'The Sun and the Moon' by Matthew Goodman
BOOK REVIEW
A newspaper hoax in 19th century New York holds sway over its audience and provides a glimpse into why people believe the unbelievable.
The Sun and the Moon
The Remarkable True Account of Hoaxers, Showmen, Dueling Journalists, and Lunar Man-Bats in Nineteenth-Century New York
Matthew Goodman
Basic Books: 384 pp., $26
One late summer morning in 1835, the people of New York City were greeted with the shocking news that life had been discovered on the moon. And not just an "animalcule" of the sort that was on display under a microscope at Scudder's American Museum at Broadway and Ann Street but a whole menagerie of celestial creatures: water birds, unicorns, beavers that walked upright, and a race of winged creatures dubbed "Vespertilio-homo, or man-bat."
As we read in Matthew Goodman's delightful history "The Sun and the Moon," all of New York was convulsed by this discovery. The newspaper offices of the New York Sun, which printed the series of articles revealing the findings, "was besieged by thousands of [newsboy] applicants from dawn to midnight" waiting for the opportunity for more papers to arrive.
The articles were so popular that a pamphlet, "A Complete Account of the Late Discoveries in the Moon," was hastily assembled and sold for 12 1/2 cents apiece and lithographs of "Lunar Animals and Other Objects" went for a quarter. P.T. Barnum, a former newspaper editor who knew a thing or two about a good hoax, claimed in his book "The Humbugs of the World" that the Sun sold no less than $25,000 worth of moon-hoax paraphernalia. An astounding number, considering the entire population of New York City was just a shade over a quarter-million.
How was such a stunt possible? It was a vastly different age. Gas and steam were being harnessed to provide all manner of conveniences, but few understood how they worked. Marvels such as the microscope and the telescope were making it plain that the universe was far more vast than previously imagined. Claims that the fossils of gargantuan creatures that kept turning up were the remains of living species that hadn't been discovered yet were becoming increasingly hard to explain. For all this progress, newspapers were methodically printed and distributed by newsboys, horse-drawn coaches and sailing ships. Suffice to say, news traveled slowly.
