On April 13, 1844, the New York Sun published a story about the first transatlantic balloon flight. The story said that a Mr. Monck Mason, and his crew in Wales, tried to cross the English Channel, but got caught in a strong wind, and landed in South Carolina. The story described the balloon in great detail, including a discussion of the use of ballast and even information about the amount of gas used.
Then on April 15, the Sun had to admit that the story was a hoax — or all “hot air.”
Actually, there would be no successful transatlantic balloon flight until 1919. But even though the Sun’s story was a hoax, they got a lot of details right. A Mr. Monck Mason did, in fact, cross the English Channel by balloon in 1837, and his balloon was very much like the one described in the story. And on top of that, when someone actually did make the transatlantic crossing, the return flight took exactly the length of time the Sun article had printed — “seventy-five hours from shore to shore.”
The person that submitted the hoax to the Sun knew newspapers wanted to be first with a story. Since there were no telephones or telegraphs to confirm the facts, newspapers would print first and worry about mistakes later. Whoever submitted the balloon hoax story also knew a lot about science and knew how to tell a convincing tale. Guess who that someone was….. Edgar Allan Poe.
Poe’s total wealth amounted to less than $5 when he submitted the story to the Sun. Even in 1844, that was chump change. Poe and his family had just moved to New York, and he had a sick wife and her mother to support. They’d found rooms in a house that he described as “old and buggy.” It was obvious Poe needed money, but he also loved literary “pranks.”
The “balloon hoax” wasn’t Poe’s last joke. In 1845, he published another article entitled “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” which convinced many readers that hypnotism enabled people to communicate with the dead. Poe may have been famous for stories gruesome or grisly, but he was in fact writing what his readers liked best. He was always painted as kind of a dark character, but it seems that he liked a good laugh, too.
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