This is the Merry Palace. I'm Nate de Mayo. There had been a breakthrough. Several, really.

On Wednesday, August 25th, 1835, people opened up the morning edition of the New York Sun

and learned about the remarkable scientific leaps made by Sir John Herschel during his

expedition to South Africa. Sir John was the son of Sir William Herschel who had discovered

the planet Uranus and two of its 27 moons. During the Elder Herschel's time, he was

hampered in his work by the limited engineering know-how of the age, and he assumed by some

unfortunate truths about optics and magnification. So his telescope, though awfully big, could

only see so far. But here in the New York Sun was news that there in South Africa, on

a hilltop in the Cape of Good Hope, the younger Herschel had cracked the problems that had

bedevelled his father. He had built an instrument so ingenious, a telescope so large that he

was beginning to answer questions that had bedevelled every person he would ever looked

up at nighttime. In an astounding feat of engineering, the lens of Sir John's telescope was 25

times larger than his father's. It weighed 14,826 pounds. In all of that shocking size and technical

sophistication, yielded a magnifying power of 42,000 times. And according to the New York

Sun, having first confirmed his father's discoveries, and then having identified several

planets orbiting distant stars, Sir John Herschel pointed his telescope at the moon.

There were beavers on the moon. There were rolling fields of deep crimson flowers, forests

of trees, each as large as the most noble pines in the oldest English churchyards. Blue

unicorns, with beards like goats, who romped and tumbled in the grass like kittens. Over

the course of five days, the wonders of the moon were catalogued in the pages of the

Sun. On Thursday, its readers learned of the vast herds of bison, which stampeded through

a valley carved out long ago by a volcanic eruption. And they learned of the moon beavers,

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