The Sun and the Moon: The Remarkable True Account of Hoaxers, Showmen, Dueling Journalists, and Lunar Man-Bats in Nineteenth-Century New York (31 page)

the sun and the moon

(he was clearly still amused by it) in an interview he gave on the
Sun’
s fiftieth anniversary in 1883. For their part, Olmsted and Loomis firmly denied having been fooled by the proprietors of the
Sun,
and insisted that at no time had they believed the lunar discoveries attributed to Sir John Herschel. In September 1835, as the story became widely circulated, their cause was taken up in a letter sent to the New Haven
Daily Herald,
signed only “Yalensis.” (The authorship has been attributed to Olmsted and Loomis themselves, but this is not clear from the text.) Yalensis pronounced the
Evening Star
item “entirely erroneous” and assured the readers of the
Daily Herald
that “the Professors of Yale were not deceived by the article in question for a single moment, as many of the inhabitants of New Haven, who inquired their opinion, will be ready to testify.” Anyone with a knowledge of optics and astronomy, claimed Yalensis, would perceive that the author of the moon series was ignorant of the finer points of those two sciences—and yet the very success of his endeavor was, ironically, a testament to the achievements of science itself: “We cannot, however, but regard the general credit given to his statements, as favorable to the reputation of science in the age in which we live, since its real discoveries have of late been so extraordinary that no creation of the imagination seemed too wonderful to be believed.”

Not since ancient Greece had the power of science so captured the popular imagination; never had the possibilities it offered seemed so limitless.

Thanks to the recent invention of hot-air balloons, human beings were now able to fly. Ships and trains—and even newspaper presses—were powered by the force of an immaterial substance: steam. The dread disease smallpox (which had left a permanent imprint on Richard Adams Locke, one of its last victims in England) was now preventable with a vac-cination obtained from, of all things, a virus found on cows’ udders. Not content with transforming human life, science was now extending itself to discover new, undreamed-of varieties of life. No more than six months earlier, the
Sun
had carried on its front page a large drawing of the creatures—“animalcules,” they were called—that could be seen in a single drop of water by means of the hydro-oxygen microscope then on exhibit at the American Museum. The accompanying article reported that the size of the animals “surpasses the conception of the human mind”; ten thousand members of a single species were, together, no larger than a single grain of sand. Yet the animals had distinct, even complex bodies, complete with what looked like tiny claws and wings and antennae. They
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came in a bewildering diversity of forms: one seemed to resemble a miniature sea serpent, another a triangle, still others a funnel or a bell, while some, noted the article, “cannot be compared to any object familiar to our senses.” If these tiny wonders could be detected in a single drop of water, then why should it not also be possible that the hydro-oxygen microscope, in combination with a powerful new telescope, might discover equally astonishing creatures on the earth’s closest neighbor?

Life, it seemed, was everywhere, in even the most unexpected places. In worlds distant and near at hand, modern science was only now beginning to perceive the variety of forms that God had bestowed on the universe, or so held the article of faith shared by theologians and scientists alike.

Science, they believed, was bringing man ever closer to God’s greatness, and perhaps, with the aid of science, humanity might more powerfully do God’s work. Shortly after the publication of the
Sun
articles, Sir Francis Beaufort, the hydrographer to the Royal Navy, wrote to his friend John Herschel in South Africa to ask if he had heard about the discoveries claimed in his name. Sir John replied that he had, and that he had further heard something even more remarkable—how an American clergyman had informed his congregation that, given the late wonderful discoveries, he expected that one day he would be calling on their generosity to help purchase Bibles for the unenlightened inhabitants of the moon.

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c h a p t e r
11

The Picturesque

Beauty of the Moon

Like most of the astronomers of his time, John Herschel was a devout Christian, and nothing in any of his scientific discoveries (those of the genuine variety) ever caused him to question that faith. He also believed in life on other worlds, a supposition based less on his astronomical research than on his deeply held religious convictions. In one passage from
A Treatise on Astronomy,
after marveling at the glory of the stars and planets, he asked the reader: Now, for what purpose are we to suppose such magnificent bodies scattered through the abyss of space? Surely not to illuminate our nights . . .

nor to sparkle as a pageant void of meaning and reality, and bewilder us among vain conjectures. Useful, it is true, they are to man as points of exact and permanent reference; but he must have studied astronomy to little purpose, who can suppose man to be the only object of his Creator’s care, or who does not see in the vast and wonderful apparatus around us provision for other races of animated beings.

He was not certain about the existence of lunarians, but he kept an open mind on the question. The final paragraph of his chapter on the moon in
A Treatise on Astronomy
begins, “If there be inhabitants on the moon . . . ,” and in his magisterial
Outlines of Astronomy,
published in 1849, he noted that while there were no indications of water on the visible side of the moon, “It by no means follows . . . that the other is
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equally devoid of them, and equally unfitted for maintaining animal or vegetable life.”

John Herschel’s uncertainty was not shared by his astronomer father William, who from the outset of his career in the 1770s had been using his homemade telescopes to look for signs of life on the moon. In this endeavor he had met with a surprising amount of success, as almost immediately he found what looked to him to be a lunar forest, while later on he noted in his journal the apparent discovery of canals, roads, pyramids, and even towns. William Herschel never published these findings, however— he seems to have doubted their accuracy and worried about how the rest of the astronomical community might view him as a result—and not long after his discovery of Uranus in 1781, he began to direct his attention away from the moon to his many other celestial projects. Still, efforts to find lunar life went on.

In 1791 the German astronomer Johann Hieronymus Schröter (known as “the Herschel of Germany,” in part because both men enjoyed the patronage of King George III) published his
Selenotopographische Fragmente,
the most detailed mapping of the moon’s surface yet produced.

Schröter was convinced that he had detected evidence of a lunar atmosphere, one apparently free from rain and snow, as it gave no sign of having any clouds. Fortunately enough for the moon’s inhabitants, water-carrying vapors rose from the lunar valleys, then fell again like dew to nourish the fields that he imagined to be just as fruitful as Italy’s famously abundant Campanian plain. On the moon, Schröter declared, “nature has ceased to rage.” The weather there was “mild and beneficial,”

ideal for “the calm culture of rational creatures.”

Johann Schröter died in 1816; like William Herschel, he had long since moved on from moon gazing to other astronomical projects, notably a search for evidence of atmosphere on other planets. It is his lunar observations, however, for which he is best remembered, and which served to inspire a cadre of younger German astronomers, probably the most enthusiastic of whom was Franz von Paula Gruithuisen. A physician as well as an astronomer, Gruithuisen published no fewer than 177 papers in his lifetime, the most memorable one entitled “Discovery of Many Distinct Traces of Lunar Inhabitants, Especially of One of Their Colossal Buildings” (1824). Gruithuisen seems to have had none of William Herschel’s circumspection about publishing his lunar discoveries, and proudly announced sighting “great artificial works on the moon erected by the lu-

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narians,” including roads, cities, and “a system of fortifications thrown up by the selenitic engineers.” There was even a star-shaped structure that he interpreted to be a lunar temple, an idea that Richard Adams Locke would resurrect in his moon series.

Gruithuisen’s observations clearly owed more to fancy than to empiri-cal evidence, and even the most confirmed of his fellow believers viewed his findings with skepticism. Still, his paper was widely discussed throughout Europe, and the extravagance of his conclusions did little to diminish interest in the idea of discovering life on the moon—nor in the even more ambitious project of communicating with its inhabitants, for which purpose the German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss is said to have proposed the construction of a vast geometrical figure on the plains of Siberia. Though this idea has been widely attributed to Gauss, its origin is actually rather murky, as is the origin of an idea long associated with the Viennese astronomer Johann Joseph von Littrow, to contact the lunarians by setting ablaze a massive kerosene-filled trench in the Sahara. But whether the geometrical-figure scheme originated with him, Gauss seems to have had few qualms about the basic concept of extraterrestrial communication. In 1818 he invented the heliotrope, a land-surveying instrument that uses a mirror to reflect sunlight over very long distances; four years later, in a letter to his astronomer friend Wilhelm Olbers, he noted, “With 100 separate mirrors, each of 16 square feet, used conjointly, one would be able to send good heliotrope-light to the moon.” It would be, Gauss added, “a discovery even greater than that of America, if we could get in touch with our neighbors on the moon.”

Like so many of his countrymen, Wilhelm Olbers was a believer in lunar life. In a letter to Gruithuisen he wrote, “I hold it to be very probable that the moon is inhabited by living, even rational creatures, and that something not wholly dissimilar to our vegetation occurs on the moon.”

Privately, though, he was critical of the highly speculative claims Gruithuisen made for his work, and in a February 1827 letter to Gauss complained that the two had been associated with Gruithuisen in “an English journal article.”

Olbers was referring to the fact that in October 1826, several of the latest developments in lunar research—Gruithuisen’s observations, Gauss’s proposal for the geometrical figure in Siberia, and his own ideas about vegetation on the moon—had been collected in a brief article entitled

“The Moon and its Inhabitants,” published in the premiere issue of the

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Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal.
It was the very article that Richard Adams Locke would happen upon nearly a decade later, which would provide the inspiration for his series about the remarkable creatures discovered on the moon.

The idea that life exists not just on the earth but throughout the universe—what has come to be called the plurality of worlds doctrine, or simply pluralism—originated long before the nineteenth century. In ancient times the Epicureans had propounded a theory of extraterrestrial life (“We must believe that in all worlds there are living creatures and plants and other things we see in this world,” wrote Epicurus), a view that was just as strongly derided by Aristotle and Plato. For many centuries afterward, the plurality of worlds remained a purely philosophical question; it was given new life in 1543 by Nicolaus Copernicus’s controversial theory that the earth is just one of the planets circling the sun and not the center of the universe. (If the earth resembled the other planets in this one crucial respect, then perhaps the other planets resembled the earth in another.) The pace of the debate quickened with the invention of the telescope, as astronomers came to understand the vastness of the universe and made the first tentative efforts at determining the physical conditions on the other planets in the solar system. The Catholic Church, however, saw little reason for discussion. The Church was deeply troubled by what it saw as the theological implications of pluralism, particularly in relation to the crucifixion of Christ: the significance of his sacrifice would seem to be diminished if the earth was only one of many worlds under God’s care.

In 1600, the astronomer Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake in Rome’s Campo de Fiori for the crime of heresy, which included his passionate advocacy of pluralism. (Bruno’s countryman Galileo, who had his own problems with the Church, remained an agnostic on the question.) Less than a half century after Bruno’s death, the book
The Discovery of
a World in the Moone, or, A Discourse Tending to Prove That ’Tis Probable There May Be Another Habitable World in That Planet
became one of the most influential works of popular science of its time, and the first to set the case for pluralism before the public. Issued anonymously in England in 1638,
The Discovery of a World in the Moone
was written by John Wilkins, a young Anglican clergyman who later became bishop of Chester. Wilkins directly addressed the theological objections to the idea of life on other worlds, providing counterarguments that would still be
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used by pluralists two centuries later. No one, he pointed out, could state with certainty that the creatures living on these other worlds were men.