A brief look at August

On the 25th in 1830 the New York Sun, a widely read newspaper, published an article purportedly written by the noted astronomer Sir John Herschel. In exquisite detail the article discussed Herschel’s discoveries, made with the assistance of an ‘an immense telescope of an entirely new principle,’ about the Moon. The article described, among other things, the bison, goats, and [my favorite] bipedal tail-less beavers that were all living on the Moon. Herschel went on to describe the numerous bat-like winged humanoids residing on the moon who, for some reason, exhibited a strong propensity for building temples. One thing the editors neglected to include in the article was any indication that the entire article was a work of fiction, that Herschel knew absolutely nothing about it, and had not consented to its publication. The editors also failed to state that the article had been intended to poke fun at the rather fanciful notions then being advanced by the learned denizens of academia. People read the article and never once questioned its veracity; they actually became enraged when additional articles on the subject were not forthcoming. Thus The Great Moon Hoax, as the article came to be called, set the bar for all future pranksters.

If there will always be war, I think the governments involved should proceed with the aim of beating the time of the Anglo-Zanzibar War. The war, between the United Kingdom and Zanzibar, took place between 9:02 and 9:40 on the morning of the 27th in 1896.

In 1869, on the 31st, Mary Ward, a prominent British scientist, was traveling to a meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society in a steam-powered automobile that had been designed and built by two of her cousins. The vehicle was traveling at the breakneck speed of 4 mph when, as luck would have it, she fell out of the passenger compartment and was run over by the vehicle She died almost instantly and went directly in to the record books as the first person to die because of an automobile accident.