ABSTRACT
In August of 1835, a scientific story sold a record number of copies of the brand new penny daily the New York Sun. It described in minute detail the observations of British astronomer J. F. W. Herschel, who had recently built a new observatory at Capetown with a telescope capable of viewing the moon’s surface. To the astonishment of the scientist himself and the readers of the Sun, there were moon-bison, man-bats, and fields of poppies on the surface of the moon. New York was in an uproar over the news. A Baptist society reportedly began taking up a collection to send missionaries to the poor naked man-bats (Martineau 23). And then it came out that the story was in fact an elaborate fabrication by the Sun’s science writer, Richard Adams Locke. Interestingly, one of the critics who outed Locke was none other than Edgar Allan Poe. Ruthless in his enumeration of the scientific inadequacies of Locke’s story, Poe’s real motivation in exposing Locke seems to have been jealousy, for Poe had published his own moon hoax a few months earlier in the Southern Literary Messenger, and no one had paid it any mind.
