Adapted from The Spaceflight Narrative: A Literary History of Leaving Earth by Alexander MacDonald. It may be tempting to dismiss out of hand the notion that Edgar Allan Poe — popularly conceived of today as an almost mythic figure cloaked in ravens and tell-tale hearts — was the “grandfather of realistic spaceflight fiction” and had a significant effect on the conceptual development of the spacecraft. The young orphan who walked the night-lit streets of Baltimore, the first American city with gas streetlamps, had a mind that strove to encompass not only the macabre but the entirety of the cosmos.
His greatest work, in his own opinion, was not one of his popular mysteries or phantasmagorias but his prose poem _Eureka_, which originated as his 1848 lecture titled “The Cosmography of the Universe.” His tale of a voyage to the Moon, “The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall,” first published in 1835, was almost as dear to his heart, claiming that it was the first plausible application of scientific principles to the problem of travel between worlds. Although the boastful Poe oversold his claim, his was indeed the first to remove the veil of satire and focus on the details of the voyage itself. His was also the first, perhaps unsurprisingly, to explore some of the darker aspects of the psychological motivations for spaceflight, and he was the first to situate his spacecraft firmly within the context of mundane economics and engineering.
The result was that “Hans Pfaall” became an animating spirit of interplanetary adventure to others — most notably Jules Verne, who, 30 years later, inspired by its visitation upon him, would follow in Poe’s gothic wake to the Moon. As a famed American original, the study of Poe has engendered a voluminous literature, as has “Hans Pfaall.” From the perspective of spaceflight history, however, several of its important contributions remain underappreciated. [For instance], Poe’s descriptions of the preparations, as well as of the voyage itself, take up the majority of the 46-page story, with Pfaall arriving at the Moon only on page 43. He also took pains to situate his work within the context of the spaceflight concepts that had come before.
In his own “Note on Hans Pfaall,” a document as significant as the story itself — as it is the first American essay on the conceptual development of spaceflight — Poe references and reviews his predecessors, from Lucian [of Samosata] to [George] Tucker. The rather arrogant Poe was decidedly dismissive of almost everyone — calling Tucker’s [story of a voyage to the Moon] “deplorably ill conceived” and Cyrano de Bergerac’s tales “utterly meaningless” — with the exception of [Francis] Godwin, whose work he felt was “somewhat ingenious.” Poe’s opinions and proclamations here are less interesting than the fact that there is already a recognition, even in the Baltimore of 1839, of a community of ideas related to the problem of spaceflight that had been developing for generations. Although he considered himself in conversation with these other spaceflight authors, albeit somewhat belligerently, the principal influences for “Hans Pfaall” were scientific ones.
It was Poe’s enthusiasm for contemporary astronomy that motivated his interest in the concept of spaceflight, and this had similarly inspired Richard Adam Locke’s famous Great Moon Hoax in the same year. Indeed, Poe treated John Herschel’s popular _A Treatise on Astronomy_, published in America in 1834, as his textbook, relying on it as his primary source of information about the distance, angles, and orbits required for a voyage to the Moon. Although a small step, he was the first to take a specific astronomy text and use it to provide a rough technical description of a lunar mission architecture — one that was sufficiently detailed that it could later be diagrammed by Nikolai Rynin in his pioneering 1928 spaceflight encyclopedia.
Poe would claim that the design in “Hans Pfaall” was “original, inasmuch as regards an attempt at verisimilitude, in the application of scientific principles (so far as the whimsical nature of the subject would permit), to the actual passage between the earth and the moon.” To the extent that this was the case, it was due significantly to his application of contemporary astronomical knowledge. Although the engineering approach presented in “Hans Pfaall” for getting to the Moon — an enclosed balloon-borne carriage with a pneumatic air condenser — has often been dismissed as technically naive, it was actually grounded in Poe’s reading of contemporary astronomy. For example, the pneumatic air condenser — which is the core innovation of Poe’s spacecraft, and which flows from Hans Pfaall’s profession as a bellows maker — is able to function because, as Poe points out, recent astronomical observations had suggested that interplanetary space might have a very thin atmosphere that could potentially be condensed into breathable air with the right technology.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
