<p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 13px; margin-left: 0px; border-collapse: collapse; background-repeat: no-repeat; padding: 0px;"><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-1524" style="vertical-align: top; border: 0; margin: 8px;" title="dellschau" src="http://strangeattractor.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/dellschau.jpg" alt="dellschau" width="400" height="387" /></p>
<p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 13px; margin-left: 0px; border-collapse: collapse; background-repeat: no-repeat; padding: 0px;">[image by <a href="http://www.charlesdellschau.com/images.html" target="_blank"><span style="text-decoration: none;">Charles Dellschau</span></a>]</p>
<p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 13px; margin-left: 0px; border-collapse: collapse; background-repeat: no-repeat; padding: 0px;">"On 13 April 1844, the New York Sun published a breathless account of a great step for mankind: "The air, as well as the earth and the ocean, has been subdued by science, and will become a common and convenient highway for mankind . . . The Atlantic has been actually crossed in a balloon . . . and in the inconceivably brief period of 75 hours from shore to shore!"</p>
<p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 13px; margin-left: 0px; border-collapse: collapse; background-repeat: no-repeat; padding: 0px;">...The account was cooked up by Edgar Allan Poe, a hoax-lover in an age of hoax-lovers; he perpetrated five others. Poe seems to have rather enjoyed the fuss: "On the morning (Saturday) of its announcement," he later wrote in the Columbia Spy, "the whole square surrounding the Sun building was literally besieged, blocked up from a period soon after sunrise until about two o'clock PM . . . I never witnessed more intense excitement to get possession of a newspaper. . . I tried, in vain, during the whole day, to get possession of a copy."</p>
<p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 13px; margin-left: 0px; border-collapse: collapse; background-repeat: no-repeat; padding: 0px;">Full story at the <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/global/2009/oct/20/edgar-allan-poe-balloon-hoax" target="_blank">Guardian</a></p>
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