“It is better for us to see the destination we wish to reach, than the point of departure.”
From the Earth to the Moon (1865) is a novel by French writer Jules Verne. Verne wrote a sequel to this novel titled Around the Moon five years later. From the Earth to the Moon and Around the Moon feature the efforts of the Baltimore Gun Club, a post-Civil War society of weapon lovers, to build the Columbiad space gun and travel to the moon. The gun is meant to launch three people—the Club’s president, his Philadelphian rival, and a French poet—in a projectile that will pull off a moon landing.
The story is memorable for many reasons, among which is the fact that Verne presented some rough calculations about the requirements for the cannon in it. Even though there was little empirical data on the subject at the time, some of Verne’s figures turned out to be accurate. From the Earth to the Moon was adapted as the opera Le voyage dans la lune in 1875 with music by Jacques Offenbach.