believe that it was Locke,
And we'll talk about that more in a moment. While
(17:42):
most people and other news publications seemed unbothered by this.
The Sun's primary competitor, The New York Harold declared The
Sun's printing of the series to be quote highly improper, wicked,
and in fact a species of impudent swindling. But most
people saw it as basically a clever joke. The reason
(18:02):
that most people were willing to let this hoax go
without protests about The Sun's journalistic integrity and the ethics
that they should have upheld sort of stem from the
fact that The New York Sun was a penny paper.
Uh at the time, there were penny papers and there
were six cent papers, and six cent papers at the
time were aimed at more discerning readers, usually a little
(18:23):
more educated, a little more highbrow, whereas penny papers UH
printed more lurid news. They would print gossip, they would
print crime reports and murder sheets, and they were aimed
at sort of a wider audience. They just weren't considered
on the same level as the six cent papers. I
think this is similar to the divide between the tabloid
format papers and broadsheet papers today. It is although penny
(18:49):
papers would report real news as well, but they have
sort of that leverage to have a little bit of
wits and yeah, yeah, and tabloids have basically have definitely
broken some legitimates worries before uh, you know, you the
classic bat Boy cover of a you know, a tabloid
papers is what this whole story kind of reminds me of.
(19:12):
And who doesn't love bat Boy. Uh. We're going to
talk a little bit more about Locke and about Sir
John Herschel in just a moment, but before that, we
are going to have a quick word from a sponsor,
if that's cool with Tracy. Sure. So, Almost five years
(19:35):
after The Great Moon Hoax was published, and after a Locke,
who was noted to be kind of a heavy drinker,
was said to have confessed his authorship to various colleagues
in the newspaper industry in various states of intoxication, Lock
actually wrote a letter to the paper New World, and
at this point he had returned to life as a
freelance writer. After he left the Son, he went to
(19:58):
another job at the New Era, but then when he
was I'm from that, he went back to freelance. Locke's
letter appeared on the front page of the New World
on May sixteenth, of eighteen forty, and in it he
said that he had written The Great Moon Hoax, but
that it had not been intended as a hoax. He
claimed that it had been written as satire, intended to
(20:18):
skewer the effect that religion was having on science, which
he believed led to the acceptance of fanciful thinking over
solid truth, and so that would seem to clear the
um the case on whether or not Alack had written it. However,
there is still some debate over whether he could have
even written this series, given the information about astronomy that
(20:40):
can that it contained, and that some people say he
just would not have known. Uh. It is of course
entirely possible that Locke could have consulted with experts, or
that multiple writers worked on these accounts that they put
forward as the work of this fictional uh dr Andrew Grant.
And it's also entirely conceivable Locke may have learned enough
(21:01):
about astronomy through his own reading. He was apparently a
very well read man and sort of a lifelong learner
that he could have written this piece without assistance. So
it's not an open and shut but most people still
think Locke did do the writing. You may be wondering,
I know, I was exactly what Sir John Herschel thought
of all of this. And while all of this work
(21:22):
was going down in the States, Sir John Herschel was
still in South Africa doing actual, legitimate astronomy work. In
late eighteen thirty five, he was given a copy of
the narrative that The Sun had published, which had cited
his work, and his initial reactions seemed to be one
of amusement. He said to have remarked that his own
actual work would probably seem quite dull by comparison once
(21:46):
it was published. So even though the initial reception on
his part was pretty jolly, over time that amusement wore
right off. Uh. Several years down the road, he wrote
a letter to his aunt Caroline Herschel, who was also
an astronomer of some renowned I have been pestered from
all quarters with that ridiculous hoax about the moon in English, French,
(22:09):
Italian and German. As for the Sun, it continued its
circulation until it merged with the New York World Telegram
in nineteen fifty, and that company eventually went under in
nineteen sixty seven. And that's the great Moon hoax which
I think I did not credit earlier, but our listener
Brian wrote to us and mentioned this a while back,
(22:30):
and it kind of went on my list and I've
been eyeballing it ever since, so I'm glad that this
was the week that I carved out time to do it.
Thank you so much for joining us for this Saturday classic.
Since this is out of the archive, if you heard
an email address or a Facebook U r L or
(22:52):
something similar during the course of the show, that may
be obsolete now, so here's our current contact information. We
are at History Podcast at how stuff works dot com,
and then we're at Missed in the History. All over
social media that is our name on Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, Pinterest,
and Instagram. Thanks again for listening. For more on this
(23:15):
and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff Works dot com.
Hi, and Happy Saturday. Today we are concluding our two
part podcast on the Great Moon Hoax of eighteen thirty five,
which is where the hoax gets really weird. I mean
it's weird from the beginning. Here's where it gets really weird, uh.
And it's also where we talk about how the hoax
was received by the end of the whole thing. We
(00:21):
hope you have fun and laugh a little bit. Enjoy.
Welcome to stuff you missed in history class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Polly Fry and I'm Tracy Vie Wilson. And today
(00:42):
is the second part of our two part episode on
a series that ran The New York Sun UH in
August of eighty five, detailing some incredible and amazing discoveries
that have been made by viewing the lunar surface through
a brand new type of telescope created Sir John Herschel.
(01:02):
It had discussed at some length bison that had been seen,
Flora goat like unicorns, and in the last chunk that
we talked about before we Cliff hung the first episode,
bat people right, and also the bipedal beavers with no
tails that carried their babies around like human babies. He Yeah,
(01:25):
I was telling our producer Nol that I want to
start a band called Lunar Beavers because that's funny to me.
I don't have any musical talent, but I'm going to
do it just the same. I figure I can at
least make band t shirts. Right, It's a great idea.
So now we're going to pick up with the fifth
entry in this sixth part series UH, and we will
(01:48):
go on to describe it and the sixth part UH
and what they contain, and then we will talk about
sort of the cultural context of all of this and
how it affected people. The fifth entry in this series
appeared in in the newspaper on Saturday, August twenty nine,
and this one started with the description of three oceans
(02:11):
on the surface of the Moon, which were visible even
with the puniest of telescopes. That also described seven seas
and innumerable smaller bodies of water. Additionally, there were all
matter of outcroppings that the astronomers really started to struggle
to name because there's not really a comparable geography on Earth.
(02:33):
And while they were surveying all of these lunar attributes,
and again this is after they had just this is
the the following session, after they had discovered these bat people, UH,
the astronomers identified an unusual architectural figure in the landscape.
So they paused for a moment and they adjusted their instruments,
lenses and its setting so that they could take a
(02:55):
closer look at it. What they discovered was a triangle
shape temple that was made entirely of sapphire or some
other bluestone that closely resembled sapphire. The temple had numerous
massive columns around its outside edges that were estimated to
be six ft or one pot eight meters wide and
seventy ft one tall. These columns were spaced at about
(03:19):
twelve feet or three point seven meters apart. Yeah, and
when we say triangle shaped, what we mean is the
footprint of it was triangle shaped. It wasn't a pyramid.
It was kind of like if you were looking at
it from above, it was a triangle, but it rose
like a column, uh in the sum of its parts.
And it was according to Dr Andrew Grant, who you
will recall if you listen to the first part was
(03:40):
the assistant to UH, Sir John Herschel, who was relaying
this information to UH in Edinburgh Scientific Journal and sharing
these notes with the press, and he said that this
was quite a beautiful structure. The roof was a golden
metal and it appeared to mimic the look of flames,
and with in the flames, as though it was being
(04:02):
consumed by them, was a sphere that the astronomers have
observed that looked as though it were made of a
clouded copper, And on each of the temple's three corners
was a smaller sphere of what appeared to be the
same copper material. A scroll made from the same metal
as the flames unfurled from the roof over the upper
walls of the building, and the temple was open and airy.
(04:24):
There weren't really any additional walls or are altars um
that existed in addition to all these columns. With the
inclusion of the flame ornamentation on the top, they estimated
that it was almost a hundred feet or thirty meters high.
There were no man, bats, or other humanoid moon beings
at the temple, only birds. And this fifth entry pretty
(04:49):
much just describes this temple UH and then it concludes
with speculation about the meaning of the temple and its
flame symbolism. It asked the question, quote, did they buy
this record any past calamity of their world or predict
any future one of ours. The sixth and final entry
in the New York Sun's Lunar series was printed on Monday,
(05:12):
August thirty one, eighty five. Yes, so that at this
point they've run basically for a week. Uh. Not far
from the temple discussed in the fifth entry, which they
referred to as the Veil of the Triads. The astronomers
saw similar beings to their man bats that they had
talked about in the fourth entry, which they had named
(05:33):
Vespertilio homo. These creatures, however, were a lot larger and
they were lighter colored than the ones that they had
seen in the Ruby Colosseum. Doctor Grant claimed that these
man bats were quote an improved variety of the race.
The team observed these larger man bats eating yellow gourd
(05:53):
like fruits and then sucking the juice from a red
fruit that was sort of shaped like a cucumber. Uh.
The astronomers observed these creatures and their group dynamics, and
they noted how polite they seemed to be in terms
of their society, and they're seeming serenity overall. They also
observed eight or nine previously unseen quadruped species, including a
(06:16):
really elegant stag like beast that had a white coat
and black antlers. Grant commented on the way that all
of the beings of the moon seemed to cohabitate peacefully
without any sort of predator prey kind of relationship, which
kind of contradicts the earlier accounts where they decided that
there must be fish in the water because the birds
were diving for them. Yeah, that's not brought up again
(06:40):
at all, um, And at this point, uh, they sort
of it's a shorter observational period. They kind of conclude
the day's observation. However, this is not the end of
this sixth entry in the newspaper series. After gawking at
all of this amazing stuff and the more advanced man
(07:01):
bats of the moon, the astronomers wrapped up for the
night by accidentally failing to correctly lower the lens and
place it horizontally. They lowered it, but they left it
in a perpendicular position, and consequently, Uh, the observatory that
Herschel and his team had constructed caught fire because of
the light that continued to reflect in the telescope because
(07:23):
it hadn't been laid down flat. So while the structure
and its contents were safe, there was a massive hole
that had been burned in the reflecting chamber of the observatory,
and that's why everything was abruptly cut short. Of course,
workmen were hired for a rush repair job, according to
this account by Grant, and within a week the telescope
(07:44):
and its supporting elements were once again fit to do
their work. But unfortunately, at that point the Moon had
moved out of observable position and it wouldn't come back
again for a bit. What follows is a whole section
where the telescope was then turned to Saturn and it's ings,
and the account detailed various things about that celestial body
rather than the moon, UH, which is all a very
(08:07):
fascinating read, but we're going to keep focused to the
moon stuff for UH for this UH. And by the
time the moon had moved back into an observable position UH,
Grants notes indicated that Herschel was still really deep in
his Saturn studies, so that he couldn't quite refocus back
to the Moon yet. But doctor Grant and the other
two assistants that were there did decide to take another
(08:29):
peak at the moon, and at this point the three
found an even more beautiful group of vespertilio homo, which
seemed to have a ceremonial social structure which was similar
to what they had seen among the bat people near
the Sapphire Temple, and an even more advanced proclivity for
producing art. But that's where the account of doctor Grant ends.
(08:53):
He said he wished to quote let the first detailed
account of them appear in Dr Herschel's authenticated it natural
History of this planet, which is so kind of him.
Did not want to steal the spotlight. So, uh, we
are going to talk next about how the world of
felt about all of this moon talk and these amazing
(09:17):
and fantastical discoveries. But before we do, we're going to
pause for a word from a sponsor. Okay, So back
to uh the New York Sun's published accounts based on
(09:37):
the notes of doctor Grant, of the things they had
seen on the Moon as part of Sir John Herschel's expedition.
Uh So, this newspaper series featured a Moon filled with
lush landscapes, of crystals and poppies, fauna similar to bison, unicorn,
and sheep, and a relatively advanced race of bat people.
(09:59):
Uh so you are probably wondering what on earth did
the public make of all this? And the short answer
was people were really excited. They've debated over the veracity
of these reports from the lunar surface. There were lectures
given and open panels to discuss the implications of this
new finding of life on the moon, and other news
(10:21):
outlets started picking up the story even before all of
the installments had been published, so like by the second one,
they began to reprint this and within weeks the tale
of lunar civilization had really kind of traveled around the world.
Uh it's as one outlet picked it up and shared
it with another, etcetera, etcetera. The Sun made a nice
chunk of cash from this hoax. The readership numbers might
(10:43):
have bumped up a little, but the paper also sold
really popular pamphlets about the discoveries, prints of artist renderings
of the various elements that have been described in the series,
and that included the solar temple and the bat people. Yeah,
those images are fantastic. I love them. Um and inter
of context in the greater cultural landscape. A decade before
(11:04):
the Great Moon Hoax, German professor at Munich University had
published a paper that translates to discovery of many distinct
traces of lunar inhabitants, especially of one of their colossal buildings.
And this one was not intended as a hoax. That
discusses the multicolored patches of the Moon and how they
(11:24):
might relate to gradations, uh how those gradations might relate
to possible different climate zones, different crops, and perhaps even
different cities and man made structures. Just a few months
before The New York Sun ran this story, there was
also an Edgar Allen Post short story that came out
called The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Fall And that
(11:47):
had been published in the Southern Literary Messenger. This was
the story of a man's return to Holland, and he
was filled with stories of a balloon adventure that had
taken him to the Moon. This had been intended, as
was the case for satire at the time, to fool
at least some of its readers, but post story was
quickly recognized as fiction by typical readers. Most of the time. Further,
(12:10):
the Southern Literary Messenger had a really small circulation, whereas
the New York Sun had a much larger readership. Yeah,
some of the numbers that you'll see, uh word like
in the nineteen thousands for distribution. There is some debate
about what the true numbers were and how much of
that was a bump from this story. But thousands versus
(12:32):
a much smaller group that we're reading, uh, the Southern
Literary Messenger, And whether the Hans Fall tale inspired this
lengthy faux scientific series of notes that the Sun published,
we don't know for certain. Uh, It's certainly entirely possible
that both were developed independently. But this was a time
when an expedition like Herschel's trip to South Africa, which
(12:54):
was a real thing to observe. Hayley's comment, was big news,
and astronomy and the possibility of life on other worlds
were really sparking the imaginations of the general public. And
in fact, forty years earlier, Sir John Herschel's father, William Herschel,
had published a paper speculating about life on other planets.
So this was a topic that was kind of rumbling
(13:16):
through culture already the Sun's series had been really carefully
designed to capitalize on all that interest in space and
life on other worlds, and all of that it was
grounded in true thanks to the use of Herschel's name
and his very well reported trip research trip to Cape Town.
It developed slowly, first establishing all of the scientific instruments
(13:39):
that were being used in the research, and then it
unwound the details of these lunar wonders bit by bit.
And while you will hear and read if you look
at many historians treatment of this different accounts of really
how this kind of UH came out in terms of
numbers of like what proportion of the population and believed
(14:00):
it versus what didn't. At least for the first several installments,
it seemed that a lot of people did believe these claims,
or were at least sort of wanted to believe them
enough to think about them of flora and fauna that
were being observed with this amazing fictional telescope. But the
fourth installment, so that's where they introduced these bat people, UH,
(14:22):
went a little too far past believability for a lot
of readers. That kind of tipped the scale of like, uh,
you've gone too far now. By the time the fifth
entry was published, most of the other papers had started
denouncing the entirety of this series as a hoax. Richard
Adams Lock, a British journalist who had moved to America,
was accused of penning the faux discovery narrative. Lock had
(14:45):
been hired as an editor of The Sun just two
months before this hoax began, and Locke actually addressed these
accusations with a nebulous denial letter that he wrote to
the New York Herald on August thirty one, so that
was the same day that the last installment of the
tale was published in the New York Sun. And in
this letter Locke wrote, quote, I beg to state, as
(15:08):
unequivocally as the words can express it, that I did
not make those discoveries. And it is my sincere conviction,
founded on a careful examination of the internal evidence of
the work in which they first appeared, that if made
at all, they were made by the great astronomer to
whom all Europe, if not an incredulous America, will undoubtedly
ascribe them. A Philadelphia paper reprinted Locke's letter along with
(15:32):
an advertisement for real estate auction to sell off newly
discovered property identified by Sir John Herschel, the sale of
which could include the native one horn sheep with the
fleshy lip flaps if the buyer so desired. Yeah. So,
some people were definitely kind of picking up the joke
and running with it in their own ways. Uh. And
even though at this point it clearly seemed to all
(15:54):
be one big lark and most people had accepted it
as such, there were still people who believed the account ounts.
Plus there was this added complication. Remember we're talking about
a hundred and eighty years ago that in some places
the news of the discovery had spread, but the follow
up hoax discussions had not. So they were only getting
(16:16):
the accounts as though they were real. They had not
had any of the follow up talk that was going
on in other papers. Of course, there was no doctor
Andrew Grant who had been traveling and working with Sir
John Herschel. He was completely made up. But Herschel did exist,
and he had been working on a new telescope, and
he did travel to the Cape of Good Hope in
(16:37):
eighteen thirty four. It was on that trip that he
made some important observations of Howe's comments, So that little
tiny kernel of truth fueled the fires of belief as
this whole hoax played out, and Edgar Allen Poe believed
that Locke was the author of the Great Moon Hoax
as the serial came to be known. It certainly wasn't
published that way, but later on people started calling it that,
(17:00):
and he suggested that Law had actually stolen the Hans
Fall idea and reworked it. And after almost ten years
of complaining about this, as though it had been a
slight to him, Poe wrote another story which was entitled
The Balloon Hoax. And this was about an intensely speedy
balloon trip across the Atlantic Ocean. If I'm remembering correctly,
it like took seventy five hours. And this too was
(17:21):
a hoax, apparently inspired by the Great Moon Hoax, and
it ended up being published in the New York Sun.
The Balloon Hoax fooled a lot more people than the
story of Hans Fall, so the New York Sun never
retracted this story. It also never named the true author,
although most historians do you believe that it was Locke,
And we'll talk about that more in a moment. While
(17:42):
most people and other news publications seemed unbothered by this.
The Sun's primary competitor, The New York Harold declared The
Sun's printing of the series to be quote highly improper, wicked,
and in fact a species of impudent swindling. But most
people saw it as basically a clever joke. The reason
(18:02):
that most people were willing to let this hoax go
without protests about The Sun's journalistic integrity and the ethics
that they should have upheld sort of stem from the
fact that The New York Sun was a penny paper.
Uh at the time, there were penny papers and there
were six cent papers, and six cent papers at the
time were aimed at more discerning readers, usually a little
(18:23):
more educated, a little more highbrow, whereas penny papers UH
printed more lurid news. They would print gossip, they would
print crime reports and murder sheets, and they were aimed
at sort of a wider audience. They just weren't considered
on the same level as the six cent papers. I
think this is similar to the divide between the tabloid
format papers and broadsheet papers today. It is although penny
(18:49):
papers would report real news as well, but they have
sort of that leverage to have a little bit of
wits and yeah, yeah, and tabloids have basically have definitely
broken some legitimates worries before uh, you know, you the
classic bat Boy cover of a you know, a tabloid
papers is what this whole story kind of reminds me of.
(19:12):
And who doesn't love bat Boy. Uh. We're going to
talk a little bit more about Locke and about Sir
John Herschel in just a moment, but before that, we
are going to have a quick word from a sponsor,
if that's cool with Tracy. Sure. So, Almost five years
(19:35):
after The Great Moon Hoax was published, and after a Locke,
who was noted to be kind of a heavy drinker,
was said to have confessed his authorship to various colleagues
in the newspaper industry in various states of intoxication, Lock
actually wrote a letter to the paper New World, and
at this point he had returned to life as a
freelance writer. After he left the Son, he went to
(19:58):
another job at the New Era, but then when he
was I'm from that, he went back to freelance. Locke's
letter appeared on the front page of the New World
on May sixteenth, of eighteen forty, and in it he
said that he had written The Great Moon Hoax, but
that it had not been intended as a hoax. He
claimed that it had been written as satire, intended to
(20:18):
skewer the effect that religion was having on science, which
he believed led to the acceptance of fanciful thinking over
solid truth, and so that would seem to clear the
um the case on whether or not Alack had written it. However,
there is still some debate over whether he could have
even written this series, given the information about astronomy that
(20:40):
can that it contained, and that some people say he
just would not have known. Uh. It is of course
entirely possible that Locke could have consulted with experts, or
that multiple writers worked on these accounts that they put
forward as the work of this fictional uh dr Andrew Grant.
And it's also entirely conceivable Locke may have learned enough
(21:01):
about astronomy through his own reading. He was apparently a
very well read man and sort of a lifelong learner
that he could have written this piece without assistance. So
it's not an open and shut but most people still
think Locke did do the writing. You may be wondering,
I know, I was exactly what Sir John Herschel thought
of all of this. And while all of this work
(21:22):
was going down in the States, Sir John Herschel was
still in South Africa doing actual, legitimate astronomy work. In
late eighteen thirty five, he was given a copy of
the narrative that The Sun had published, which had cited
his work, and his initial reactions seemed to be one
of amusement. He said to have remarked that his own
actual work would probably seem quite dull by comparison once
(21:46):
it was published. So even though the initial reception on
his part was pretty jolly, over time that amusement wore
right off. Uh. Several years down the road, he wrote
a letter to his aunt Caroline Herschel, who was also
an astronomer of some renowned I have been pestered from
all quarters with that ridiculous hoax about the moon in English, French,
(22:09):
Italian and German. As for the Sun, it continued its
circulation until it merged with the New York World Telegram
in nineteen fifty, and that company eventually went under in
nineteen sixty seven. And that's the great Moon hoax which
I think I did not credit earlier, but our listener
Brian wrote to us and mentioned this a while back,
(22:30):
and it kind of went on my list and I've
been eyeballing it ever since, so I'm glad that this
was the week that I carved out time to do it.
Thank you so much for joining us for this Saturday classic.
Since this is out of the archive, if you heard
an email address or a Facebook U r L or
(22:52):
something similar during the course of the show, that may
be obsolete now, so here's our current contact information. We
are at History Podcast at how stuff works dot com,
and then we're at Missed in the History. All over
social media that is our name on Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, Pinterest,
and Instagram. Thanks again for listening. For more on this
(23:15):
and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff Works dot com.
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