Fake News: The 1835 Edition (The Great Moon Hoax)

Hello Book Nerds of Bloglandia!

I had never heard of the Great Moon Hoax until about a month ago when I was looking over a book about steampunk culture (for research for a possible future writing project). A little side story in the book told about a hoax article Edgar Allan Poe had written back in the 1840s.

Since I’d recently read something about a bit of journalism flimflam that took place in Oregon in the late 1800s/early 1900s this got me curious about other news hoaxes. And that brought me to find the Great Moon Hoax.

To say I enjoyed this story is a complete understatement. Talk about laughing out loud.

I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

The Book Owl (Not a) Podcast Episode Two

Fake News: The 1835 Edition

Now, whether or not you want to believe certain social media tirades or not, I’m here to tell you that fake news is real.

Or at least it was back in August 1835 when the country, and even the world was swept up in some truly out of this world fake news. Hold on to your spaceships because as I promised last time, this is going to be a fun episode.

So, if you’re ready to wander into the wild world of journalism and newspapers, let’s get in the way back machine and head to New York, 1835.

It’s the 25^th of August and as people open up their copies of the New York Sun they’re greeted with the first of six articles about a major scientific discovery.

It could revolutionize their understanding of the world, it could mean we’re not alone in the universe, or it could just mean people are really, really gullible.

So these articles became known as the Great Moon Hoax and were supposed to have been written by Dr. Andrew Grant to report on a study published in the Edinburgh Journal of Science.

Now, scientific journals aren’t anything you would normally pick up to read. Because laypeople couldn’t possibly understand the complexities of scientific jargon, Grant decided to write a series of articles explaining in easy to read language an amazing discovery.

Grant, who I’ll just tell you now was a complete fabrication, was a colleague of Sir John Herschel and these articles reported on Herschel’s recent work.

Now John Herschel was a real person and he really was an astronomer among many other things.

In Grant’s story, Herschel had gone to South Africa in 1834 to set up a huge telescope at a new observatory.

The first article was primarily about this telescope and the set up. But the next few articles were all about what Herschel observed using this telescope.

And what did Herschel observe?

Wonders upon wonders!

The very fact that Herschel didn’t have heart failure from the excitement should have been a clue this was a hoax. I mean, the moon was amazing!

First there was the landscape. A white pockmarked surface? Hell no! Sure the moon had its craters, but it also featured amethyst crystal outcroppings, flowing rivers, lush tropical vegetation, and beaches.

What? Tell me more! Sorry, you need to buy the next paper to learn that these landscapes were nothing compared to Herschel’s other findings.

And people did. Basically, the New York Sun was running the click bait scam of the day. The paper’s sales prior to these articles had been slumping, but as people became eager to learn more about this unprecedented discovery, sales dare I say, skyrocketed.

But that’s not to say people didn’t get their money’s worth. Because the next article revealed…are you ready for this…

There was life on the moon.

And you’re going to want to really pay attention here because this is good.

So we start off a bit tame with some bison, then move up to unicorns (because why not), but there were also two-legged tail-less beavers (I’m not sure how these are beavers at this point, but…), and human like beings with bat wings. Y

es, the moon, not Gotham City, was the original home of Batman.

Unfortunately the moon missed out on a huge franchise opportunity by naming them man bats.

Grant reported Herschel had, and I quote, “scientifically denominated them as Vespertillo homo, or man bat and they are doubtless innocent and happy creatures.”

Okay so as I said, Grant was a pseudonym, and it’s believed that  the actual author of the articles was a man named Richard Adams Locke, who honestly didn’t think people were gullible enough to believe this stuff.

But as we know, people believe what they want to believe. And you couldn’t argue with the sales The Sun was seeing. So, Locke wisely kept mum about the hoax.

The story wasn’t just being picked up in New York. It spread throughout the U.S. And across the pond to Italy, Germany, and the UK.

Even a big ol’ smarty pants like Ralph Waldo Emerson was taken in. As were some scientists from Yale who, as scientists are wont to do, were eager to see the source material for Grant’s articles.

So they traveled to New York to see first hand the study in the Edinburgh Journal of Science. Trouble was, that scientific journal had ceased publication in 1833.

But as I said, Locke and The Sun wanted to keep things under wraps to keep sales coming in, so they ended up shuffling these Yale guys from the printing office to another office back to the printing office until the guys couldn’t stay any longer.

They returned to Yale none the wiser.

Eventually however, people began to question the articles’ veracity. And this doubt started with the very first article that one where they were talking about Herschel’s telescope set up.

This was supposedly a telescope with a diameter of 24 feet and weighed 7 tons, or 6700 kilograms. This massive thing according to the article had been transported from England to South Africa, and this was the early 1800s, they had enough trouble just transporting basic cargo let alone a giant delicate piece of scientific equipment.

The skeptics finally got their way and a month after the first article came out, The Sun revealed that all the articles were indeed just a bit of satire. In fact, Locke, remember he’s the guy who had written the articles, had a specific target he was poking fun at.

See, astronomy was capturing people’s imagination…maybe a bit too much. In 1824 a German professor of astronomy…a professor mind you, published a paper with the lengthy title of “Discovery of Many Distinct traces of lunar inhabitants, especially one of their colossal buildings.”

In the paper he reports seeing roads and cities on the moon. I think the professor was dipping into the beer stein a few too many times during the day.

But it was papers like these that had people convinced life really did exist on the moon and this led up to speculations by Reverend Thomas Dick who asserted without any room for doubt that that moon had 4.2 billion inhabitants.

Now keep in mind that Earth at that time had only around 1 billion people living on it. Locke couldn’t resist poking fun at such an idea. And poke he did.

So what was the end result of this? Did people cry foul at The Sun, did they demand the paper be shut down, did they cancel their subscriptions? Nope. They had a good laugh at themselves and The Sun’s sales stayed fairly steady.

And the hoax wasn’t just a one and done thing. Over the next few months you could buy yourself Moon Hoax Merchandise including wall paper and snuff boxes. From the time of the big reveal and throughout the rest of 19^th century anything deceptive was called Moon Hoax-y.

But what about Herschel? Was his career ruined by this hoax? Did people claim he was less credible as a scientist?

Nope again.

In fact, at first he was amused by the articles and kind of enjoyed the silliness of them. But as the years went on he got a little annoyed because people kept asking him about the life he’d discovered on the moon.

The only person who seems to have been really bothered by the hoax was Edgar Allan Poe.

See Locke had been his editor, and a few months prior to the hoax, Poe had written a short story about life on the moon, with some similarities to the Great Moon Hoax articles.

A story Locke had edited.

The story had been published in another paper but was never popular. I think Poe was mainly upset that Locke’s version of the story got more attention than his own.

But a few years later, The Sun published another series of hoax articles written by Poe about a hot air ballon ride over the Atlantic. Unfortunately for Poe, these articles just didn’t grab the world like the Great Moon Hoax.

So that’s it for the moon hoax. All I can say is that the fake news of 1835 was way more entertaining than the supposed fake news of today.

I hope you enjoyed this tale of fakery and fun, and that it’s left you shooting for the moon!!