The Great Moon Hoax of 1835 the Nation’S First “Father’S Day.” the Great Moon Hoax 1 However, It Was Not Until 1972, 58 2 Moon Hoax, Cont
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Tidings So, What the Heck is Bayshore Presbyterian Church August 29, 2015 Fathers’ Day? On July 19, 1910, the governor of the Inside This Issue U.S. state of Washington proclaimed The Great Moon Hoax of 1835 the nation’s first “Father’s Day.” The Great Moon Hoax 1 However, it was not until 1972, 58 2 Moon Hoax, cont. years after President Woodrow Moon Hoax, cont. Wilson made Mother’s Day official, of 1835 3 that the day became a nationwide 3 Prayer List/Birthdays and Anniversaries holiday in the United States. Peace and Global Witness There's a full moon happening tonight, but not just any full 3 moon. This "supermoon" is happening. 4 What are the Dog Days of Summer Mother’s Day: Inspiration for Father’s Day World Communion Sunday The “Mother’s Day” we celebrate today has its origins in the It's an event that happens a few times every year and is a 4 Inside This Issue peace-and-reconciliation campaigns of the post-Civil War era. The Search for Lincoln’s Killer good chance for photographers to nab a picture of the 4 Just Another Day on the Bayshore 1 During the 1860s, at the urging of activist Ann Reeves Jarvis, moon when it appears at its biggest and brightest. The Volunteer List In Christian Sympathy one divided West Virginia town celebrated “Mother’s Work Days” 5 1 that brought together the mothers definition of a supermoon is when a full moon closely lines Lincoln’s Killer, cont. of Confederate and Union soldiers. up with its perigee, or its closest point to Earth, in its In 1835, the moon was the focus of attention for quite a 2 orbit. The moon has a slightly eliptical orbit around Earth In 1870, the activist Julia Ward different reason. 180 years ago, the year of the “Great 3 Shoe Mission Howe issued a “Mother’s Day with one side of the orbit closer to Earth than the other. The Moon Hoax,” a New York newspaper convinced many Building and Grounds Update Proclamation” calling on a side closest to the Earth is called the perigee and the side of its readers that unicorns and winged bat-men had 3 “general congress of women” farthest from the Earth is known as the apogee. been found on the lunar surface. to “promote the alliance of the 3 Birthdays/Anniversaries different nationalities, the ami- 3 In Carnation cable settlement of international The New York Sun was a low-rent “penny paper” that questions, [and] the great and typically dealt in sensationalist fare about murders and 3 Rays Baseball neral interests of peace.” tenement fires, but beginning on August 25, 1835, it However, Mother’s Day did not become a commercial holiday briefly became the world’s premier scientific authority. 4 From the Pastor’s Desk until 1908, when–inspired by Jarvis’s daughter Anna, who The transformation began 4 Prayer List wanted to honor her own mother by making Mother’s Day a with the publication of “Great national holiday–the John Wanamaker department store in Astronomical Discoveries,” a 4 Just Another Day on the Bayshore Philadelphia sponsored a service dedicated to mothers in its six-part series that claimed to auditorium. Thanks in large part to this association with retailers, 5 Contact Information Form recount the earth-shattering who saw great potential for profit in the holiday, Mother’s Day 6 Volunteer List caught on right away. In 1909, 45 states observed the day, and findings astronomer Sir John in 1914, President Woodrow Wilson approved a resolution that Herschel had made while made the second Sunday in May a holiday in honor of “that observing the heavens in tender, gentle army, the mothers of America.” South Africa. According to the Sun’s editors, the stories Origins of Father’s Day were culled from articles that A supermoon can appear 14% larger and 30% brighter than had originally appeared in the The campaign to celebrate the nation’s fathers did not meet with a regular full moon. Supplement to the Edinburgh Journal of Science. They the same enthusiasm–perhaps because, as one florist explained, “fathers haven’t the same sentimental appeal that mothers have.” promised to describe “celestial discoveries of higher and On July 5, 1908, a West Virginia church sponsored the nation’s As luck would have it, this will more universal interest than any, in any science yet first event explicitly in honor of fathers, a Sunday sermon in be the first of 3 supermoons known to the human race.” memory of the 362 men who had died in the previous these during the next three months. December’s explosions at the Fairmont Coal Company mines in There will also be one on The first article introduced readers to Herschel, who was Monongah, but it was a one-time commemoration and not an September 28 and October 7. credited as having “solved or corrected nearly every annual holiday. leading problem of mathematical astronomy” during a Early Native American tribes recent expedition to the Cape of Good Hope. It also offered a lengthy, jargon-heavy account of his dubbed this next full moon as the "Sturgeon Moon" because apparently it was easier to catch huge sturgeon revolutionary new telescope, an instrument “of vast fish this time of year. dimensions and an entirely new principle” that was said to have a magnifying power of 42,000 times. The following day’s entry revealed what happened when Sir John aimed his super-telescope at the moon. Upon bringing an image of the lunar surface into focus, he As the hysteria grew, Sun owner Benjamin Day and his fellow scientists saw elaborate basaltic rock started peddling a pamphlet version of the accounts formations and fields of blood-red poppy flowers—“the first along with a 25-cent lithograph that depicted the organic production of nature, in a foreign world, ever man-bats and other “Lunarian” species. Both revealed to the eyes of men.” became huge sellers. Further observations revealed green forests and shimmering The media circus would have been justified if not for blue seas, as well as brown a simple fact: the moon stories were a fraud. Sir quadrupeds that resembled John Herschel was a real astronomer, and he really small bison. The astronomers was observing the heavens in South Africa, but the were also stunned to find blue- accounts of his new telescope and the majestic tinted unicorns with goat creatures it had found were a piece of science beards and an orb-shaped fiction. Its author was Richard Adams Locke, the amphibian that “rolled with Sun’s British-born editor. A great velocity across the science enthusiast, Locke pebb ly beach.” had penned the stories as satire of the early 19th Day three treated readers to descriptions of even more lunar century astronomical curiosities including erupting volcanoes and cliffs of quartz community and its crystal. Miniature zebras wandered the green hillsides, and penchant for making half- the woods were filled with horned bears and roving herds of baked claims about alien reindeer and elk. Most wondrous of all was the so-called life. His chief target was “biped beaver,” a tailless, upright-walking creature that Thomas Dick, a Scottish carried its young in its arms like a person, used fire and lived reverend and bestselling in wooden dwellings. author who, among other bizarre theories, had once alleged that the solar system was home to exactly 21,894,974,404,480 inhabitants. Locke later admitted that he’d hoped to lampoon Dick and his supporters by making equally absurd claims and passing them off as science, yet most readers failed to pick up on his satire. “The credulity was general,” newsman Asa Greene later remembered. “All New York rang with the wonderful The last three entries dropped the real bombshell. While discoveries of Sir John Herschel…There were, scanning a grouping of ruby red hills, the scientists were indeed, a few skeptics; but to venture to express a said to have spied a species of winged humanoids that doubt of the genuineness of the great lunar soared through the lunar skies just as easily as they walked discoveries, was on two legs. The article claimed the creatures stood 4 feet considered almost tall, had orangutan-like as heinous a sin as features and “were covered, to question the truth except on the face, with of revelation.” One short and glossy copper- of the most prom- colored hair.” They appeared inent doubters was to live a life of leisure and the writer Edgar Allan were observed to engage in Poe. Only a few weeks conversation—a sure sign of before the Sun’s moon sentience. “We scientifically stories made their denominated them a debut, he had written “Hans Vespertilio-homo, or man-bat,” Phaall, a Tale,” a would-be literary hoax that the story’s author wrote, “and claimed to recount a foreign news report about a they are doubtless innocent Dutchman traveling to the moon in a hot air balloon. and happy creatures.” Poe considered the Sun account a plagiarism of his story, but even he couldn’t help but marvel at the By the time Vespertilio-homo was revealed to the world on popular sensation it caused. He would later note August 28, the “Great Astronomical Discoveries” series was that, for a time, “not one person in ten discredited it.” a runaway success. Spellbound readers mobbed the Sun’s offices to buy the latest installments, and the paper’s circulation soared to over 19,000—more than any daily on the globe.