Hoaxes

Origins

The nature of information dispersal and news gathering that dominated media from the 1600s through most of the 1800s made the creation and dissemination of hoaxes relatively easy. In most cases, information was presented without comment. Readers were left to determine validity on what seemed plausible to them based on conventional wisdom, religious beliefs, or scientific discovery. Much of what was known scientifically, however, was built upon speculation, not upon scientific inquiry. As a result, what might be considered hoaxes based on present understanding was simply the passing on of information. When Benjamin Franklin, for example, reported in the October 17, 1745, Pennsylvania Gazette that a medicine made from a substance called “Chinese Stones” could cure rabies, cancer, and a host of other ailments, verification of the medicine's potency was based on personal testimony. A letter to the Gazette the next week, however, revealed that the stones were made from deer antlers and contained as much medicinal value as a tobacco pipe. Similar hoaxes passed regularly as news stories or in advertising for patent medicine until the creation of the Food and Drug Administration curtailed many of them in the early twentieth century.

Author Jonathan Swift used hoaxes to tell stories. Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World (1726), more commonly known as Gulliver's Travels, purported to be the true story [Page 718]of the travels of Lemuel Gulliver. In 1708, Swift predicted the death of a famous astrologer in an almanac using the fictitious name Isaac Bickerstaff. On the appointed day, Swift printed a black-bordered elegy to the astronomer. Two days later, he published a pamphlet extolling the prediction. The news spread through London. People who saw the astrologer that day thought he bore a striking resemblance to the deceased astrologer. Swift later said that he created the hoax to discredit the man's astrological predictions. Swift's hoax was set to coincide with April Fool's Day, and media have regularly created fictitious, nonharmful hoaxes for the day ever since.

Stories of human abnormalities and oddities regularly appeared in the news in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In 1765, a story that swept Britain and then America declared that “the Existence of Giants is proved.” Examined by scientists, the story as it appeared in the Maryland Gazette of March 14 told of a tomb in France that contained “a human Skeleton entire, 25 Feet and a Half long, 10 Feet wide across the Shoulders, and 5 Feet deep from the Breast Bone to the Back.”

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