Excerpt from Murray Ellison’s 2015 VCU M.A.Thesis on Poe and 19th-Century Science ©
"The captain’s gray hairs are records of the past, and his grayer eyes are Sybils of the future. The cabin floor was thickly strewn with strange, iron clasped folios, moldering instruments of science and obsolete long-forgotten charts"
- "MS. Found in a Bottle" by Edgar Allan Poe (1833)
Several researchers have proposed that late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Gothic writers (a sub-genre of the “Romantic” writers) inform Poe’s views of the horrors and uncertainties of science (Gewirtz, Tresch, ...
literature
Poe’s Balloon Hoax – Part II
Written by Murray Ellison, 2015
As noted in Part I of this column, J. Harris was one of the many researchers who connected Locke’s “Moon Hoax” with Poe’s April 1844 New York Sun columns on the “Balloon Hoax.” As Eric Carlson comments, “In the considerable rush for copies” for the “Balloon Hoax,” they “were sold for as much as fifty cents each” (260). This would be equal to at least $15 a newspaper today-even more than charged at most airports! Poe’s anonymous story “was written in the style of a journalistic flash, since the Sun extra edition gave all of the signs of being a real ...
Poe’s Great Balloon Hoax – Part 1
This article is an excerpt from Murray Ellison’s VCU MA Thesis on Poe and Nineteenth-Century Science, ©2015
Near the end of his journalistic career, Poe was likely running out of actual science reports to write about that would excite the public’s interest in science as spectacularly as his fictional stories did. Perhaps, by that time, his imagination far exceeded science’s ability to create new inventions. His 1843 “Balloon Hoax” story demonstrated that sensational quasi-scientific newspaper reports could command the public’s attention in ways that even he could have never imagined. By ...
Poe’s Cryptographic Imagination – Part II
Modern Computer Solves Poe’s Last Inscrutable Puzzle
Murray Ellison | April 13, 2018
Excerpts from Murray’s VCU Master of Arts Thesis on Poe and Science © 2015.
Poe published several columns on cryptography entitled “A Few Words on Secret Writing.” He explains that advanced puzzles, where the only secret to the code is “locked in the creator’s mind can be very difficult or nearly impossible to solve.” Poe mentions that the acclaimed sixteenth-century English philosopher and scientist Francis Bacon “very properly defined three essentials in secret correspondence.” Bacon’s first essential is ...
