Jules Verne’s projectile

More than a hundred years before Apollo, the French writer Jules Verne imagined people flying to the Moon. In his 1865 novel From the Earth to the Moon, members of the Baltimore Gun Club, a group of cannon fans in the United States after the Civil War, decide to fire a giant shell at the Moon. Three men end up riding inside it: the club’s president Impey Barbicane, his rival Captain Nicholl and a French adventurer named Michel Ardan.

The shell is fired from the Columbiad, an enormous cannon dug straight down into the ground at a place called Stone’s Hill near Tampa, Florida. The first book ends with the launch and leaves the travellers’ fate uncertain. The sequel, Around the Moon, published in 1869, follows them through space. Many details turned out to look surprisingly like real Moon missions a century later.

The story

In Around the Moon, the travellers do not land as planned. Their shell ends up circling the Moon instead. They try firing small rockets on the shell’s base to push it down toward the surface, but they fire them too late, and the shell starts falling back toward Earth. It plunges into the sea, where the crew of a US Navy ship, the Susquehanna, find the hollow aluminium capsule floating with all three men alive inside.

Story vs real science

Verne did careful calculations for his time, but a space cannon would not work for people. To reach the speed needed to escape Earth’s gravity, the shell would have to speed up so violently that the passengers would be crushed; a much longer barrel would be needed to make the push gentler. Real spacecraft use rockets instead. Still, Verne got some ideas strikingly right, which is why people still talk about these books.

Surprising echoes of Apollo

Like Apollo 11, Verne’s mission carried three people and launched from Florida. His cannon was called the Columbiad, and Apollo 11’s command module was named Columbia. His capsule was mostly aluminium, splashed down in the sea and was picked up by the Navy, as Apollo crews were. On the way home from the Moon in 1969, Neil Armstrong even mentioned that a hundred years earlier, Jules Verne had written a book about a voyage to the Moon.

On the 3D Moon

On the 3D Moon, Jules Verne’s projectile circles the Moon on a long, stretched orbit, just as it does in the novel Around the Moon. Open its card to read about the 1865 story and its giant cannon.