Born in 1792, Sir John Herschel was a mathematician, chemist, philosopher and astronomer. He was buddies with Babbage, pals with Peacock. Darwin was his homeboy. He won two Copley medals from the Royal Society and named the moons of Saturn and Uranus. The first line of The Origin of Species – ‘that mystery of mysteries, as it has been called by one of our greatest philosophers’ – refers to him. In short he was that rarest of things: a rock star scientist.

One day in 1835 Herschel got talking to Sir David Brewster (renowned in the field of optics; inventor of the kaleidoscope). Herschel had a problem with his telescope: at higher magnifications not enough light reached the viewer, leaving images indistinct. The two men were discussing how this situation might be improved.

Suddenly Sir John had a breakthrough. Might it be possible, he wondered, to use the same principle as Brewster’s new illuminated microscopes but on a larger scale?

Sir David sprung from his chair in ‘an ecstasy of conviction’. ‘Thou art the man!’ he exclaimed (no, really).

Within months the two men had acquired a £70,000 grant from the Royal Society and had completed a seven ton mega-telescope capable of clearly magnifying distant objects up to six thousand times. Naturally the first thing that they pointed it at was the moon.

The view was incredible. They recorded some interesting basaltic rock formations.

Then they noticed a patch of greenish-brown vegetation. And some lunar tree-melons. What looked like reindeer with a single horn and, um, beards gambolled in meadows. Winged humanoids flapped around a golden domed temple.

Panning left (possibly) they come across some moon beavers who walked on their hind legs and whose huts were ‘constructed better .. than those of many tribes of human savages’. The beavers had also discovered fire, the better to cook bearded unicorn steak with.

Not that’s a proper hoax. They knew how to do it properly, back in ‘35.

To be fair Sir John didn’t have a clue that he was being attributed with having discovered bipedal beavers – it was a stunt by the New York Sun to increase their circulation (it worked). Complete story here, a contemporary account and the complete text of the collected articles is in pamphlet form here .

(via Metafilter)