Authors: Matthew Goodman
Immense Siberian figures, astronomers the world over watching for signs of lunarian cities: it was all, Locke thought, utterly absurd. Yet these were respected scientists, their views aired in prestigious journals. They were so very confident in their predictions of lunar life; they believed it was only a matter of time until, in Thomas Dick’s mathematical phrase, “direct proofs” were obtained and humanity knew itself to be alone no more. Life discovered elsewhere in the universe: what a sensation that would make. Locke began to imagine how such an event might be reported in the newspapers—the triumphant announcement, the awestruck descriptions of the fantastic become real. He could picture the exclama-
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tory headlines, the long columns of black type, each day’s account concluding with that most captivating of phrases:
To be continued.
It would be the most remarkable news story in the history of the world.
And all the better, for his purposes, for being entirely untrue.
Knowing the great success that his Matthias pamphlet had enjoyed, Locke asked three hundred dollars for this new series—exactly double what he had received for the earlier one—a high price, to be sure, but one to which Benjamin Day readily agreed. (Ultimately, Day later recalled, he would pay Locke “between $500 and $600” for the moon series. It was an enormous sum, equivalent to about a year’s wages for Locke, but for Day it would still prove very cheap.) Did Benjamin Day know from the outset that the series being proposed by Richard Adams Locke was fictitious? This has never been established— neither of the two men ever publicly discussed the matter—but it seems scarcely possible that Day had not known. Day himself never claimed as much, and none of his actions in the aftermath of the series are indicative of a publisher who has been grievously fooled by his editor. He never expressed misgivings about paying Locke double his original asking price; nor did he fire Locke, who continued as the
Sun’
s editor (writing several important features for the paper) until 1836, when he left to start his own penny paper, the
New Era.
And if one of the stories that subsequently arose about the Moon Hoax is true—that of the Yale astronomers who came to the
Sun
offices seeking proof—then Benjamin Day had to have been in on the game. Day was a shrewd, hard-nosed entrepreneur who had envisioned the
Sun
primarily in business terms from the very beginning, when he had conceived of the newspaper as a means of advertising his struggling print shop. In the summer of 1835 the
Sun
had been publishing for less than two years, and though it had become unexpectedly successful, the paper’s future remained uncertain. It was engaged in a fierce battle for the city’s readers, not only with the old guard of merchant newspapers but with two aggressive new penny dailies as well. Just that summer a pair of entrepreneurs, hoping to capitalize on his work, had started a penny paper they called the
True Sun;
that pirat-ical venture hadn’t lasted a week, but there were rumblings of other papers to come, and some of them would undoubtedly prove more enduring. Not all of the papers could survive, even in a city as large as New York. The Matthias series had greatly improved his paper’s chances;
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Day had every confidence that this one would as well, and he accepted Locke’s proposition.
Perhaps, as seems most likely, Richard Adams Locke told Benjamin Day straight out about the details of his scheme. Or else he simply outlined the fantastic nature of the series, leaving unspoken the question of its authenticity—and, like P. T. Barnum accepting R. W. Lindsay’s assurances about Joice Heth’s age, Day saw the glittering opportunity that lay before him and did not inquire further.
The first item, published the morning of Friday, August 21, attracted little attention among the
Sun’
s newsboys (who much preferred news of a more sordid nature), and among the paper’s readers as well. Headlined
“Celestial Discoveries,” it was the lead story, although unlike nearly all of the other twenty-seven items on the page it comprised only a single sentence, one said to have been taken from the venerable Scottish newspaper the
Edinburgh Courant.
According to the
Courant
—or so claimed the
Sun
—an “eminent publisher” in Edinburgh was reporting “astronomical discoveries of the most wonderful description” made by Sir John Herschel at his observatory at the Cape of Good Hope, using an enormous telescope that worked on “an entirely new principle.” The excerpt from the
Courant
ran only forty-two words, and in its brevity left much unsaid: the source of the original report (the “eminent publisher”), the “new principle” on which the telescope worked, and, most centrally, the “wonderful”
discoveries that Sir John had made. Those details would have to await further updates, the next one of which—truly the first installment of the moon series—arrived four days later.
On August 25, the
Sun
announced on its news page that it was beginning the publication of a series of articles, entitled “Great Astronomical Discoveries, Lately Made By Sir John Herschel, L.L.D., F.R.S., &c. at the Cape of Good Hope,” which had recently appeared in the
Supplement to
the Edinburgh Journal of Science
and had been furnished to the
Sun
by an unnamed “medical gentleman” just returned from Scotland. The forthcoming articles, trumpeted the
Sun,
would reveal “celestial discoveries of higher and more universal interest than any, in any science yet known to the human race,” discoveries that “cannot fail to excite more ardent curiosity and afford more sublime gratification than could be created and supplied by any thing short of a direct revelation from heaven.”
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According to the
Sun,
the remarkable information contained in the series had been provided to the
Edinburgh Journal of Science
by Dr. Andrew Grant—a character of Richard Adams Locke’s own creation—who was serving as amanuensis to Sir John Herschel at his observatory at the Cape of Good Hope. Dr. Grant had thus been an eyewitness to the otherwise scarcely believable events described in the
Supplement.
He had stood by Herschel’s side as the eminent astronomer made the final adjustments to his telescope before directing it at the moon; he was there to record how Sir John, at last satisfied with the preparations, had solemnly ad-journed for several hours, so that he could prepare his own mind for the great revelations he felt certain would follow. “Well might he pause!” exclaimed the anonymous author of the
Supplement.
“He was about to become the sole depository of wondrous secrets which had been hid from the eyes of all men that had lived since the birth of time. He was about to crown himself with a diadem of knowledge which would give him a conscious preeminence above every individual of his species who then lived, or who had lived in the generations that are passed away.”
Having set the scene, the
Supplement
next provided its readers a brief taste of the “wondrous secrets” that would soon be revealed: To render our enthusiasm intelligible, we will state at once that by means of a telescope, of vast dimensions and an entirely new principle, the younger Herschel, at his observatory in the Southern Hemisphere, has already made the most extraordinary discoveries in every planet of the solar system; has obtained a distinct view of objects in the moon, fully equal to that which the unaided eye commands of terrestrial objects at the distance of a hundred yards; has affirmatively settled the question whether this satellite be inhabited, and by what orders of beings; has firmly established a new theory of cometary phenomena; and has solved or corrected nearly every leading problem of mathematical astronomy.
Before all that could be explained, however, it was first necessary to describe the invention of John Herschel’s revolutionary telescope. For years the great astronomer had worked on telescope design, following the course set by his astronomer father William in his own efforts to observe the moon; his latest instruments had allowed an unprecedented view of the lunar landscape, but beyond a certain point his progress had been
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stymied. Herschel was confronting the optical problem that had bedeviled astronomers since the dawn of telescopes: the more highly an image is magnified, the dimmer it becomes. The
Supplement
cited a kind of honor roll of astronomers—Huygens, Newton, Gregory, William Herschel—all of whom had fruitlessly searched, like medieval alchemists seeking the philosopher’s stone, for the right compound of materials to overcome this essential problem. John Herschel had used the most sophisticated materials that modern chemistry could provide; in the
Supplement’
s romantic description, he “had watched their growing brightness under the hands of the artificer with more anxious hope than ever lover watched the eye of his mistress.” But while he might have taken satisfaction in the knowledge that his telescopes provided him a more intimate view of the moon than had been gained by anyone before him, he was still denied an answer to the most interesting question of all: Whether this light of the solemn forest, of the treeless desert, and of the deep blue ocean as it rolls; whether this object of the lonely turret, of the uplifted eye on the deserted battle-field, and of all the pilgrims of love and hope, of misery and despair, that have journeyed over the hills and valleys of this earth, through all the eras of its unwritten history to those of its present voluminous record; the exciting question, whether this “observed” of all the sons of men, from the days of Eden to those of Edinburgh, be inhabited by beings like ourselves.
The age-old problem of creating magnification and light, like that of creating gold from lead, had long seemed insoluble. And yet somehow John Herschel
had
solved it, had succeeded where so many men before him had failed—had discovered life on the moon. But how had he done it? The key moment, reported the
Supplement,
had occurred three years earlier during a conversation between Herschel and Sir David Brewster, the eminent Scottish scientist and one of the world’s great experts in the field of optics. (Significantly for Richard Adams Locke’s purposes, the real-life Brewster was also among the leading scientific advocates of the idea of lunar life.) The two learned men had been chatting—Sir John had just complimented Sir David on his article on optics for the
Edinburgh
Encyclopedia
—when Herschel offhandedly remarked on the great convenience offered by the old style of tubeless telescope. Such a telescope, he observed, was actually highly practical, because the astronomer did not
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have to contend with the enormous weight of the tube. Sir David had agreed, and the conversation then turned to the perennial problem of the paucity of light under great magnification. Herschel was silent for several moments, deep in thought. Might it not be possible, he finally asked, to effect a transfusion of
artificial light
through the focal object of vision?
Taken aback by the originality of the idea, Brewster was himself momentarily silent, before raising a few tentative objections involving the refrangibility of rays and the angle of incidence. Herschel, however, had already considered those problems, and he confidently brushed them aside with a reference to the Newtonian reflector, which had used additional lenses to correct for them. Now he continued, the excitement in his voice growing, “Why cannot the illuminated microscope, say, the hydro-oxygen, be applied to render distinct, and, if necessary, even to magnify the focal object?”
The hydro-oxygen microscope was not a creation of Locke’s; it was one of the most heralded scientific instruments of the age. To operate the microscope, the scientist first placed the object to be viewed on a glass slide; streams of hydrogen and oxygen were then directed against a piece of lime, the resulting reaction producing an intense light that projected an image of the object through the microscope’s lens and onto a distant screen. In this manner, objects so small as to be invisible to the naked eye could be magnified, breathtakingly, to a dimension of several feet. As the
Time
s of London wrote about the hydro-oxygen microscope in 1833, “It can, in truth represent objects five hundred thousand times larger in size than they really are. Thus the pores of the slenderest twig and the fibres of the most delicate leaf expand into coarse net work. The external integu-ments of a fly’s eye, filled with thousands of lenses, appear the dimensions of a lady’s veil—that gentleman yclept the flea, swells into six feet— worms seem like boa constrictors: while the population of a drop of goodly ditch water presents such shapes as Teniers should have seen before he pencilled the grotesque monsters who troubled the sleep of St. Anthony.” In an age when microscopes were still rare and wondrous instruments, the hydro-oxygen microscope had so captured the interest of the public that in New York—as Richard Adams Locke well knew—a demonstration of the microscope was one of the featured attractions at Scudder’s American Museum on Broadway.
Essentially, Herschel’s idea (as supplied to him, of course, by Locke) was to take the lunar image produced by the telescope and then transmit
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that image through a hydro-oxygen microscope. This way, he would not only illuminate the image, thus resolving the problem of available light, but would additionally magnify it, so that—as the
Supplement
quoted him as remarking—he could study even the entomology of the moon, in case there happened to be insects living on its surface. It did not take David Brewster long to grasp the import of the idea, and when he did the effect was extraordinary: “Sir David sprung from his chair in an ecstacy of conviction,” reported the
Supplement,
“and leaping halfway to the ceiling, exclaimed, ‘Thou art the man!’”