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. But it is no tall tale. 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.
For this, Poe points to the zodiacal light and to Benjamin Valz’s observation of the decreasing period and diminished coma of Encke’s comet when it was near the Sun. Valz proposed that this was the result of a resisting medium, an atmosphere that surrounded the Sun, and Poe’s Pfaall simply extended this notion, positing that the zodiacal light was this atmosphere: “It appeared to me evidently in the nature of a rare atmosphere extending from the sun outwards, beyond the orbit of Venus at least, and I believed indefinitely farther. Indeed, this medium I could not suppose confined to the path of the comet’s ellipse, or to the immediate neighborhood of the sun. It was easy, on the contrary, to imagine it pervading the entire regions of our planetary system, condensed into what we call atmosphere at the planets themselves.”
Other references to the theories and observations of contemporary astronomy abound. When, during his 19-day journey to the Moon, Pfaall encounters explosive debris, he presumes it to have come from one of the many volcanoes on the lunar surface, in accord with the volcanic explanation for the moon’s pockmarked appearance that was the dominant theory from the 18th century to the late 1890s. When justifying his belief in a lunar atmosphere, Pfaall draws on the observations of Johann Hieronymus Schröter, Johannes Hevelius, and Giovanni Domenico Cassini that suggested its existence. By citing contemporary astronomers and their speculative theories, and thinking about how they would apply to a voyage to the Moon, Poe gave the concept of spaceflight a new basis in science.
By citing contemporary astronomers and their speculative theories, and thinking about how they would apply to a voyage to the Moon, Poe gave the concept of spaceflight a new basis in science.
In some respects, however, Poe’s insights into the psychological and behavioral characteristics that would lead to spaceflight were even more insightful than his clever applications of contemporary astronomy. Although he is still working within the lone-inventor model employed by Godwin and Tucker, the inventor is no longer an aristocratic adventurer, an extraterrestrial, or a mystic scientist, but rather a simple engineer — Hans Pfaall, an underemployed and debt-ridden Dutch bellows maker in Rotterdam. Even more significantly, this inventor begins to approach the level of single-minded obsession and dedication of effort and resources that would possess many of the early pioneers of spaceflight. Like many of them, Pfaall has an almost epiphanic spaceflight inspiration after reading a book — in this case, Speculative Astronomy by Professor Encke:
“There were some particular passages which affected my imagination in an extraordinary manner. The longer I meditated upon these, the more intense grew the interest which had been excited within me. The limited nature of my education in general, and more especially my ignorance on subjects connected with natural philosophy, so far from rendering me diffident of my own ability to comprehend what I had read, or inducing me to mistrust the many vague notions which had arisen in consequence, merely served as a farther stimulus to imagination; and I was vain enough, or perhaps reasonable enough, to doubt whether those crude ideas which, arising in ill-regulated minds, have all the appearance, may not often in effect possess all the force, the reality, and other inherent properties of instinct or intuition.”
After a sleepless night of thinking, the next morning Pfaall uses the last of his money to buy some books on mechanics and practical astronomy and “devoted every spare moment to their perusal.” When he decides to build his space vehicle, Pfaall sells all his remaining property and “borrowed, in small sums, under various pretences, and without giving any attention … to [his] future means of repayment, no inconsiderable quantity of ready money.” Although, like most of his predecessors, Poe conceived of a spacecraft as something within the technical capability of a single individual, he also foresaw that the challenges of building a spacecraft would require resources beyond what the average person would be able to raise under ordinary circumstances, and he was the first to depict a spacecraft inventor as an obsessive individual endeavoring to secure funds at any cost in order to realize his vision.
Importantly, the process of spacecraft construction was an integral part of Poe’s narrative and was presented as a relatively standard engineering problem. Poe described in exhaustive and minute detail the articles and instruments that Pfaall needed in order to build and equip his spacecraft. The result was what can arguably be considered the first spacecraft components list. Poe also situated the construction of the spacecraft firmly within the mundane context of real engineering, with Pfaall concerning himself with material costs and adjusting his design accordingly. He selects cambric muslin on account of it “answering all the purposes of silk itself, quite as strong and a good deal less expensive,” while rejecting a “membrane of a certain animal” for the balloon as he thought it “altogether too expensive and was not sure, upon the whole, whether cambric muslin with a coating of gum caoutchouc was not equally as good.”
This attention to practical engineering detail would be the greatest legacy of “Hans Pfaall.” When Jules Verne — who considered Poe “le createur du roman merveilleux-scientifique” (the creator of the marvelous-scientific novel) and his personal literary hero — described his massive engineering project in From the Earth to the Moon (1865), his emphasis on the practical, almost pedantic aspects of the project is the logical conclusion of Poe’s movement toward a real-world context for spaceflight. In 1835, however, it would still be thirty years before the spirit of Poe would reach across the Atlantic to inspire Verne’s foundational work.
This article Before Jules Verne, Edgar Allan Poe imagined the Space Age is featured on Big Think.