The Balloon-Hoax
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"The Balloon-Hoax" is the title used in collections and anthologies of a newspaper article by American writer Edgar Allan Poe, first published in 1844 in The Sun newspaper in New York. Originally presented as a true story, it detailed European Monck Mason's trip across the Atlantic Ocean in only three days in a gas balloon. It was later revealed as a hoax and the story was retracted two days later.
Overview
[edit]The story now known as "The Balloon-Hoax" was first printed in The Sun newspaper in New York. The article provided a detailed and highly plausible account<ref>Edgar Allan Poe, Astounding News! (full text of hoax), New York Sun, April 13, 1844</ref> of a lighter-than-air balloon trip by European balloonist Monck Mason across the Atlantic Ocean taking 75 hours, along with a diagram and specifications of the craft.
Poe may have been inspired, at least in part, by a prior journalistic hoax known as the "Great Moon Hoax", published in the same newspaper in 1835. One of the suspected writers of that hoax, Richard Adams Locke, was Poe's editor at the time "The Balloon-Hoax" was published.<ref>Tresch, John. "Extra! Extra! Poe invents science fiction!" collected in The Cambridge Companion to Edgar Allan Poe, Kevin J. Hayes, ed. Cambridge University Press, 2002. p. 115 Template:ISBN</ref> Poe had complained for a decade that the paper's Great Moon Hoax had plagiarized (by way of Locke) the basic idea from "The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall", one of Poe's less successful stories which also involved similar inhabitants on the Moon. Poe felt The Sun had made tremendous profits from his story without giving him a cent. (Poe's anger at The Sun is chronicled in the 2008 book The Sun and the Moon by Matthew Goodman.)
Publication history
[edit]
The story was first published on April 13, 1844 in the New York Sun.<ref>Quinn, Arthur Hobson. Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. Template:ISBN. p. 410</ref> It ran with the headline:
- ASTOUNDING NEWS!
- BY EXPRESS VIA NORFOLK:
- THE ATLANTIC CROSSED
- IN THREE DAYS!
- SIGNAL TRIUMPH OF
- MR. MONCK MASON'S
- FLYING MACHINE!!!
- Arrival at Sullivan's Island,
- near Charlestown, S. C., of
- Mr. Mason, Mr. Robert Hol-
- land, Mr. Henson, Mr. Har-
- rison Ainsworth, and four
- others, in the
- STEERING BALLOON
- "VICTORIA,"
- AFTER A PASSAGE OF
- SEVENTY-FIVE HOURS
- FROM LAND TO LAND.
- FULL PARTICULARS
- OF THE
- VOYAGE!!!
A retraction concerning the article was printed in The Sun on April 15, 1844:
Critical reception and significance
[edit]Poe himself describes the enthusiasm his story had aroused: he writes that the Sun building was "besieged" by people wanting copies of the newspaper. "I never witnessed more intense excitement to get possession of a newspaper", he wrote.<ref name=Meyers154>Meyers, Jeffrey. Edgar Allan Poe: His Life and Legacy. New York: Cooper Square Press, 1992: 154. Template:ISBN</ref> The story's impact reflects on the period's infatuation with progress.<ref>Meyers, Jeffrey. Edgar Allan Poe: His Life and Legacy. New York: Cooper Square Press, 1992: 155. Template:ISBN</ref> Poe added realistic elements, discussing at length the balloon's design and propulsion system in believable detail.<ref>Rosenheim, Shawn James. The Cryptographic Imagination: Secret Writing from Edgar Poe to the Internet. The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997: 183. Template:ISBN</ref> His use of real people, including William Harrison Ainsworth, also lent credence to the story.<ref name=Meyers154/> The character of Monck Mason was not a real person, though he was based heavily on Thomas Monck Mason; the story borrowed heavily from Mason's 1836 book Account of the Late Aeronautical Expedition from London to Weilburg.<ref>Sova, Dawn B. Edgar Allan Poe: A to Z. New York: Checkmark Books, 2001: 149. Template:ISBN.</ref>
"The Balloon-Hoax" is like one of Poe's "tales of ratiocination" (such as "The Murders in the Rue Morgue") in reverse: rather than taking things apart to solve a problem, Poe builds up fiction to make it seem true.<ref>Cornelius, Kay. "Biography of Edgar Allan Poe," collected in Bloom's BioCritiques: Edgar Allan Poe, Harold Bloom, ed. Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 2002: 34. Template:ISBN</ref> The story is also an early form of science fiction, specifically responding to the emerging technology of hot air balloons.<ref>Tresch, John. "Extra! Extra! Poe invents science fiction!", The Cambridge Companion to Edgar Allan Poe, Kevin J. Hayes, ed. Cambridge University Press, 2002: 114. Template:ISBN.</ref>
The story may have later been an inspiration for Jules Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days.<ref>Tresch, John. "Extra! Extra! Poe invents science fiction!" as collected in The Cambridge Companion to Edgar Allan Poe, edited by Kevin J. Hayes. Cambridge University Press, 2002: 117. Template:ISBN</ref> As Verne scholar William Butcher pointed out, Verne was an early admirer of Poe and his novel Cinq semaines en ballon (Five Weeks in a Balloon) was published within a year of his non-fiction book Edgar Poe et ses œuvres (Edgar Allan Poe and his Works).<ref>William Butcher, Journey to the Centre of the Earth, Oxford U Press, 1992. Template:Webarchive</ref> Verne even has a character mention Poe's story in From the Earth to the Moon. It is not difficult to see Poe's works, published in France as Histoires extraordinaires ("Extraordinary Stories"), as one of the influences on Verne's Voyages extraordinaires ("Extraordinary Journeys").
Real trans-oceanic lighter-than-air flights
[edit]Template:Further The first human-carrying lighter-than-air craft of any type to cross the Atlantic was in 1919. The British dirigible R-34, a direct copy of the German L-33 which crashed in Britain during World War I. The 3559.5 mile flight from Britain to New York City took 108 hours 12 minutes.
The first human-carrying unpowered balloon to actually cross the Atlantic Ocean was Double Eagle II from August 11 to 17, 1978. The Pacific was crossed in three days by unmanned Japanese "fire balloons" called Fu-Go in 1944, exactly 100 years after Poe's story.