From the Earth to the Moon; and, Round the Moon
Jules Verne, Taylor Anderson
Paperback
(CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, Oct. 24, 2017)
From the Earth to the Moon (French: De la terre à la lune) 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. The story is also notable in that Verne attempted to do some rough calculations as to the requirements for the cannon and, considering the comparative lack of any data on the subject at the time, some of his figures are surprisingly close to reality. However, his scenario turned out to be impractical for safe manned space travel since a much longer muzzle 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. Around the Moon (French: Autour de la Lune, 1870), Jules Verne's sequel to From the Earth to the Moon, is a science fiction novel which continues the trip to the moon which was only partially described in the previous novel. It was later combined with From the Earth to the Moon to create A Trip to the Moon and Around It. From the Earth to the Moon and Around the Moon served as the basis for the film A Trip to the Moon. Odin’s Library Classics is dedicated to bringing the world the best of humankind’s literature from throughout the ages. Carefully selected, each work is unabridged from classic works of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, or drama.
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