Jules Verne

From the Earth to the Moon: A Direct Route in 97 Hours, 20 Minutes is an 1865 novel by Jules Verne. It tells the story of the Baltimore Gun Club, a post-American Civil War society of weapons enthusiasts, and their attempts to build an enormous Columbiad space gun and launch three people—the Gun Club’s president, his Philadelphian armor-making rival, and a French poet—in a projectile with the goal of a Moon landing. Five years later, Verne wrote a sequel called Around the Moon.
The story is also notable in that Verne attempted to do some rough calculations as to the requirements for the cannon and in that, considering the comparative lack of empirical data on the subject at the time, some of his figures are remarkably accurate. However, his scenario turned out to be impractical for safe manned space travel since a much longer barrel would have been required to reach escape velocity while limiting acceleration to survivable limits for the passengers.
The character of Michel Ardan, the French member of the party in the novel, was inspired by the real-life photographer Félix Nadar.

From the Earth to the Moon: A Direct Route in 97 Hours, 20 Minutes. Jules Verne, 1865
Cover of an early English translation
An episode in the series “The extraordinary travels of Jules Verne” which was inspired by the novel From the Earth to the Moon, published in 1865. Source: leblob.fr

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