The Sun and the Moon: The Remarkable True Account of Hoaxers, Showmen, Dueling Journalists, and Lunar Man-Bats in Nineteenth-Century New York (27 page)

Little does he suspect that the
gansas
are going into hibernation, and that they do so each year on the moon. For the lunar voyage of
L’Autre Monde:
Les etats et empires de la lune,
the seventeenth-century French writer Cyrano de Bergerac (on whom, of course, Edmond Rostand based his famous play) imagined a flight suit made of vials filled with dew, the idea being that the heat of the sun will draw the dew into the air. When that scheme delivers the narrator no farther than Canada, he next sets to work on a flying machine. A group of carousing soldiers, trying to turn the con-traption into a fiery dragon, load it up with firecrackers; the resulting explosion thrusts the machine aloft, each new explosion setting off additional ones, the force propelling the flying machine higher and higher, until it has left the earth’s atmosphere and, freed of gravity’s pull, sails all the way to the moon—becoming, in effect, literature’s first rocket ship.

Horses, wings, geese, dew, firecrackers: Edgar Allan Poe, for his part, seems to have been the first writer to imagine a voyage to the moon in a hot-air balloon. In writing “Hans Phaall” he was unquestionably aware of his literary forebears, for in a lengthy appendix that he wrote for a subsequent publication of the story Poe, ever competitive, took time to disparage several of those earlier works. Though he grudgingly acknowledged that Godwin’s tale about Diego Gonsales and his
gansas
was “somewhat ingenious” and “not without some claim to attention,” in general he found it a “naive specimen” marred by numerous scientific errors. Cyrano’s tale he dismissed as “utterly meaningless,” while another, more obscure work, “The Flight of Thomas O’Rourke,” he tossed aside with the single phrase “not altogether contemptible.” Poe did point out, correctly, that in each of the earlier stories the writer’s motive was pri-

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marily satirical rather than scientific— the author was describing the customs of the moon as a way of commenting on those of the earth. In “Hans Phaall,” on the other hand, Poe devoted most of his attention to the flight itself, including several pages of technical discussion about how such a voyage might be accomplished. As Poe saw it, “Hans Phaall” was unique in the annals of literature for its emphasis on what he proudly called “
verisimilitude,
in the application of scientific principles (so far as the whimsical nature of the subject would permit,) to the actual passage between the earth and the moon.”

In his appendix to “Hans Phaall” Poe also referred to a review in the
American Quarterly Review
of a recent novel about a lunar voyage in which flight was made possible by a newly unearthed metal (dubbed “lu-narium”), on which the moon exerted a powerful magnetic attraction.

The very notion of it was “stupidity,” Poe fumed, “more deplorably ill conceived than even the
ganzas
of our friend the Signor Gonzales.” Poe did not deign to name the book, referring to it only as “a certain ‘Journey’

of the kind in question,” but it was
A Voyage to the Moon,
a short novel published in 1827 by “Joseph Atterly,” the pseudonym of George Tucker, a professor at the University of Virginia. Although Poe dispatched Tucker’s novel with a few rapier sentences, and further condemned the reviewer’s own “absurd ignorance of astronomy,” the detailed summary of the book in the
American Quarterly Review
was actually one of the important sources he drew on for his writing of “Hans Phaall.” He seems to have picked up from it a number of ideas he would later incorporate into his story, including the use of an exotic metal to power the lunar flight (the “
particular metallic substance
” from which Phaall generates the gas for his balloon), an air condenser to allow for respiration in space, a meteor shower produced by lunar volcanoes, a
bouleversement
that takes place while the protagonist is asleep (both protagonists initially mistake the moon below them for the earth), and many more.

Poe’s appendix to “Hans Phaall” appeared in his first story collection,
Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque,
published in 1839. It would be another seven years before he mentioned his most important source for

“Hans Phaall”: John Herschel’s
A Treatise on Astronomy.
In his 1846

essay “Richard Adams Locke,” Poe wrote that he had read the American edition of Herschel’s book and had been “much interested in what is there said respecting the possibility of future lunar investigations.” He extended this remark to note, “The theme excited my fancy, and I longed to give

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free rein to it in depicting my day-dreams about the scenery of the moon.”

But these two sentences do not begin to acknowledge the debt he owed John Herschel. In writing “Hans Phaall” Poe had not merely been inspired by
A Treatise on Astronomy;
he had in fact lifted whole passages from it.

For example, in discussing the largest segment of the earth ever seen from the air John Herschel wrote:

The convex surface of a spherical segment is to the whole surface of the sphere to which it belongs as the versed sine or thickness of the segment is to the diameter of the sphere.

As Hans Phaall looks down at the earth from his balloon and attempts to calculate what segment of its surface he can see, he explains to the reader: The convex surface of any segment of a sphere is, to the entire surface of the sphere itself, as the versed sine of the segment to the diameter of the sphere.

In the section of
A Treatise on Astronomy
that discusses the use of a barometer, Herschel wrote:

From its indications we learn, that when we have ascended to the height of 1000 feet, we have left below us about one thirtieth of the whole mass of the atmosphere:—that at 10,600 feet of perpendicular elevation

. . . we have ascended through about one third; and at 18,000 feet (which is nearly that of Cotopaxi) through one half the material, or, at least, the ponderable body of air incumbent on the earth’s surface.

Continuing his calculations, Hans Phaall notes:

From indications afforded by the barometer, we find that, in ascen-sions from the surface of the earth we have, at the height of 1000 feet, left below us about one-thirtieth of the entire mass of atmospheric air; that at 10,600 we have ascended through nearly one-third; and that at 18,000 which is not far from the elevation of Cotopaxi, we have surmounted one-half the ponderable body of air incumbent upon our globe.

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These are just two excerpts from as many as a dozen passages in which Poe closely paraphrased, or copied outright, the work of John Herschel.

Sometimes, however, he could not find what he needed in Herschel, and when this happened he turned to other sources, chiefly the 1819 edition of Abraham Rees’s
Cyclopedia or Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences,
and Literature.
The
Cyclopedia
entry on the moon, for instance, contains the following sentence, describing some of the German astronomer Johann Schröter’s observations of the moon: The two cusps appeared tapering in a very sharp, faint prolongation, each exhibiting its farthest extremity faintly illuminated by the solar rays, before any part of the dark hemisphere was visible.

That sentence appears, in its entirety, in Poe’s story, as Hans Phaall muses on the meaning of Schröter’s work; it is part of three long paragraphs, totaling more than four hundred words, that Poe took from Rees’s
Cyclopedia,
changing or adding a word or phrase here or there (“I thought,” “I supposed,” “my ideas on this topic”) as necessary to suggest that they originated not with an encyclopedia but with Hans Phaall.

Of course, “Hans Phaall” is a long story, the great bulk of which was written by Edgar Allan Poe himself, and its “design is original,” as Poe asserted in his appendix, in the conception of a balloon ride to the moon and in its emphasis on the technical aspects of the flight. But the genre of the lunar voyage was hardly a new one, while a story that gave a detailed description of a balloon ride ( “Leaves from an Aeronaut”) appeared in a major literary magazine about the time Poe was setting to work on his own story. Those two stories share certain incidents, as does Poe’s story and a recent novel about a trip to the moon, a long review of which he acknowledged having read. Moreover, virtually all of the scientific passages in “Hans Phaall,” in which Poe took such pride, were lifted directly from other sources. So too, as it turned out, were important elements of his critique of the moon series of Richard Adams Locke, the writer whom he believed had stolen his idea for a moon story: that being one early battle in Poe’s lifelong campaign against plagiarism.

“Hans Phaall—A Tale” appeared in the June 1835 issue of the
Southern
Literary Messenger,
the Richmond journal for which Poe would shortly be hired as editor. The story received little notice beyond the immediate

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region, but in Virginia and Maryland the critical response was generally favorable. The Richmond
Whig
called it an “extraordinary production ridiculed by some” with “a great deal of nonsense, trifling and bad taste before Hans Phaal [
sic
] quits the earth,” but having scenes in outer space that “exhibit genius and invention”; those parts of the story the
Whig
found “wonderfully approximating to truth, and penetrative of the mysteries of creation.” (Poe was very pleased by this review, writing of it to the
Messenger’
s publisher, “I will take care & have the Letter inserted in all the Baltimore papers.”) The Baltimore
Patriot
praised the story’s “hair-breadth ’scapes and stirring incidents,” and hoped that the author would someday provide readers an account of Hans Phaall’s journey back to the earth, echoing a sentiment expressed in the editorial introduction to the issue of the
Southern Literary Messenger
in which the story appeared.

“Mr. Poe’s story is a long one,” wrote the
Messenger’
s editor, but it will appear short to the reader, whom it bears along with irresistible interest, through a region of which, of all others, we know least, but which his fancy has invested with peculiar charms. We trust that a future missive from the lunar voyager will give us a narrative of his adventures in the orb that he has been the first to explore.

Poe seems to have had every intention of writing a sequel to “Hans Phaall—A Tale.” Indeed, at one point in the story, Hans remarks about his balloon, “I wished to retain with me as much weight as I could carry, for reasons which will be explained in the sequel.” The second part of that sentence, the reference to a “sequel,” was cut by Poe from the 1839 version of the story, replaced by the phrase, “for the obvious reason that I could not be
positive
either about the gravitation or the atmospheric density of the moon.”

Sometime between 1835 and 1839, then, Poe gave up on the idea of writing a sequel to “Hans Phaall,” a second story that would finally allow him to entertain his “day-dreams about the scenery of the moon.” (In fact, as he would later admit, “The chief design in carrying my hero to the moon was to afford him an opportunity of describing the lunar scenery.”) Ironically, the demise of the second story was connected to his original idea for the first one, which did not involve a balloon flight at all. Instead Poe, having been inspired by Herschel’s
A Treatise on Astronomy,
imag-

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ined a story about a man who discovers a fantastical world on the moon by means of an extraordinarily powerful new telescope.

Poe recognized at once that the story would be successful only if readers so trusted the science of the story that they would give themselves over to its flights of fancy. But would they willingly suspend disbelief about a telescope powerful enough to detect life on the moon? He discussed his idea with a few friends in Baltimore (among them John Pendleton Kennedy, one of the judges of the
Saturday Visiter
contest), who advised him that the optical problems presented by such a telescope were so obvious and so widely recognized that readers would never believe one could really exist. Reluctantly concluding that his friends were right, Poe shelved his plans for the telescope story and decided instead “to give what interest I could to an actual passage from the earth to the moon.”

Scarcely two months after “Hans Phaall” appeared in the
Southern Literary Messenger,
a series of articles began to run in the
Sun,
reporting the lunar discoveries that had been made with a powerful new telescope—one said to have been invented by none other than John Herschel. Even from Baltimore Poe could tell that, unlike “Hans Phaall,” the series was receiving an astonishing amount of attention. The
Sun’
s moon story—so rife with blunders, like all the others—was on everyone’s lips, and his own, which he knew to be superior in so many ways, had already been forgotten. Someone in New York was growing wealthy while he remained obscure, still wandering the nighttime streets, gripped by his dark memories—which now included those long-ago evenings on John Allan’s porch, when he had gazed at the moon in wonder, little knowing that one day it too would be lost to him.

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c h a p t e r
10

“If This Account

Is True, It Is Most

Enormously Wonderful”

On wednesday, August 26, the
Sun
brought to New York the first accounts of the remarkable lunar discoveries that had, it said, recently appeared in the
Edinburgh Journal of Science
. The
Journal’
s correspondent, Dr. Andrew Grant, amanuensis to Sir John Herschel himself, had earlier described how the new telescope came to be invented. Now Dr.