In the Library
From the Earth to the Moon
Jules Verne, 1865
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Accessible
- Reading time
- Reading time 3.5 hours
- Translated by
- Translated by Anonymous (1877)
- Chapters
- Chapters 28
- Length
- Length 50k words
£1.99
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It was a company of Exterminating Angels, at bottom the best fellows in the world.
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About the book
Peace breaks out, and the artillerymen of Baltimore are ruined by it. The Gun Club musters barely one arm between every four members, keeps a statistician who has established that each has personally killed two thousand three hundred and seventy-five men and a fraction, and has nothing left to shoot at. So its president proposes the Moon. What follows is the funniest engineering document of its century: nine hundred feet of Columbiad sunk into Florida sand, four hundred thousand pounds of gun-cotton, a shell cast in aluminium, subscriptions raised in every country on earth, and a Frenchman who arrives by telegram to announce that he means to ride inside it. Jules Verne does the sums in front of you and they very nearly work. Read it for what he guessed right: a Florida launch site, three men, a capsule of light metal, escape velocity worked out by hand. Then notice the joke underneath, which is that the machine for reaching the Moon is the same machine, built by the same cheerful men, that had lately been reaching Gettysburg.