From the Earth to the Moon (Barnes & Noble Digital Library): Direct in Ninety-seven Hours and Twenty Minutes: And a Trip Around It

By Jules Verne and Aaron Parrett

This edition includes a modern introduction and a list of suggested further reading. Scarcely more than a century after Jules Verne published one of the most enduring and captivating novels of the nineteenth century in 1865-From the Earth to the Moon-Apollo 8 circled the moon on Christmas Eve in 1968 carrying the first human beings to fly around another celestial body. With uncanny futuristic vision, Verne had not only anticipated that the launch would take place from Florida, but also foresaw a three man crew traveling in a capsule with approximately the same dimensions as the Apollo Command Module, and he had already worked out the necessary launch velocity required to escape the earth's gravity. Though the literary term would not be invented for another seventy years, many critics agree that Verne can be legitimately called the "inventor of Science Fiction."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barnes & Noble
• Release date: Mar 13, 2012
• ISBN: 9781411468092

Jules Verne

Jules Gabriel Verne was born in the seaport of Nantes, France, in 1828 and was destined to follow his father into the legal profession. In Paris to train for the bar, he took more readily to literary life, befriending Alexander Dumas and Victor Hugo, and living by theatre managing and libretto-writing. His first science-based novel, Five Weeks in a Balloon, was issued by the influential publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel in 1862, and made him famous. Verne and Hetzel collaborated to write dozens more such adventures, including 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea in 1869 and Around the World in 80 Days in 1872. In later life Verne entered local politics at Amiens, where had had a home. He also kept a house in Paris, in the street now named Boulevard Jules Verne, and a beloved yacht, the Saint Michel, named after his son. He died in 1905.

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FROM THE EARTH TO THE MOON

JULES VERNE

TRANSLATED BY EDWARD ROTH

EDITED AND WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY AARON PARRETT

Introduction and Suggested Reading © 2005 by Barnes & Noble, Inc.

This 2012 edition published by Barnes & Noble, Inc.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher.

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INTRODUCTION

SCARCELY MORE THAN A CENTURY AFTER JULES VERNE PUBLISHED one of the most enduring and captivating novels of the nineteenth century in 1865—From the Earth to the Moon—Apollo 8 circled the moon on Christmas Eve in 1968 carrying the first human beings to fly around another celestial body. With uncanny futuristic vision, Verne had not only anticipated that the launch would take place from Florida, but he also foresaw a three man crew traveling in a capsule with approximately the same dimensions as the Apollo Command Module, and he had already worked out the necessary launch velocity required to escape the earth’s gravity. Though the literary term would not be invented for another seventy years, many critics agree that Verne can be legitimately called the inventor of science fiction.

Jules Gabriel Verne was born February 8, 1828, in Nantes, France, and was the oldest of five children. His father was a lawyer and an authoritarian figure who struggled in vain throughout his life to control his adventurous son. More than one biographer has related with delight the story of how young Jules at eleven years of age stowed away on the ship Coralie, bound for the West Indies. Though a recent biography has exposed the tale as almost surely apocryphal, it has survived because it seems so characteristic of Verne—even down to the alleged promise he made to his distraught mother: From now on, I’ll travel only in my imagination. In any case, the imaginary travels of Jules Verne became the titles of such world-famous books as Journey to the Center of the Earth, Around the World in 80 Days, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, and most audacious of all—From the Earth to the Moon.

Young Jules was not a remarkable student. Though he did well in Latin and Greek and clearly demonstrated competence at learning, he showed none of the genius or scientific bent that would define his eventual work. In fact, the marks he made in spelling, grammar, physics, and chemistry were just barely passing. While he professed an early fascination with machinery and gear-works, and later developed a reverence for the power of science to change the course of everyday life, he was never a scientist himself. Nevertheless, his vibrant adventure stories made use of the latest scientific theories, and they popularized those developments for the reading public, often with almost prophetic vision.

Verne’s personal life was marked by slow success at his chosen career—writing—and only eventual success in love. In both arenas he faltered, and was ultimately more successful in his career than at romance. He fell in love with his cousin Caroline when he was twelve years old and was chagrined by her rejection and eventual marriage to a forty-year-old merchant while Jules was away at college. This failure was to set a pattern that would predominate for much of his life.

He traveled to Paris in 1848 to study law, where he witnessed the famous February Revolution led by the celebrated romantic poet Alphonse Marie Louis de Lamartine (1790-1869). Like most other details of his life, Verne’s politics have been debated by biographers. Though most accounts depict him as a rebel (if in sensibility more than in practice), Verne cannot be so easily pigeonholed. Herbert Lottman suggests he was generally conservative, though he came out strongly in favor of free speech. Throughout his life, Verne sympathized with the working classes, and believed that the bourgeoisie failed to appreciate his genius and rejected his style.

Though he had finished his examinations and was qualified to assume the family law practice in Nantes, Verne was seduced by the literary lifestyle that he had begun to cultivate while at school. He counted among his friends such luminaries as Alexandre Dumas père, who produced Verne’s first professional literary effort, a play called Broken Straws. The play was staged in 1850, and received some flattering attention. Verne was even closer to Alexandre Dumas fils, author of the sensational Camille, who helped Verne with the actual writing of Broken Straws. Based on his first modest success, Verne decided to abandon the law and stay in Paris to devote himself to writing.

While living in Paris, he suffered another bout of unrequited love at the hands of Herminie Arnault-Grossetière. The bitterness he felt from this and previous jilting accumulated, and his attitude toward women, as often expressed in his novels, has occasionally earned him a dubious reputation for misogyny. It is true that many of his adventure novels (including From the Earth to the Moon) lack authentic or interesting female characters, though this is a sin of omission rather than commission, and as a sexist, Verne was surely a product of his times.

In any case, Verne eventually met and married the widow Honorine Morel, (née de Viane) in 1857. They remained married throughout his life, though their relationship was often strained and incommunicative. Verne’s only child, a son named Michel, was born in 1861.

Verne sold his first novel in 1862 to Pierre Hetzel, who signed Verne to a twenty-year contract under which Verne was expected to produce three novels a year. The first novel was Five Weeks in a Balloon, which was an immediate best seller. With it, Verne essentially inaugurated a new genre in literature, one that Hugo Gernsback would give the name scientifiction in the 1920s, by which, he said, I mean the Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, and Edgar Allan Poe type of story—a charming romance intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision. While it is true that Verne was inspired by his reading of Poe, he infused his novels with science, rather than gothic imagination, thereby raising the bar for future purveyors of fantastic adventure tales.

From the Earth to the Moon is both a flattering paean to American ingenuity and a satire of the human preoccupation with war. Only in America, Verne writes, could engineers and visionaries be given free reign to enact such a grandiose scheme as traveling to the moon. The Yankees, the best mechanics on earth, he explains, are natural-born engineers, as the Italians are natural-born musicians, and the Germans are natural-born philosophers.

But ordinarily, such engineering prowess is exploited only for making war. From the Earth to the Moon opens as the War Between the States has drawn to a bloody close and former generals and warmongers are clamoring for a project on which to unleash their pent-up martial energy and freshly honed ballistic skills. Modern readers are amazed at Verne’s prescience in imagining that such a grand enterprise as traveling to the moon could only take place in a postwar redirection of political and military energy. The NASA space program of the 1960s, of course, grew out of the technology that the United States inherited from the vanquished Germans at the end of World War II. Verne would have appreciated the irony inherent in the fact that essentially the same rockets that carried bombs to London were redesigned by their makers twenty-five years later to carry astronauts 240,000 miles across space to the moon.

In fact, Verne blatantly links the audacious enterprise of conquering the moon to the well-rehearsed American policy of Manifest Destiny when he has Barbican, the president of the Baltimore Gun Club, address its membership:

There is no one among you, gentlemen, who has not gazed long and carefully on the Moon, or at least who has not heard of those that have. . . . For us is perhaps reserved the glory of being the Columbuses of another new world. Have confidence in me and second me by all the means in your power, and I shall guide you to her State or Territory, which we shall annex to all the other States and Territories that form the totality of our glorious Union!

Though Verne’s novels are typically categorized as romans scientifiques, From the Earth to the Moon is also clearly a satire of military mentality and the politics of annexation. It is perhaps unique among anti-war novels in that it does not merely decry the human urge for war, but suggests a way to channel that apparently universal impulse toward a more productive and sanguine end.

Verne builds his fantastic story about traveling to the moon on the firm foundation of nineteenth-century scientific knowledge and technology, which lends a sense of credibility to what had long been a purely fanciful idea. For the first time in the history of literature, Verne offered a believable account of the scientific details that would have to be considered if human beings really wanted to go to the moon. Verne’s novel moved a dream that had previously only existed in the human imagination into the realm of mechanical possibility. As one critic wrote in 1870, Mr. Verne’s fantasy doesn’t lead science astray, it only gives it wings and helps it to fly.

Accordingly, Verne included a series of technical chapters in the novel that gave readers a crash course in selenography (the scientific study of the moon), Newtonian mechanics, ballistics, astronomy, and the science of explosives. Schoolteachers everywhere have long appreciated Verne because his books satisfy both of Horace’s requirements for great literature: They are not merely entertaining to students, but they are also educational. From the Earth to the Moon contains a wealth of information that has never gone out of date.

Verne has sometimes been criticized for sacrificing the literary aspects of his books—the characters and their motives, for example—to the scientific cause. The characters are papier-mâché, such critics charge, and the conflicts between characters are inconsequential. Certainly Verne may be guilty of occasionally subordinating his literary impulses to his scientific purposes, resulting in fictions that are sometimes thin and characters who remain one-dimensional. But others of his characters have emerged as figures with lives larger than the books that contain them: Captain Nemo (from Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea) is surely as well known as his more literary counterpart, Captain Ahab.

And many of Verne’s heroes are drawn from actual figures. The dynamic hero of Verne’s moon novels, Michel Ardan, was inspired in part by the charismatic nineteenth-century French personality Felix Tournachon, known by his pseudonym Nadar, who had made a name for himself as an early practitioner of the fledgling art of photography. By 1862, Nadar had become interested in aeronautics, an irrepressible passion that Verne found contagious. When Verne modeled his hero of From the Earth to the Moon, he transposed the name to Ardan.

From the Earth to the Moon draws to a mysterious and tense close, with our heroes flying somewhere in space, and their earthbound comrades anxiously hoping that all has gone well and that they are on a course to the moon. Naturally, such a cliffhanger demanded a sequel, which Verne delivered five years later with Around the Moon (1870), which catalogues the adventures of the nineteenth-century astronauts as they circle the moon and prepare for a splashdown in the Pacific. Once again, Verne’s prophetic imagination was astounding.

Though Verne is sometimes criticized for his faulty mechanical ideas and a vision of the future that frequently missed the mark, such criticisms come from those blessed with that well-known power of observation we call 20/20 hindsight. He was right as often as he was wrong about the future, and even when he missed on the details, as Lottman notes, he often came close. Verne’s conception of the cannon that fires his rocket to the moon, for example, would not have worked in actual practice, but the general principle (drawn directly from Newton) is sound, and Walter James Miller reported in 1995 that NASA was considering a similar space-gun.

In the twentieth century, Verne’s popularity has continued to grow. Many of his titles are now considered classics, and such luminaries of the literary establishment as Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes have expressed their admiration and approval of his work. In 1962, Arthur C. Clarke, author of 2001: A Space Odyssey, eulogized Verne thus:

There can never be another Jules Verne, for he was born at a unique moment of time. He grew up when the steam engine was changing the material world, and the discoveries of science were changing the world of the mind. . . . He was the first writer to welcome change and to proclaim that scientific discovery could be the most wonderful of all adventures. For this reason, he will never grow out-of-date.

Verne died in 1905, from complications arising from the diabetes he had suffered from for years. He went to his grave having written over one hundred books, some of which were not published until years later. He earned over one million francs from his works, an unprecedented figure for its time, and this in spite of a contractual arrangement with Hetzel that clearly took advantage of him. Verne was adored by audiences of readers the world over, and had achieved France’s highest award, the Legion of Honor. But perhaps the honor for which he would have been most proud is a humble pockmark on the far side of the moon—at Latitude 35˚ South and Longitude 147˚ East—now known as Jules Verne Crater.

Aaron Parrett is Assistant Professor of English Literature at the University of Great Falls in Montana. He holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Georgia and is the author of The Translunar Narrative in the Western Tradition.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE - THE ARTILLERISTS

CHAPTER TWO - THE PRESIDENT’S COMMUNICATION

CHAPTER THREE - THE EFFECT

CHAPTER FOUR - REPLY FROM THE CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY

CHAPTER FIVE - THE ROMANCE OF THE MOON

CHAPTER SIX - WHICH LADY READERS ARE REQUESTED TO SKIP

CHAPTER SEVEN - THE MATERIAL OF THE BULLET

CHAPTER EIGHT - THE CANNON

CHAPTER NINE - THE POWDER

CHAPTER TEN - AN ENEMY!

CHAPTER ELEVEN - FLORIDA OR TEXAS?

CHAPTER TWELVE - THE FINANCIAL QUESTION

CHAPTER THIRTEEN - STONY HILL

CHAPTER FOURTEEN - SPADE, SHOVEL, PICK AND TROWEL

CHAPTER FIFTEEN - THE CASTING

CHAPTER SIXTEEN - THE BIG GUN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN - BY THE ATLANTIC CABLE

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN - WHO WAS HE?

CHAPTER NINETEEN - ARDAN DEFINES EVERY PLANK AND SPLINTER OF HIS PLATFORM

CHAPTER TWENTY - A FENCING MATCH

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE - WAR TO THE KNIFE!

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO - POPULARITY IN AMERICA

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE - AN IMPROVEMENT ON PULLMAN

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR - THE TELESCOPE ON THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE - CLOSING DETAILS

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX - FIRE !

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN - CLOUDY WEATHER

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT - A NEW STAR

ENDNOTES

SUGGESTED READING

003 CHAPTER ONE 004

THE ARTILLERISTS

IT WAS DURING THE GREAT CIVIL WAR OF THE UNITED STATES, THAT a new and very influential club started in Baltimore, Maryland. Everybody knows the astonishing energy with which the military instinct suddenly developed itself in that ship-building, engineering, and commercial nation. Shopkeepers who had hardly ever heard of West Point, jumped from their counters into the position of captains, colonels, and even generals. Their knowledge of the art of war soon almost equaled that of the great masters of the old world, and, like them too, they won victories by enormous discharges of bullets, men, and greenbacks.

But in gunnery especially the Americans even surpassed their brethren in Europe. Not that their arms ever reached a higher degree of precision, but they were constructed on a scale of such extraordinary dimensions that ranges were soon attained that had never before been known. As far indeed as regards plunging fire, flank fire, horizontal fire, oblique fire, raking fire, or reverse fire, the English, the French, the Prussians, had very little to learn; but even today the best European cannons, howitzers, and mortars are only mere pocket pistols in comparison to the formidable engines of the American artillery.

This is not surprising. The Yankees, the best mechanics on earth, are natural-born engineers, as the Italians are natural-born musicians, and the Germans are natural-born philosophers. It is therefore the most natural thing in the world to see them bring their daring ingenuity to bear on the art of gunnery. Hence their colossal cannons, far less useful, indeed, than their sewing machines, but quite as astonishing and much more bewildering. The huge monsters devised by Parrot, Dahlgren, Rodman, are well known. And the Armstrongs, the Pallisers, the Whitworths, the Treville de Beaulieus, the Krupps, had nothing for it but to surrender gracefully to their American rivals.

Accordingly, during the terrible struggle between the North and the South, artillery ruled the roost in America; everyday the Union journals chronicled enthusiastically the new inventions; in every country store, in every bar room throughout the land, the air resounded with rifled cannons, Columbiads, swamp angels; and nearly every green grocer’s clerk went crazy from calculating difficult problems about the long range.

The moment an American conceives an idea, he gets another American to share it with. If they are three, they elect a president and two secretaries; if four, they nominate a vice president, and the society takes action; if five, they call a stated meeting and the club is established. That is exactly what happened at Baltimore. The first inventor of a new cannon associated himself with the first man who cast it and with the first man who bored it. Such was the nucleus of the Gun Club. A month after its formation, its register contained the names of 1,800 effective, and 30,575 corresponding, members.

It was an imperative condition on every one wishing to join this club, an absolute sine qua non, that he should have invented or at least improved a cannon—or if not a cannon, a fire arm of some kind. Still the inventors of fifteen shooters, of revolving carbines, or of saber pistols and such small fry, enjoyed but slight consideration among the members of the Gun Club. Here, as throughout the nation at large, the artillerymen overshadowed everybody else.

The reputation they obtain, as a learned orator of the Club said one day, is in proportion to the masses of their cannon, and in exact ratio with the square of the distance reached by their projectiles. A comical application of Newton’s law of terrestrial gravitation.

The Gun Club once founded, you can easily figure for yourself the results soon reached by the inventive genius of the Americans. The new war engines assumed proportions still more colossal, so that the shells they discharged often killed people who were quietly engaged at their occupations miles beyond the target. Such inventions naturally soon left far behind them the timid instruments of European artillery. Just figure it out a little for yourself.

Once, in the good old times, it was thought to be a pretty respectable performance, if a 36-pounder, at a distance of 300 feet, pierced, by a flank shot, thirty-six horses and sixty-eight men. That was only the art in its infancy. It has made some progress since. The Rodman cannon threw a ball weighing half a ton a distance of seven miles, and could have easily stretched five hundred horses and three hundred men. For a time the Gun Club seriously entertained the idea of convincing the world of such tremendous energy by a grand ocular demonstration. But though the horses might possibly be brought together, unfortunately the men upon whom it was proposed to operate objected so decidedly that the idea was unwillingly abandoned; so this great scientific question is left unsettled to the present day.

One thing, however, is quite certain: the effect of these cannons was very destructive. At every discharge, the combatants fell before them like grass before the mowing machine. In comparison with such projectiles what was the famous ball that, at Coutras in 1587, in the wars of Henry IV, put twenty-five men hors de combat? Or that other which, at Zorndorff in 1758, when Frederic II was fighting the Russians, killed forty men? Or the one thrown by the Austrian cannon at Kesselsdorf in 1745, which at every discharge made seventy enemies bite the sod? What were even those wonderful guns of Jena and Austerlitz that had so often decided the day? These terrible engines of death would be considered mere children’s playthings in the Federal War! At the battle of Gettysburg, a conical projectile, shot by a rifled cannon, struck down 173 Confederates, and in the retreat across the Potomac, a Rodman ball sent 215 Southerners out of this wicked world without giving them even time to bless themselves. We must here likewise make mention of a formidable mortar invented by J. T. Marston, a most distinguished member and the Honorary secretary of the Gun Club. This mammoth piece of ordnance at first excited universal enthusiasm, but its results by no means gratified the general expectation, for it burst at its first public trial, and killed a large number of the spectators, men, women, and children—337 all told.

These eloquent figures speak sufficiently for themselves. Nothing we can say could add to their effect. Accordingly we shall conclude this part of the subject by giving the following result, obtained after much calculation by W. G. Pitcairn, Esq., the statistician of the Gun Club. By dividing the number of victims who had fallen beneath bullets and balls, by the number of the active members of the Gun Club, he found that each one of the latter had killed, on an average, 2,375 men. Even a hasty glance at the number must convince the disinterested reader that the only avowed objects of this learned society were: First, the annihilation of the human race—of course on grounds strictly philanthropical—and second, the improvement of cannons as the best instruments of civilization. The Gun Club was in fact a Society of Exterminating Angels—though at heart they were, no doubt, the very best fellows in the world.

It is hardly necessary to add that these Americans, brave as fire, by no means confined their speculations to theory; they tested them by frequent practical experience. You could find in the Club Register officers of every grade, lieutenants and generals; soldiers of every age, blushing debutants in the career of arms and grizzly veterans still standing solid at their posts. Many had fallen in the battlefield, and their names were all carefully recorded on the Roll of Honor. And many who had returned still bore on their persons the marks of their unquestioned intrepidity. Crutches, wooden legs, artificial arms, iron hands, gutta-percha jaws, silver skulls, platinum noses, false teeth—nothing was wanting to the collection; and W. J. Pitcairn, the statistician already mentioned, calculated that in the Gun Club, on an average, there was only one arm for every four men, and one pair of legs for every six.

But such trifling considerations never disturbed the equanimity of these valiant artillerymen, and their bosoms swelled with proper pride, and they congratulated each other with justifiable emotion whenever the New York Herald’s battle bulletin announced that the number of the slain was ten times greater than that of all the bullets, balls, and shells counted together.

One day, however, a sad and miserable day, peace was signed by the survivors of the war; the roaring of the artillery ceased; the mortars grew dumb; howitzers tightly muzzled, and cannons with their heads hanging downwards, were dragged off to the arsenals; the balls were piled into pretty pyramids; the bloody tracks of war began to fade away; the cotton plants grew to an enormous size on the richly manured fields; mourning garments began to disappear from the streets; and the Gun Club remained plunged in a lethargy profound, exanimate, and hopeless.

A few irrepressible workers, to be sure, unremitting drudges, would still keep on figuring at ballistic calculations and dreaming of gigantic shells and cyclopean howitzers. But, without practice, wherefore such vain theories? Accordingly the club rooms became gradually deserted; the waiters dozed in the antechambers; the newspapers, unread, grew moldy on the files; the dark corners resounded with mournful snores; and the members of the Gun Club, once so bustling, so noisy, so exuberant, now reduced to silence by a disastrous peace, sulkily dawdled away their days and nights in reveries of platonic artillery!

This is abominable! exclaimed Tom Hunter, one evening, wearily stretching his wooden legs, a splendid pair of Palmer’s best. Nothing to do! Nothing to hope for! What a miserable existence! Where is the grand old time when the cannon from Federal Hill woke us up every morning with its joyous detonations?

Those happy days are gone, sang Billsby the brave, jolly as ever, though one of his eyes was only glass. "That was a time to live in! You invented your cannon; it was hardly cast before you could try it on the enemy. Then on your return to the camp you got a shake hands from Little Mac, or an encouraging nod from Sherman. But now the generals are all back at their counters, sanding their sugar, watering their whiskey, and making the women believe that cotton is wool. Ah! The melancholy days are come indeed, and Othello’s occupation is gone!"

It’s a fact, Billsby! cried old Colonel Bloomsbury, quite energetically. "Our fate has been pretty rough. Take myself for instance! I gave up the oyster packing business forever, to go to the war. I went to the war, I learned how to fight, I took my share in everything going, for nearly five years. A life