From the Earth to the Moon

JULES VERNE
’s life was characterized by a love for the sea, travel, and adventure. He was born into a family with a seafaring tradition in Nantes, France, in 1828. At an early age he tried to run off and ship out as a cabin boy but was stopped and returned to his family. Verne was sent to Paris to study law, but once there, he quickly fell in love with the theater. He was soon writing plays and opera librettos, and his first play was produced in 1850. When he refused his father’s entreaties to return to Nantes and practice law, his allowance was cut off, and he was forced to make his living by selling stories and articles.

Verne combined his gift for exotic narratives with an interest in the latest scientific discoveries. He spent long hours in the Paris libraries studying geology, astronomy, and engineering. Soon he was turning out imaginative stories such as
Five Weeks in a Balloon
(1863) and
Journey to the Center of the Earth
(1864), which were immensely popular all over the world. After
From the Earth to the Moon
(1865), Verne received letters from travelers wishing to sign up for the next lunar expedition. His ability to envision the next stage in man’s technological process and his childlike wonder at the possibilities produced
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
(1870) and
Michael Strogoff
(1876). His biggest success came with
Around the World in Eighty Days
(1872).

Verne’s books made him famous and rich. In 1876 he bought a large steam yacht, outfitted with a cabin in which he could write more comfortably than on shore. He sailed from one European port to another and was lionized everywhere he went. His books were widely translated, dramatized, and later filmed. He died at Amiens in 1905.

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 22

CHAPTER 23

CHAPTER 24

CHAPTER 25

CHAPTER 26

CHAPTER 27

CHAPTER 28

W
ONDER—THAT
is the key to understanding Jules Verne, the first novelist to claim excitement and awe as his territory. Because he wrote with a sure sense of the wonders that lay beyond everyday life, Verne was considered a children’s writer. But his work has outlasted vast numbers of “serious” novels about character and setting that are now mere historical curiosities.

We live in a time when the first expedition to the moon, in 1969, is a fading memory. Why, then, read about past visions of flying to the moon? After all, we know how it really happened—the ending is no surprise.

Verne’s answer would be, “Because the sense of
possibility
must be kept alive.” Unlike yesterday’s yellowing newspapers, the quality of wonder does not fade. Verne believed wonder to be an emotion that grows out of our sense of adventure and inspires us to reach our fullest potential. Though men have now traveled to the moon, the ideas and attitudes Jules Verne packed into
From the Earth to the Moon
are still alive today. And the novel even contains a prediction that may yet be fulfilled.

Verne invented modern science fiction. Others had written fantastic novels and stories using elements of science, such as Mary Shelley’s dark, brooding gothic novel,
Frankenstein.
But Jules Verne devised
science fiction—
stories with the scientific content in the foreground, as much a character as any person. More than any other figure of the nineteenth century, he saw the possibilities of the soaring century to come—and actually made things happen by igniting the imaginations of people everywhere.

For decades Verne was the best known of all French authors, valued not so much for his plots but for his ideas. He labored to infuse his novels with the feeling that these events
could
happen no matter how impossible they seemed at first glance.
From the Earth to the Moon,
first published in 1865, provides some excellent examples of this technique.

Verne had great faith in the growing potential of the still-young United States, and often predicted that it would lead the world in the following century. So when thinking about going to the moon, Verne picked the United States for his setting. “The Yankees, the world’s best mechanics, are engineers the way Italians are musicians and Germans are metaphysicians: by birth.” He wrote the book while the bloodiest battles of the Civil War still raged, yet was able to look beyond the ongoing American agony and envision a postwar future.

The members of the fictional Baltimore Gun Club are restless for activity. Its leader, the man with a grand idea—a typical Verne hero—is an anomaly at the Gun Club: “all his limbs were intact.” The image of hobbled veterans making a huge leap to another world is Verne’s way of showing how limitations can be overcome—by work, will, and wonder. His Gun Club dreamers, aware of the latest scientific developments, know that the mathematician Carl Gauss has already proposed signaling to possible inhabitants of the moon and Mars by building giant
stone triangles on the earth that could be seen from a vast distance. But mere signals would not be enough for Verne’s heroes, who feel in their bones that by dreaming as exactly—as precisely and scientifically—as possible, they can live up to the full possibilities of their lives. This basic theme lights up over a hundred of his “extraordinary voyage” novels.

But the members of the Baltimore Gun Club aren’t the usual run of aimless, romantic nineteenth-century dreamers. Verne’s men—this was long before women aspired to such things—are relentlessly practical. Early on they consider a story by Edgar Allan Poe (a writer Verne admired) in which a man floats to the moon in “a balloon filled with a gas drawn from nitrogen and thirty-seven times lighter than hydrogen.” This is an insider’s joke. Nitrogen, the most plentiful gas in our own atmosphere, is already far heavier than hydrogen. Nobody could “extract” a lighter gas from it without breaking up the atoms—and still it would be heavier than hydrogen.

Here and elsewhere Verne mocks his era’s great interest in balloon sailing to the planets. It is now hard to comprehend that most people of that time had no idea what “outer space” meant. To them, balloons—which had just begun to be used to fly—were a logical way to travel to the crescent they could plainly see waiting in the sky. They never doubted that there would be air available throughout such a journey—wasn’t there plenty of it here? Balloons rise because they contain gases lighter than air. Few popular writers realized that because space is a vacuum, this doesn’t work.

In 1865 there were five other books on interplanetary themes published in French, including
Voyage to Venus, An Inhabitant of the Planet Mars, Voyage to the Moon,
and even a survey by an astronomer,
Imaginary Moons
and Real Moons.
All featured balloons. One writer did have a dim idea of using rockets, but his squirted water out the end, not fiery gas. Then he ruined the effect by thriftily collecting and reusing the ejected water. Common sense should have told him that such a ship would gain no momentum: The water’s push would be canceled when the water was caught. (The recycling squirter idea seems to have had a lingering appeal; it was proposed as late as 1927 by an engineer.)

Verne made fun of the invention, saying that his own launch mechanism, a cannon, would certainly work. No suspicious mechanics for him! He stuck with engineering he knew would work—artillery, the workhorse of battle. The story proceeds with an engineer’s relish for the details, the numbers, the tug of technical arguments. Verne checked his calculations with experts. When the numbers told him that the shell of a capsule would be impossibly heavy if made of iron, he decided to use aluminum, which then was rare and costly, unheard of as a construction material. (One wonders what he would have thought of our soft-drink cans.) This was Verne’s secret—showing the wonder lurking behind the mask of gritty particulars.

He used this same method to invent many of the amazing details that now strike us as so prescient. Since the United States was the most likely nation to undertake so bold a venture, where would his veterans place the cannon? Verne describes attaining the right “plane of the ecliptic,” which is a reasonable motivation but sidesteps the more detailed logic behind his choice of launch site. He knew that to artillery gunners, the earth’s rotation is important in predicting where a shell will land—while it is in flight, the land moves beneath it. In aiming for the moon, there’s an even bigger effect. Think of the earth as a huge merry-go-round. If you stand at the north pole, the
earth spins under your feet but you don’t move at all. Stand on the equator, though, and the earth swings you around at a speed of about a thousand miles an hour. You don’t feel it because the air is moving too.

But that speed matters a lot if you’re aiming to leap into orbit. Verne had the crucial idea right—that
escape velocity
is the key to getting away from the earth’s gravitational pull. The added boost from the earth’s rotation led him to believe that the American adventurers would seek a spot as close to the equator as possible, while still keeping within their national territory. A glance at the map told him that the obvious sites were in Texas and Florida.

This is exactly what happened in the American space program nearly a century later, when the launch site of the Apollo program became a political football between Texas and Florida. Florida won, as Verne predicted, but not for political reasons. NASA engineers wanted their rocket stages to fall harmlessly into the ocean. Verne picked Stone Hill, on almost the exact latitude as Cape Kennedy, the Apollo launch site.