You’re Having A Laugh – Part Thirty Five
The Great Balloon Hoax of 1844
Edgar Allan Poe is one of my heroes, not just a great and
innovative writer but also a bit of a prankster. This is one of my favourite
hoaxes of his.
Being able to fly long distances was just a pipe dream in
the 1840s. The concept of powered flight in an aeroplane was still half a
century away and what experimentation in the field of aeronautics was confined
to the hot air balloon. Imagine, therefore, the sensation that was caused when
news broke, courtesy of The New York Sun in its midday edition of April 13,
1844, of an astonishing feat. The famous European balloonist, Monck Mason, had not
only flown across the Atlantic Ocean but had achieved the feat in just 75
hours.
Not that Monck had intended to get to America, the piece
reported. He was just trying to fly from England to Paris in his balloon named
Victoria but, thanks to a problem with the craft’s propeller mechanism, he had
veered off course rather dramatically and finally landed on terra firm on
Sullivan’s Island close to Charleston in South Carolina. This was the first
time that the Atlantic had been crossed by balloon. The article included a
diagram and specifications of the craft.
Thomas Monck Mason was a real person, an Irish flute player,
impresario and a pioneer of long-distance ballooning. In 1836 he flew from
London to just outside the German town of Weilburg. It took him eighteen hours and
he published a book about his exploits two years later, entitled Account of the
Late Aeronautical Expedition from London to Weilburg. Monck was name-checked by
the poet, Thomas Hood, in his Ode to Messrs Green, Hollond and Monk; “write
then Messrs Monck Mason Hollond Green/ and tell us all you have or haven’t
seen/ twaa kind when the balloon went out of town/ to take Monck Mason up and
set him down”.
A sense of the sensation that the supposed derring-do of
this accomplished balloonist’s derring-do can be gained from Poe’s later
account of events in The Columbia Spy. When the news broke, he wrote, “the whole
square surrounding the ‘Sun’ building was literally besieged, blocked
up—ingress and egress being alike impossible, from a period soon after sunrise
until about two o’clock P.M…. I never witnessed more intense excitement to
get possession of a newspaper. As soon as the few first copies made their way
into the streets, they were bought up, at almost any price, from the newsboys,
who made a profitable speculation beyond doubt. I saw a half-dollar given, in
one instance, for a single paper, and a shilling was a frequent price. I tried,
in vain, during the whole day, to get possession of a copy.”
As well as trying to secure a copy of the paper at face value, Poe
is said to have tried to tell anyone and everyone that the story was fake news.
No one would listen to him but soon the truth came out. The New York Sun
published a retraction in its edition of April 15, 1844, stating “we are inclined to believe that the intelligence is
erroneous. The description of the Balloon and the voyage was written with a
minuteness and scientific ability calculated to obtain credit everywhere and
was read with great pleasure and satisfaction. We by no means think such a
project impossible”.
The question is: what motivated Poe to perpetrate
this hoax?
Well, he had a long-standing beef with the newspaper. They
had been taken in by the Great Lunar Hoax of 1835 (see https://windowthroughtime.wordpress.com/2018/03/26/youre-having-a-laugh-part-ten/)
which, although it had nothing to do with Poe, he claimed that it ripped off
the plot of one of his less successful stories, The Unparalleled Adventure of
One Hans Pfall, published in 1835 and intended to be an elaborate lunar hoax
itself, running over several episodes. Poe reckoned that The Sun had made a lot
of money from the hoax, but he hadn’t seen a cent. He waited nine years for his
revenge but got it in spades.
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If you enjoyed this, check out Fifty Scams and Hoaxes by
Martin Fone
https://www.troubador.co.uk/bookshop/business/fifty-scams-and-hoaxes/
