As for the inspiration of the moon story, the record is nebulous. If Poe was really grieved at his first thought that Locke had taken from him the main imaginative idea—that the moon was inhabited—then Poe was oversensitive or uninformed, for that idea was at least two centuries old.
Francis Godwin, an English bishop and author, who was born in 1562, and who died just two centuries before the Sun was first printed, wrote “The Man in the Moone, or a Discourse of a Voyage Thither by Domingo Gonsales, the Speedy Messenger.” This was published in London in 1638, five years after the author’s death.
In the same year there appeared a book called “The Discovery of a World in the Moone,” which contained arguments to prove the moon habitable. It was written by John Wilkins—no relative of the fictitious Peter of Paltock’s story, but a young English clergyman who later became Bishop of Chester, and who was the first secretary of the Royal Society. Two years later Wilkins added to his “Discovery of a World” a “Discourse Concerning the Possibility of a Passage Thither.”
Cyrano de Bergerac, he of the long nose and the passion for poetry and duelling, later to be immortalized by Rostand, read these products of two Englishmen’s fancy, and about 1650 he turned out his joyful “Histoire Comique des Etats et Empires de la Lune.” But Bergerac had also been influenced by Dante and by Lucian, the latter being the supposed inspiration of the fanciful narratives of Rabelais and Swift. Perhaps these writers influenced Godwin and Wilkins also; so the trail, zigzagged and ramifying, goes back to the second century. It is hard to indict a man for being inspired, and in the case of the moon story there is no evidence of plagiarism. If “Hans Pfaall” were to be compared with Locke’s story for hoaxing qualities, it would only suffer by the comparison. It would appear as the youthful product of a tyro, as against the cunning work of an artist of almost devilish ingenuity.
Is there any doubt that the moon hoax was the sole work of Richard Adams Locke? So far as concerns the record of the Sun, the comments of Locke’s American contemporaries, and the belief of Benjamin H. Day, expressed in 1883 in a talk with Edward P. Mitchell, the answer must be in the negative. Yet it must be set down, as a literary curiosity at least, that it has been believed in France and by at least one English antiquary of repute that the moon hoax was the work of a Frenchman—Jean Nicolas Nicollet, the astronomer.
Nicollet was born at Cluses, in Savoy, in 1786. First a cowherd, he did not learn to read until he was twelve. Once at school his progress was rapid, and at nineteen he become preceptor of mathematics at Chambry. He went to Paris, where in 1817 he was appointed secretary-librarian of the Observatory, and he studied astronomy with Laplace, who refers to Nicollet’s assistance in his works. In 1823 he was appointed to the government bureau of longitudes, and at the same time was professor of mathematics in the College of Louis le Grand.
He became a master of English, and through this knowledge and his own mathematical genius he was able to assemble, for the use of the French life-insurance companies, all that was known, and much that he himself discovered, of actuarial methods; this being incorporated in his letter to M. Outrequin on “Assurances Having for Their Basis the Probable Duration of Human Life.” He also wrote “Memoirs upon the Measure of an Arc of Parallel Midway Between the Pole and the Equator” (1826), and “Course of Mathematics for the Use of Mariners” (1830).
In 1831 Nicollet failed in speculation, losing not only his own fortune but that of others. He came to the United States, arriving early in 1832, the very year that Locke came to America. It is probable that he was in New York, but there is no evidence as to the length of his stay. It is known, however, that he was impoverished, and that he was assisted by Bishop Chanche, of Natchez, to go on with his chosen work—an exploration of the Mississippi and its tributaries. He made astronomical and barometrical observations, determined the geographical position and elevation of many important points, and studied Indian lore.
The United States government was so well pleased with Nicollet’s work that it sent him to the Far West for further investigations, with Lieutenant John C. Frémont as assistant. His “Geology of the Upper Mississippi Region and of the Cretaceous Formation of the Upper Missouri” was one of the results of his journeys. After this he tried, through letters, to regain his lost standing in France by seeking election to the Paris Academy of Sciences, but he was black-balled, and, broken-hearted, he died in Washington in 1843.
The Englishman who believed that Nicollet was the author of the moon hoax was Augustus De Morgan, father of the late William De Morgan, the novelist, and himself a distinguished mathematician and litterateur. He was professor of mathematics at University College, London, at the time when the moon pamphlet first appeared in England. His “Budget of Paradoxes,” an interesting collection of literary curiosities and puzzles, which he had written, but not carefully assembled, was published in 1872, the year after his death.