Did Poe have a time machine?

As I mentioned last week, today I want to talk a bit about Edgar Allan Poe.

He was born January 19, 1809 in Boston and died October 7, 1849 in Baltimore. In his forty years he did some remarkable things.

He was a pioneer of the detective genre, influencing Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. He kicked off science fiction according to Jules Verne and he is considered the father of modern horror, inspiring greats from Lovecraft to King.

Poe was also one of the founding fathers of what we today call short stories. But these achievements aside, I want to talk about some of the weird things that surround this strange man and his works.

In his 1838 novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, a crew of whalers run out of food and are forced to resort to cannibalism. Their unfortunate dinner is a young lad named Richard Parker. Now in the real world in 1884, 46 years later, four men were cast adrift when their ship sank and they had to eat someone to survive. They snacked on none other than their 17 year old cabin boy Richard Parker... Creepy.

In 1840, Poe wrote The Businessman, in which the titular character suffers brain damage with the result that his entire personality changes. In 1848, a railroad worker suffered similar damage and his personality changed in the exact same way. Now people getting hurt is nothing new, but the remarkable thing is that brain damage was not understood in the mid-1800's. Modern doctors were astounded at Poe's understanding of all the symptoms of frontal lobe damage.

Then in 1848, Poe published a huge poem called Eureka, in which he postulates that the universe began as a single particle, and then in a flash expanded and indeed is still expanding. Sounds familiar doesn't it? Yup, Poe essentially came up with the Big Bang theory half a century before astronomers figured it out.

There is more to this remarkable and strange man, but you'll have to read up on that yourself if you're interested. I'll just finish with how he finished. He was found rambling in a gutter, repeating the name Reynolds over and over. To this day we don't know who that is. Poe was not wearing his own clothes, and since the medical records are lost forever, we don't know what he died from. There were no marks on his body, and no obvious signs of any particular illness.

That's it for this time. Until we see each other again, have a great week!