Мистификация Эдгара Аллана По: Воздушный шар и обман публики

Edgar Allan Poe hoax
the 1844 balloon hoax

"The Balloon Hoax" is the title used in collections and anthologies of a newspaper article by American writer Edgar Allan Poe, first published in 1844 in The Sun newspaper in New York. Originally presented as a true story, it detailed European Monck Mason's trip across the Atlantic Ocean in only three days in a gas balloon. It was later revealed as a hoax and the story was retracted two days later.

The story now known as "The Balloon Hoax" was first printed in The Sun newspaper in New York. The article provided a detailed and highly plausible account of a lighter than air balloon trip by European balloonist Monck Mason across the Atlantic Ocean taking 75 hours, along with a diagram and specifications of the craft. Poe may have been inspired, at least in part, by a prior journalistic hoax known as the "Great Moon Hoax", published in the same newspaper in 1835. One of the suspected writers of that hoax, Richard Adams Locke, was Poe's editor at the time "The Balloon Hoax" was published. Poe had complained for a decade that the paper's Great Moon Hoax had plagiarized (by way of Locke) the basic idea from "The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall", one of Poe's less successful stories which also involved similar inhabitants on the Moon. Poe felt The Sun had made tremendous profits from his story without giving him a cent. (Poe's anger at The Sun is chronicled in the 2008 book The Sun and the Moon by Matthew Goodman.)

Poe himself describes the enthusiasm his story had aroused: he writes that the Sun building was "besieged" by people wanting copies of the newspaper. "I never witnessed more intense excitement to get possession of a newspaper", he wrote. The story's impact reflects on the period's infatuation with progress. Poe added realistic elements, discussing at length the balloon's design and propulsion system in believable detail. His use of real people, including William Harrison Ainsworth, also lent credence to the story. "The Balloon Hoax" is like one of Poe's "tales of ratiocination" (such as "The Murders in the Rue Morgue") in reverse: rather than taking things apart to solve a problem, Poe builds up fiction to make it seem true. The story is also an early form of science fiction, specifically responding to the emerging technology of hot air balloons. The story may have later been an inspiration for Jules Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days. As Verne scholar William Butcher pointed out, Verne was an early admirer of Poe and his novel Cinq semaines en ballon (Five Weeks in a Balloon) was published within a year of his non fiction book Edgar Poe et ses œuvres (Edgar Allan Poe and his Works). Verne even has a character mention Poe's story in From the Earth to the Moon. It is not difficult to see Poe's works, published in France as Histoires extraordinaires ("Extraordinary Stories"), as one of the influences on Verne's Voyages extraordinaires ("Extraordinary Journeys").

The first human carrying lighter than air craft of any type to cross the Atlantic was in 1919. The British dirigible R 34, a direct copy of the German L 33 which crashed in Britain during World War I. The 3559.5 mile flight from Britain to New York City took 108 hours 12 minutes. The first human carrying unpowered balloon to actually cross the Atlantic Ocean was Double Eagle II from August 11 to 17, 1978. The Pacific was crossed in three days by unmanned Japanese "fire balloons" called Fu Go in 1944, exactly 100 years after Poe's story.