Episode #215- Edgar Allan Poe: Hoax Master?

Our Fake History

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Education, Talk Radio, Society & Culture, History

4.7 • 3.5K Ratings

🗓️ 19 November 2024

⏱️ 89 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Edgar Allan Poe has been remembered as one of America's greatest authors and poets. However, many are less familiar with is career as a hoaxer. In the 1830's and 1840's Poe made a name for himself orchestrating elaborate newspaper hoaxes, and debunking hoaxes attempted by others. Poe specialized in deceptions that dealt with the frontiers of science. Some of these scientific hoaxes flopped, while others drummed up real excitement among astonished readers. What was the secret sauce that made a newspaper hoax go large? Tune-in and find out how moon-gnomes, chess playing automatons, and bipedal space beavers all play a role in the story.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, everyone, Sebastian here. Just wanted to let you know that I will once again be participating in this year's Intelligent Speech Conference.
0:09.5	Deception, lies, fakery, fraudulence, and forgery is what they have on the docket for Intelligent Speech 2025.
0:19.3	So, obviously, I've got to be there. For those that don't know,
0:25.1	intelligent speech is an online conference that highlights the best in history podcasting.
0:32.1	Intelligence Speech 2025 deception will be taking place on the 8th of February 2025.
0:40.4	So if you want tickets, go to intelligent speech online.com right now and get yourself to the conference.
1:01.3	Let's start today with a fun little trivia question.
1:08.9	What do American founding father Benjamin Franklin, the godfather of the computer, Charles Babbage, and Emperor of the French, Napoleon Bonaparte, all have in common.
1:15.7	If you answered, they were all humiliated by a robot, you would be correct.
1:22.3	Well, humiliated might be too harsh a word, and even the word robot is a touch imprecise in this
1:31.1	context. Let me rephrase. All three of these epoch defining luminaries were defeated by the same
1:40.3	chess-playing automaton. Honestly, humiliated by a robot still feels better, but hey,
1:48.1	let's not get hung up on this. The point is that all three of these men who have been variously
1:53.8	praised as geniuses lost a game of chess to what appeared to be a clockwork machine. Babbage technically lost two
2:05.0	games to the contraption. And by the way, these fellows weren't slouches when it came to
2:10.7	playing chess. In particular, Benjamin Franklin was a noted enthusiast of the game. In 1786, he even penned an essay titled
2:20.2	The Morals of Chess, where he argued, quote, the game of chess is not merely an idle amusement.
2:27.5	Several very valuable qualities of the mind, useful in the course of human life, are to be
2:32.4	acquired or strengthened by it."
2:34.8	End quote. Franklin played chess almost daily and has even been inducted into the Chess
2:41.5	Hall of Fame. So you can imagine his shock when he was bested by what he had been told
2:48.7	was the world's first thinking machine.
	...

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