On August 25, 1835, the New York Sun published the first of six articles claiming that famed astronomer Sir John Herschel had observed lunar life through a massive new telescope. The stories detailed lush forests, sapphire temples, bipedal beavers, and winged humanoids called Vespertilio-homo. It was an elaborate lie crafted by reporter Richard Adams Locke, but 19th-century readers swallowed it whole.
What followed was the world's first modern viral news craze, and the Sun was entirely unprepared for the mechanical chaos it unleashed. To satisfy the rabid public, the Sun relied on a newly installed steam-powered cylinder press, a technological marvel capable of printing thousands of sheets per hour. However, the appetite for moon news was unprecedented.
Crowds swarmed the newspaper's offices on Nassau Street, buying up copies faster than they could be cranked out. The steam engine ran constantly for over ten hours a day, straining the iron gears, leather belts, and paper feeds to their absolute physical limits. When circulation exploded to over 19,000 copies per day, making the Sun the most circulated daily paper in the world at the time, the mechanical press broke down under the heat and pressure of non-stop operation.
To meet demand, publisher Benjamin Day had to hire secondary printing shops and keep manual hand-presses running alongside the exhausted steam machinery around the clock. The Great Moon Hoax didn't just prove how easily people could be fooled by fake news; it stress-tested the nascent industrial technology of mass print media, proving that viral information could physically outpace the machines built to distribute it.