VICTORIANS IN SPACE

In 1820, the Astronomical Society of London was founded over a dinner between 14 ‘gentlemen astronomers’ at a London pub named the Freemason’s Tavern. These men were in fact wealthy amateurs who were doggedly determined to pursue knowledge of the skies above. Quite a hobby, we’re sure you’ll agree – leading to quite a lot of behaviour that can be described in scientific terms as ‘completely bonkers’.

They weren’t the only ones taking an interest, either. The 19th century was a golden age in engineering and intellectual thinking - even if not all was exactly right all of the time, as you may read on to discover. In 1862, two chaps named James Glaisher and Henry Coxwell bravely sailed off in a hot air balloon towards the edge of the earth’s atmosphere. Luckily they had the good sense to equip the balloon with a safety cord, which they released about 11 kilometres into their journey before both fainting. Both survived, and even the balloon made it back in tact too (even if their dignity was in tatters).

Fictional methods for interplanetary travel reflected knowledge of technology at the time. In his 1865 novel From the Earth to the Moon, Jules Verne imagined firing an enormous bullet the size of a house from a giant gun, stuffed with passengers into space. Similarly in the HG Wells classic The War of the Worlds aliens propelled themselves down to Earth in a similar fashion, although contemporaneous readers may be more bemused at the fact that the Martians choose to land in Surrey, of all places.

Back in the real world, there were riches to be won for nebulous finds. A wealthy, space-obsessed Frenchwoman left The Pierre Guzman Prize in her will, decreeing that whoever could communicate with a planet or star would reap a 100,000-franc reward. There was a momentary obsession with building enormous visual representations of mathematical problems, such as a Pythagorean formula, as proof of intelligent life on Earth. An astronomer named Mercier became convinced that the Eiffel Tower could be rigged with mirrors to reflect light up towards aliens on Mars.

The preoccupation with space exploration was in effect across the pond too, culminating in the Great Moon Hoax of 1835, a series of articles published in New York newspaper The Sun. The articles, backed by false quotes attributed to one of the Astronomical Society’s founders, John Herschel, made the gag-worthy announcement that life had been discovered on the Moon by looking through an ‘immense telescope’. The stories detailed oceans, beaches and trees and land populated by bat-like humanoids with wings, along with unicorns, goats and beavers. It is of course a great shame that such a planet transpired not to have existed.

Proposed methods for interplanetary communication became more and more outlandish. A group of academics - part of the so-called Second Order Adepts of the Golden Dawn -  claimed they had travelled to space via astral projection, encountering at one point a winged man on the rings of Saturn. On Mars they bumped into an armoured angel. Their notes were detailed and scientific. Incidentally, opium was widely consumed in Victorian times, as you could buy it in most shops. As we say, entirely unrelated.