Jules Verne, From the Earth to the Moon: the Gun Club and the shell
Jules Verne's From the Earth to the Moon and Around the Moon: the Baltimore Gun Club, the Columbiad cannon, Michel Ardan and the curious echoes of Apollo.
In 1865 the Parisian publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel brought out a novel that turned an ancient dream into an engineering problem. With From the Earth to the Moon, Jules Verne, already known for Five Weeks in a Balloon and Journey to the Centre of the Earth, abandoned wings, daemons and chariots of fire: to reach the Moon, calculation, ballistics and a good dose of daring were enough. The story had a sequel, Around the Moon, serialised in 1869 and published in book form the following year.
The Baltimore Gun Club
The story opens in the United States in the aftermath of the Civil War. In Baltimore the artillerymen of the Gun Club, a society of cannon inventors left idle by the return of peace, listen to a proposal from their president, Impey Barbicane: to fire a projectile all the way to the Moon. The idea arouses national enthusiasm, and offers of money to finance the enterprise arrive from all over the world.
Verne describes every stage of the project with almost documentary care: the choice of launch site, which falls on Florida for reasons of latitude, the casting of a gigantic vertical cannon called the Columbiad, dug directly into the ground, and the calculation of the speed needed to escape the Earth's attraction. For the figures the writer relied, according to biographical tradition, on the advice of his cousin Henri Garcet, a professor of mathematics.
Michel Ardan and the passengers of the shell
The project changes character when a telegram announces the arrival of Michel Ardan, a French adventurer who asks to travel inside the projectile. The name Ardan is an anagram of Nadar, the famous photographer and balloonist who was Verne's friend, whose exuberance the character shares. The projectile thus becomes a habitable aluminium capsule, and aboard it go Barbicane and his rival, Captain Nicholl, a maker of armour plate.
The first novel ends with the launch and with uncertainty: through the great telescopes the projectile can be seen, having failed to reach the Moon and now circling it like a satellite. In Around the Moon the three travellers observe the lunar surface at close range, fly over the hidden side plunged in darkness and finally, after an attempt to correct their course, fall back to Earth, into the Pacific Ocean, where they are recovered by an American ship.
Prophecies and coincidences
A century later many noticed the similarities with the Apollo programme: three men aboard, the launch from Florida, the orbit around the Moon, the splashdown in the Pacific. In December 1968 the Apollo 8 mission made exactly such a journey, without landing. These are coincidences born of the logic of the problem rather than of prophecy, but they show how seriously Verne had approached the question.
The lunar novels in turn inspired other works. In 1875 Jacques Offenbach staged in Paris the opéra-féerie The Journey to the Moon, loosely based on Verne, and in 1902 Georges Méliès made A Trip to the Moon, the film with the shell lodged in the Moon's eye, which combined ideas from Verne and from H. G. Wells's novel The First Men in the Moon.
In Hetzel's illustrated editions, with engravings accompanying the text, Verne gave readers a new image of the Moon: no longer a fantastic kingdom but a destination that technical progress might reach. It is precisely this optimistic faith in science, tempered by irony, that made From the Earth to the Moon one of the most loved and imitated books of the nineteenth century.