THE HEAVENS
No. 61 (Spring/Summer 2025)
Table of Contents
Love and Rockets
Paul J. Erickson
Randolph G. Adams Director
William L. Clements Library
The Cincinnati Observatory, opened in March 1845, was the first public observatory in the Western Hemisphere. Shown here is its second building—the original 11-inch telescope was moved in 1873 to a new observatory farther from downtown.
On January 29, 1859, Professor Ormsby Mitchel (1810–1862) delivered a lecture at the Academy of Music in New York titled “The Great Unfinished Problems of the Universe,” as the conclusion of his well-attended “Course of Five Popular Lectures on Astronomy.” Before the lecture, the gathered worthies passed a series of resolutions related to the construction of an “Astronomical Observatory” in Central Park, which had only partially opened the previous year. Mitchel was an appropriate guest for this honor, as he was at the time the best-known American popularizer of astronomical knowledge. A college professor and engineer based in Cincinnati, Mitchel took the lead in raising funds to build the Cincinnati Observatory and to purchase a suitable telescope. When it opened to the public in March 1845, the observatory housed the second-largest refracting telescope in the world.
Through his writing, lecturing, and fundraising, Mitchel was instrumental in spreading awareness of the new science of astronomy in the antebellum United States. In the first issue of The Sidereal Messenger (Cincinnati, 1846–1848), a periodical Mitchel launched in 1846, he wrote that the new wave of interest in the heavens called for the creation of more knowledge for general readers on “a subject which for the first time they are permitted to investigate by sight, and not by faith only.”
American writers and readers had of course long been interested in the notion of ascent, but mostly out of an interest in the perspective that a view from the heights would afford. That is to say, they were interested in looking down instead of up. The Clements Library’s large collection of bird’s-eye view prints are an example of this impulse, but it also took other forms. Several writers in the 19th-century United States imagined voyages to outer space, or encounters with extraterrestrial beings. A short interlude in Washington Irving’s A History of New York (New York, 1809) muses on the views that European settlers had of the Americas when they first crossed the Atlantic, and for comparison imagines a conquest of the Earth by “Lunatics,” little green men with tails who carried their heads under their arms and arrived from the moon on ships that slid down moonbeams. They transported the rulers of all the nations of Earth back to the moon, where the Man in the Moon, shocked by the barbarity of the earthlings, declared the entire planet to be a lunar possession.
In 1813, George Fowler published A Flight to the Moon, or, the Vision of Randalthus, a narrative in which the titular character is conveyed to the moon in an ethereal cloud. The narrator spends 175 pages explaining the science, politics, religion, and society of Earth to the Lunarians, a gentle race of blonde, blue-eyed moon people who were technologically far behind their terrestrial neighbors. Having nearly bored the Lunarians to death, Randalthus ensured that we had nothing to fear from a lunar invasion. At the end of the narrative, he also made a brief visit to the sun, which turned out to be hollow. Its interior was inhabited by a darkhaired, quick-tempered people who were somehow spared Randalthus’ lectures on the Ways of Earth.
An 1827 work of science fiction by George Tucker is unfortunately not held anywhere on the University of Michigan campus. A Voyage to the Moon: With Some Account of the Manners and Customs, Science and Philosophy, of the People of Morosofia differed from earlier speculative narratives in being more interested in describing the structure and habits of Lunarian society than in telling the people of the moon about life on Earth. Joseph Atterley, the narrator, was born on Long Island in 1786, the son of a sea captain in the China trade. On a voyage to Canton in 1822, his ship was wrecked in a typhoon, and the crew was washed ashore on the Burmese coast. Atterley was carried into the interior. In the Burmese mountains, he became friends with a Brahmin hermit who told him a secret: not only had he been to the moon, he knew how to get back. Having discovered a previously unknown metal in the local mines that repelled gravity, the hermit and Atterley decided to build a spacecraft out of this metal. With the assistance of a local coppersmith, they crafted an anti-gravitational cube that lifted them to the moon in the space of three days.
What looks like a rocket on the cover of this newly arrived U.S. edition of Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon (New York, 1874) was actually a capsule fired from a gigantic gun designed by the novel’s Baltimore Gun Club.
The numerous series of dime novels and boys’ weeklies that flooded newsstands in the late 19th century were endlessly fascinated with travel to the skies and beyond, always enabled by the engineering prowess of American boyhood. (The Five Cent Wide Awake Library, Baldwin, NY, 1884)
The detailed description of the creation of this craft, combined with the technological advances heralded by Mitchel’s great telescope in Cincinnati, sparked a new focus in American speculative writing of the 19th century. No longer content with simply talking to the people of the moon, many writers became preoccupied with the technical challenge of actually getting to outer space. And this interest was most pronounced in the post-bellum outpouring of fiction intended specifically for boys.
Tucker’s spacecraft relied on a combination of mystical Eastern knowledge and esoteric craftsmanship. His narrative clearly influenced Edgar Allan Poe, whose 1835 short story “The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall” described a trip to the moon in a balloon-like contraption inspired by Tucker’s device. (Tucker was a professor at the University of Virginia when Poe was a student there.) What the ability to actually see into outer space inspired in many writers was a more practical approach to the questions of science fiction. What would flying machines look like? And how could they be built?
Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon Direct in Ninety-seven Hours and Twenty Minutes was first published in Paris in 1867; a translated American edition appeared two years later. Although written in France, the novel’s focus was American. It concerned the efforts of the Baltimore Gun Club after the Civil War to steer the prowess of American artillerists in less destructive directions. Impey Barbicane, the club’s president, fixed on the goal of constructing a giant gun — eventually called “The Columbiad” — large enough to launch a manned capsule all the way to the moon. The novel was filled with discussions of the required size and caliber of such a gun, all amidst a welter of scientific calculations that were only made possible by the advances in astronomical observation that Mitchel so avidly promoted.
The fascination with the construction of contraptions that would bring American boys to the skies and beyond reached its height in the proliferation of dime novel series that focused on the exploits of young inventors.
Popular fiction for boys from the last three decades of the century was filled with descriptions of increasingly elaborate airships of all kinds. To take one example, Harry Collingwood’s The Log of the Flying-Fish (originally published in London) went through numerous American editions. Young readers were clearly enthralled with the technological sublime of its descriptions of the Flying-Fish, a vessel that could fly around the world without stopping and could also explore the depths of the ocean (all thanks to its construction out of “aethereum,” a newly discovered lightweight metal).
The fascination with the construction of contraptions that would bring American boys to the skies and beyond reached its height in the proliferation of dime novel series that focused on the exploits of young inventors. One recent arrival at the Clements is a bound volume of issues of the Five Cent Wide Awake Library, a weekly fiction series published by Frank Tousey in the 1880s and 1890s that recounted the engineering achievements of Frank Reade and his son, Frank Reade, Jr. Issues in this volume regaled young readers with stories of the construction of steampowered robots, electric horses, submarines, and — above all — airships. By that point in the 19th century, many Americans would have been aware that there was a world above the attic of a typical house (the 10-story Home Life Building in Chicago, generally considered the nation’s first skyscraper, was built in 1885). But the dream of being aloft, untethered to the earth, was more exhilarating than simply being in a tall building. The dissemination of knowledge about the heavens in the 19th century in the pages of popular fiction guaranteed that the American imagination would remain directed upwards.
Harry Collingwood’s The Log of the Flying Fish (New York, 1887) was originally published in London. This first U.S. edition featured the book’s silvery marvel—a combination airship and submarine that took readers to previously unexplored heights.