The Sun and the Moon by Matthew Goodman

Author:Matthew Goodman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Books

HOW many of the Sun’s readers truly believed what they were reading in Great Astronomical Discoveries? No one can state this with any degree of accuracy, but contemporaneous accounts suggest that the number—at least for a while—was very high indeed. “As these discoveries were gradually spread before the public,” Edgar Allan Poe wrote in his essay on Richard Adams Locke, “the astonishment of that public grew out of all bounds.” Those who doubted the veracity of the Sun’s account numbered, according to Poe, “not one person in ten,” and most strangely, “the doubters were chiefly those who doubted without being able to say why—the ignorant, those uninformed in astronomy, people who would not believe because the thing was so novel, so entirely ‘out of the usual way.’” (Poe himself reported that “a grave professor of mathematics in a Virginian college told me seriously that he had no doubt of the truth of the whole affair!”)

Poe’s assertions were echoed by Benson J. Lossing in his 1884 History of New York City. Lossing was twenty-two years old when the moon series appeared in the Sun, and in his history he recalled how “the construction of the telescope was so ingeniously described, and everything said to have been seen with it was given with such graphic power and minuteness, and with such a show of probability, that it deceived scientific men. It played upon their credulity and stimulated their speculations.” Horace Greeley, who was then editing the weekly paper the New-Yorker, remarked on the “unquestionable plausibility and verisimilitude” of the series; those who were fooled by it comprised, in his estimation (like that of Poe), “nine-tenths of us, at the least.” P. T. Barnum declared that “the majestic, yet subdued, dignity” of Locke’s work “at once claimed respectful attention; whilst its perfect candor, and its wealth of accurate scientific detail, exacted the homage of belief from all but cross-grained and inexorable skeptics.”

Whether or not readers entirely believed it, Great Astronomical Discoveries was the first news story to be avidly read and discussed by all New Yorkers—not just the merchants perusing the six-penny papers for the latest currency tables or the mechanics opening the penny papers to the police office reports—but everyone, wherever people talked about the news: in the Chatham Market and the Merchants’ Exchange alike, around the cloth-covered tables of Delmonico’s and the pine tables of countless waterfront boardinghouses, on any of the hundred omnibuses rumbling up and down Broadway, in the Bowery taverns where the cartmen and firemen ate freshly killed oxen, and in the more genteel establishments where talk of the moon was punctuated by the delicate clinking of hammers chipping off pieces of ice for chilled drinks. In Bowery Village, at the corner of what today would be Eleventh and Broadway, a nurseryman named Michael Floy noted in his diary on Sunday, August 30: “A great talk concerning some discoveries in the moon by Sir John Herschell [sic]; not only trees and animals but even men have been discovered there.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.