The Long Space Age

by Alexander MacDonald

  New York City in the 1830s was the urban center of commercial growth for the young American republic. It had a population of two hundred thousand to three hundred thousand, and this mass of people and commerce had created a new type of popular newspaper, the penny paper, which appealed more directly to the broader public than the six-cent, business-focused dailies. The editor of one such New York penny paper, The Sun, Richard Adams Locke, was an avid reader of natural science and astronomical literature. His readings included the popular works of Reverend Thomas Dick, a Scottish minister who appealed to religious sentiment and proclaimed that the myriad planets of the universe, including the Moon, had been purposely populated by God. Locke also read more scholarly texts, such as John Herschel’s A Treatise on Astronomy, first published in America in 1834.48 These readings led Locke to think about how a discovery of extraterrestrial life on the Moon would be received by the public, as well as the effect that such an announcement would have on newspaper sales.

  On Tuesday, August 25, 1835, The Sun ran a front-page story announcing “GREAT ASTRONOMICAL DISCOVERIES Lately Made By Sir John Herschel, LL.D., F.R.S., &c, At the Cape of Good Hope.” In it, The Sun claimed that it had been furnished with a recent issue of The Edinburgh Journal of Science that contained an article on Herschel’s latest, amazing discoveries, which it was now reprinting. The story progressed over six installments for a week, culminating in the revelation that a powerful new telescope of Herschel’s, with a magnifying power forty-two thousand times that of an unaided human eye, had enabled him to discover an inhabited world in the Moon, complete with mountains of amethyst, bipedal beavers, and a lunar civilization of intelligent, temple-building beings with batlike wings:

  Certainly they were like human beings, for their wings had now disappeared, and their attitude in walking was both erect and dignified. Having observed them at this distance for some minutes, we introduced lens H z which brought them to the apparent proximity of eighty yards. . . . About half of the first party had passed beyond our canvass; but of all the others we had a perfect distinct and deliberate view. They averaged four feet in height, were covered, except on the face, with short and glossy copper-colored hair, and had wings composed of a thin membrane, without hair, lying snugly upon their backs, from the top of their shoulders to the calves of their legs. The face, which was of a yellowish flesh color, was a slight improvement upon that of the large orang outang, being more open and intelligent in its expression, and having a much greater expansion of forehead.49

  Although the story was fictional, the effect it had was not. The account seems to have been largely believed to have been true when first published, and the widespread interest instantly increased the circulation of The Sun fivefold, giving it the largest circulation of any New York newspaper of its day.50 The demand for news of the “discoveries” was staggering: P. T. Barnum, in his The Humbugs of the World, published in 1866, estimated that over $25,000 worth of “Moon Hoax” materials—which included the penny newspapers, sixty thousand twelve-cent pamphlets, and lithographs costing a quarter—had been sold by The Sun, more than had yet been spent on any American observatory.51 There was more than fleeting interest: in 1859, a single copy of the twelve-cent pamphlet form of the story sold at a library auction for $3.75—roughly three or four days’ average wage at the time.52 The story made it over to Europe, where it was reprinted, sometimes with newly commissioned lithographs, causing correspondents to write to Herschel in South Africa seeking to affirm its validity. Herschel would later write of being told that a priest had even sermonized to his flock that he wanted to take up a collection for Bibles that could be sent to the newly discovered lunar inhabitants.53 Although the tale of a “Bibles to the Moon” campaign in the 1830s may be apocryphal, it is suggestive of the significant impact, credibility, and influence of the manufactured story.

  It is worth noting that contemporaries viewed the Moon Hoax as emerging out of a general popular interest in astronomy that was already present in America, rather than as being a major spur to such interest afterward. In P. T. Barnum’s colorful and underutilized account of the hoax, it is evident that popular American interest in the exploration of the heavens predated the hoax and enabled it to reach the proportions that it did. As Barnum recounts:

  The real discoveries of the younger Herschel, whose fame seemed destined to eclipse that of the elder sage of the same name, and the eloquent startling works of Dr. Dick . . . did much to increase and keep up this peculiar mania of the time, until the whole community at last were literally occupied with little else than “star-gazing.” Dick’s works on “The Sidereal Heavens,” “Celestial Scenery,” “The improvement of Society,” etc., were read with the utmost avidity by rich and poor, old and young, in season and out of season. They were quoted in the parlor, at the table, on the promenade, at church, and even in the bedroom, until it absolutely seemed as though the whole community had “Dick” upon the brain. To the highly educated and imaginative portion of our good Gothamite population, the Doctor’s glowing periods, full of the grandest speculations as to the starry worlds around us, their wondrous magnificence and ever-varying aspects of beauty and happiness were inexpressibly fascinating. The author’s well-reasoned conjectures as to the majesty and beauty of their landscapes, the fertility and diversity of their soil, and the exalted intelligence and comeliness of their inhabitants, found hosts of believers. . . . It was at the very height of the furor above mentioned, that one morning the readers of the “sun” . . . were thrilled with the announcement in its columns of certain “Great Astronomical Discoveries.”54

  Although the words of a promoter and marketer like P. T. Barnum must be read with a healthy dose of skepticism, he was also a connoisseur of fads and chicanery and, as such, would have paid close attention to such a grand “humbug” as the Moon Hoax. That he confidently ascribes its success, and the credulity toward lunar habitation, to an already existing interest in astronomy is significant.

  In referring to this general interest, in particular, as generated by the speculative works of Reverend Dick, it is hard to improve on the words of the contemporary commentator William Griggs: “So thoroughly was the popular mind, even among the best educated and most reading classes, imbued with these fanciful anticipations of vast lunar discoveries, that, at the time Mr. Locke’s ‘Moon Story’ was written, scarcely any thing could have been devised and announced upon the subject too extravagant for general credulity to receive.”55 This ferment in popular astronomy was evidently significant enough that at least two of the era’s prominent writers tried to capitalize on it with works of satirical fiction: Locke’s “Moon Story” was the most successful, but Edgar Allan Poe had hoped his story “The Unparalleled Adventures of One Hans Pfall” might have similar success. Indeed, Poe initially accused Locke of plagiarism. Poe claimed to have considered writing a similar hoax-tale of telescopic discovery before choosing instead to develop his “Hans Pfall” story as a verisimilitudinous voyage to the Moon and publish it in a literary journal, the Southern Literary Messenger, in June 1835, a few months before The Sun ran Locke’s work.56 For his part, Locke claimed not to have read “Hans Pfall,” and, after meeting him in 1843, Poe believed he was telling the truth. That two authors had apparently simultaneously generated their plans for using the popular enthusiasm for astronomy to their advantage suggests something of the depth and prevalence of that enthusiasm in American communities from New York to Baltimore.

  An important and underappreciated factor in the success of the Moon Hoax was the description Locke provided of the scale of Herschel’s telescope. Unlike in “Hans Pfall,” which portrayed a voyage to the Moon being accomplished with a device of only moderate expense, Locke’s story involved a new type of massive telescope that had been constructed at unprecedented cost. Locke sought verisimilitude for his story, and he achieved it through a superficially plausible method for a high-magnification telescope: combining the magnification techniques of the recently introduced hydro-oxygen m
icroscope with a large Herschelian telescope. The stupendously large magnifying power was naturally accompanied by an impressively high cost: £70,000, an amount supposedly raised by subscription. The subscription effort was said to have been initially launched with £10,000 from “that liberal patron of science” the president of the Royal Society, Prince Augustus Frederick, the Duke of Sussex, and ultimately backed by the king up to the full amount.57 To the American reader, £70,000, converted to U.S. dollars at the then-official exchange rate of $4.85 to the pound, would be equivalent to some $340,000. Such an amount represents a share of contemporary wealth that would not be seen in terms of American observatory expenditures until some forty years later with the Lick Observatory. The supposed physical scale of the telescope was also unprecedented: an object glass 24 feet in diameter, six times the size of William Herschel’s largest, suspended between pillars 150 feet high. That claims of a project of such unprecedented scale in astronomy would lend credibility to a narrative of such sensation and novelty is obvious. What is perhaps more interesting to note is that an astronomical project of such scale was itself deemed credible to a broad cross section of the population of New York in 1835.

  Locke’s fictional narrative also included construction details that were familiar themes for large observatories and that would have imparted credibility to the story. The casting of the large object glass was given due attention, with the work being done by “the large glass-house of Messrs. Hartly and Grant” and with the first glass found to have been significantly flawed, requiring another casting. The transportation of the equipment to Herschel’s observatory in South Africa is described in some detail, with thirty-six oxen and several companies of Dutch Boers taking four days to traverse the distance from the port at Cape Town to the observing site. The telescope within the observatory was moved on circular railroads by a “locomotive apparatus” to enable maximum precision.58 Locke even supplies the project’s patron, the king, with the politically appropriate concern for the practical benefits of the project: “His Majesty, on being informed that the estimated expense was £70,000, naively inquired if the costly instrument would conduce to any improvement in navigation? On being inform that it undoubtedly would, the sailor King promised a carte blanch for the amount which might be required.”59 The story of the Great Moon Hoax shows the popular interest in astronomy and telescopic exploration that existed in America at the dawn of the Observatory Movement. Although the telescopes that would follow in the subsequent decade would be initially modest, the enthusiasm of New Yorkers for telescopic discoveries presaged the fervor for astronomy that would later grip the citizens of Cincinnati, Boston, Albany, Detroit, Pittsburgh, and Chicago and was an early sign of American fascination with large telescopes. By the end of the century, Americans would be building real telescopes that would almost rival Locke’s fictional one in size, expense, and social impact.

  Before his journey to Cincinnati, in an address to his constituents in Dedham, Massachusetts, Adams summed up his understanding of the economics of astronomy and the exploration of the heavens:

  Other sciences may be cultivated by individual exertion, by solitary toil, and at little cost—but for the discovery and investigation of the secrets of the skies, expensive edifices, still more expensive and complicated instruments, the combined labors of exquisitely talented mechanics, of eagle-eyed observers, of profound and skilful mathematicians, are all indispensably necessary; and, without the fostering aid and encouragement of the powerful, the affluent, and the liberal, these cannot be obtained. The history of astronomy has been, in all ages, the history of Genius and Industry, in their blazing light and untiring toil, patronized by power.60

  It would indeed be the powerful and the affluent that would patronize astronomy in nineteenth-century America. But it would not be through the federal government, as Adams had initially expected, that American citizens would provide their support. Rather, it would be through the voluntary and personal decisions of individual Americans in pursuit of their own passions and their own monuments.

  The early private support of American astronomy was focused in the colleges. In 1828, Yale College received a donation of $1,200 from Sheldon Clark, a bachelor who had been deprived of a much-desired education but who had been left significant property holdings by his grandfather. The gift enabled purchase of the finest ten-foot-long, five-inch-aperture Dollond achromatic telescope from London. Although it was not provided its own observatory and was placed instead in the steeple of the college’s first chapel, the Atheneum, it was the finest telescope in the Americas. It soon established the importance of large telescopes on the continent with its 1835 sighting of Halley’s Comet weeks before news arrived of its sighting in Europe. Popular interest in astronomical observatories was gathering momentum, and by the 1840s and 1850s, colleges would be acquiring telescopes as a way of signaling their intellectual bona fides, with even the Central Masonic Institute of Selma, Alabama, having a telescope as large as Yale’s.61

  Contemporaneous with the Yale telescope acquisition, Joseph Caldwell, the president of the University of North Carolina, initiated the construction of an observatory that would be the most expensive to date in the United States. As well as being the president of the university, Caldwell had a passion for teaching astronomy, as an 1896 article in Popular Science recounted: “To study the constellations and to show them to his pupils, Dr. Caldwell built on the top of his own residence a platform surrounded by a railing. Here he would sit night after night, pointing out to the seniors, taken in squads of three or four, the outlines of the constellations and their principal stars, and the highway of the planets and the moon.” 62 He recommended that the University establish a fully equipped observatory and was passionate enough about the venture to make a trip to London to procure the instruments at his own expense. The trustees arranged a credit of $6,000 in 1831, which allowed Caldwell to purchase the finest Troughton and Simms meridian circle, an altazimuth telescope, a Dollond equatorial refractor, and a Molyneux clock with a mercury-compensating pendulum.63 He built the observatory building with his own personal funds, for $430.29, although he was later reimbursed by the university. The observatory fell into decay shortly after Caldwell’s death in 1835, as his successors did not see the value of such a costly astronomical investment being maintained at a university whose main aim was to train the would-be political and commercial leaders of the South.64 However, Caldwell’s efforts are a significant early example of the extent to which individual initiative and private passion can propel the development of astronomical observatories, if not necessarily maintain that momentum.

  Another university president who gave significant support to astronomy was Willbur Fisk, the first president of Wesleyan University in Connecticut. A course in astronomy was available from the time of the university’s founding in 1831, and considerations for a college observatory began as early as the following year. Fisk was a renowned Methodist minister and theologian, dedicated to education, who went to special lengths to incorporate a study of the heavens into his university’s curriculum. In 1835 he traveled to Europe to order a six-inch Lerebours achromatic telescope in Paris for 6,000 francs, and the following year he purchased, for $2,200, a giant orrery weighing one ton, with a forty-five-foot-diameter orbit for Neptune and five hundred cog wheels of brass.65 Total expenditure on “the philosophical and astronomical apparatus” in 1836 was estimated at $4,000, including a separate altazimuth telescope and astronomical clock.66

  The Hopkins Observatory, at Williams College in Massachusetts, the oldest observatory still existing in the United States, was also largely the result of a personal passion for astronomy, in this case that of Professor Albert Hopkins, the brother of the university’s president. In 1836, with $4,000 from the college, $500 of Hopkins’s personal funds, $1,200 from the college trustees, and $400 from town merchants—a total of $6,100—a dedicated observatory was constructed to house an imported equatorial Herschelian telescope. As was common in many early Ame
rican observatories, religious motivation was a significant factor. For Albert Hopkins, an observatory was a way to explore the heavens as the work of God, as his dedicatory oration made clear: “It is the desire of those whose contributions and whose care have aided in the erection of this building, that it may subserve the interest, not merely of sound science, but of spiritual religion.” 67 Indeed, religious study and thought formed the greater part of Professor Hopkins’s life, with astronomy being one part of that study. The religious motivations for the observatory were evident even in its architecture, with biblical phrases engraved into marble tablets above its doors. Over the north door was written, “Lift up your eyes on high and behold who hath created these.” 68

  Although intrinsic interests had planted the seeds of the Observatory Movement, signaling motives began to assume importance even in the early phases. The Hudson Observatory at the Western Reserve College in Hudson, Ohio, was authorized in 1836 with $4,000, only ten years after the college itself had been founded with $7,500.69 The funds covered a year of travel to Europe for Elias Loomis—the mathematics professor leading the project, who had learned astronomy at Yale with the Sheldon Clark telescope. His European trip was for the purpose of acquiring the instruments for $1,700, and $1,086 more was set aside for the construction of the observatory.70 For Loomis, the motivation was astronomical research, while the college saw an observatory as a requisite element of signaling their position as a prestigious educational institute. As explained by the later college president, Reverend Carroll Cutler, this signaling motive reflected a desire to emulate the astronomical prowess of other great American colleges such as Yale: “If the question were asked whether these buildings were all necessary, we should have to reply that the plan on which Yale College was conducted was adopted here as the sum of all wisdom in such matters.”71 The positive signaling that applied to buildings like observatories seemingly did not extend to the quality of professors, however, as Loomis was subject to “pecuniary embarrassments” at the university and decided to resign from the college in 1844 to accept a position at New York University.72 The top quality of Loomis’s research and teaching abilities can hardly be questioned: the textbooks he would later write would become so popular at universities and with the public that, at his death in 1889, he was able to leave a significant fortune, $300,000, to his alma mater, Yale University, for the exclusive support of its astronomical research program.73 Already then, there were signs that the popular demand for astronomical observatories was driven by something other than a desire to support scientific research.