Edgar Allan Poe: Original Balloon Boy?

With the recent (and rather mindless) media carnival over the balloon hoax family, the Cabinet of Wonders blog published an excellent entry on previous farces far more shocking than the so-called balloon boy. Surprisingly, one of these contains an intimate link to weird fiction and balloons. As Cabinet of Wonders reports, it happened in 1844, when a major newspaper picked up an account written by Edgar Allan Poe that falsely described a successful flyover of the Atlantic in a hot air balloon. This article from Britain's "The Guardian" contains a full account of Poe's hoax, but the crux of the story is this:

On 13 April 1844, the New York Sun published a breathless account of a great step for mankind: "The air, as well as the earth and the ocean, has been subdued by science, and will become a common and convenient highway for mankind . . . The Atlantic has been actually crossed in a balloon . . . and in the inconceivably brief period of 75 hours from shore to shore!"

In a precursor of the reality shows to which the Heenes apparently aspired, the Sun ran excerpts from the faked diary of the Victoria's navigators, which ended just after their "sighting" off the coast of South Carolina. (In reality, the Atlantic would not be crossed by a balloon until 75 years later, when the rather less romantically named British dirigible R-34 landed in New York City after an 108-hour flight.)

The account was cooked up by Edgar Allan Poe, a hoax-lover in an age of hoax-lovers; he perpetrated five others. Poe seems to have rather enjoyed the fuss: "On the morning (Saturday) of its announcement," he later wrote in the Columbia Spy, "the whole square surrounding the Sun building was literally besieged, blocked up from a period soon after sunrise until about two o'clock PM . . . I never witnessed more intense excitement to get possession of a newspaper. . . I tried, in vain, during the whole day, to get possession of a copy."

But the excitement was not allowed to get out of hand. Two days later, the Sun printed a retraction: "BALLOON – The mails from the South last Saturday night not having brought a confirmation of the arrival of the Balloon from England . . . we are inclined to believe that the intelligence is erroneous." And so the first great media balloon hoax was punctured.

If history is doomed to repetitive cycles, then at least we can thank weird fiction writers for helping along this natural process.

-Grim Blogger