From the Earth to the Moon
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.
Cover of an early English translation
The projectile, as pictured in an engraving from the 1872 Illustrated Edition
The firing of the Columbiad
Jules Gabriel Verne was a French novelist, poet, and playwright. His collaboration with the publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel led to the creation of the Voyages extraordinaires, a series of bestselling adventure novels including Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas (1870), and Around the World in Eighty Days (1872). His novels, always well documented, are generally set in the second half of the 19th century, taking into account the technological advances of the time.
Portrait by Étienne Carjat, c. 1884
Painting of Nantes from Île Feydeau, around the time of Verne's birth
The Lycée Royal in Nantes (now the Georges-Clemenceau), where Verne studied
Aristide Hignard