Great Moon Hoax

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Illustration of the 4th article
Vespertilio homo (Bat Man ), from the Italian edition of the Moon Duck: Delle Scoperte Fatte Nella Luna del Dottor Giovanni Herschel ( Naples , 1836)

The Great Moon Hoax ( German  The great moon hoax ) was a series of six newspaper articles from 25 August 1835 in the New York Sun published and about the alleged discovery of life on the moon reported.

The great vertigo of the moon

The series of articles entitled “Great astronomical discoveries lately made by Sir John Herschel, LLDFRS & c. At the Cape of Good Hope [From Supplement to the Edinburgh Journal of Science] ”, he first described the alleged astronomical discoveries of Sir John Herschel in his observatory at the Cape of Good Hope , built in 1834 , which he“ with the help of a telescope of enormous dimensions and a completely new principle ”should have made. It was said that Herschel had put forward a “new theory of cometary phenomena ”, that he had discovered planets in other solar systems , and that he had “ solved or corrected almost every outstanding problem in mathematical astronomy ”. It was also said that the famous scientist discovered life on the moon .

On Monday, August 31, 1835, Richard Adams Locke , who is usually credited with the authorship of the legendary newspaper duck, enthused : “From there we crossed the country southeast until we came to Atlas (No. 6), and it was all in one the lofty valleys at the foot of this mountain, where we found the most superior species of the batman (Vespertilio homo). In terms of stature they did not surpass those last described, but they were of infinitely greater personal beauty, and in our eyes they appeared hardly less lovely than the usual depictions of angels by the more imaginative schools of painting. "

When the supposed existence of people on the moon was sensationally and publicly revealed, the editor of Sun Benjamin Day announced that his paper had the highest circulation of all newspapers worldwide with 19,360 copies. Many of the competing publishers rushed to reprint the series. The turmoil caused such a stir for three weeks that a mission group in Springfield , Massachusetts was said to have seriously considered sending missionaries to the earth satellite to convert the batmen.

In the United States, the "big moon duck" in the New York paper is considered the first example of large-scale and deliberate forgery in newspaper journalism. It was not until September 16, 1835, that the Sun admitted the fake, and the public reacted largely amused. Not least because of this fact, the bizarre hoax is one of the most famous in all of media history .

Carl Friedrich Gauß and the vertigo of the moon

The great mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauß considered his French colleague Joseph Nicolas Nicollet , who emigrated to America in 1832, to be the originator of the moon vertigo in 1844, which had also caused a sensation in Europe. A few years after the scandal, Gauß wrote in a letter to his son Eugen Gauß, who had lived in America since the end of 1830 and had met Nicollet there:

“In one of your earlier letters you once mentioned a young French man named Nicollet with whom you became acquainted. The same was previously an assistant at the Paris observatory and did some not meritorious work. I did not find out why he had to leave France. Later (about 7 or 8 years ago) he (I don't know whether anonymously or by naming the name) wrote a ridiculous article in an American newspaper or journal about alleged truly nonsensical discoveries that Herschel made on the promontory of Good Hope should be delivered. This article was even translated into German at the time and gave curious evidence of how crude a mystification can be without losing the strength to make fools of many people. "

literature

  • Richard Adams Locke, Joseph Nicolas Nicollet: The Moon Hoax; or, a Discovery that the Moon Has a Vast Population of Human Beings . New York 1859.
  • Roland Wenzlhuemer: Writing global history. An introduction to 6 episodes. UVK Verlagsgesellschaft, Konstanz / Munich 2017, ISBN 978-3-8252-4765-2 , pp. 43–78.

Web links

Commons : Great Moon Hoax  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files
Wikisource: Latest reports from the Cape of Good Hope on Sir John Herschel's most curious astronomical discoveries concerning the moon and its inhabitants.  - Translation of Articles 1–5 into German, Hamburg 1836

Individual evidence

  1. ^ New Inhabitants of the Moon (Museum of Hoaxes)
  2. ^ Letter from Carl Friedrich Gauß to Eugen Gauß, Göttingen, February 15, 1844. Reprint: Florian Cajori : Carl Friedrich Gauss and his children. In: Science, New Series, Volume 9, 1899, pages 697-704, here: 700.