by Steven Mars

Created on: January 15, 2009   Last Updated: February 18, 2012

Jules Verne wrote “From The Earth to The Moon And round The Moon” in 1865. He was born in Nantes, France on February 8, 1828 and died on March 24, 1905. Sometimes “From the Earth to The Moon” and “Round The Moon” are presented as separate books. He also wrote “Journey to The Center of The Earth” (1864), “Twenty Thousand Leagues under The Sea” (1870), and “Around The World in Eighty Days” (1873).

The book starts out at the Gun Club, which was an influential club located in Baltimore, Maryland. The president of the Gun Club is Impey Barbicane. He invites all members of the club to an important meeting. He is forty years old and had become rich as a timber merchant. He was director of artillery in the civil war and was always an aid to anyone trying to invent anything. He tells them that he has a plan to take a rocket ship to the moon that should work given the nineteenth century knowledge of artillery. He claims much is known about the moon its density, mass, etc., and that much is known about it through mathematical science, geology, and astronomy. There is an uproar in the Gun Club because of this announcement.

And the next day, about five hundred newspapers and journals announce the plan of a journey to the moon by the Gun Club of Baltimore, Maryland. Scientific, geographic, historic, etc. societies sent letters offering money to help in the endeavor. A letter asking questions about the exact distance to the moon and how to hit the moon with a projectile is sent to the observatory of Cambridge, England.

Chapter 5, titled “Romance of The Moon”, gives some detail of what is known about the Milky Way, Galileo's observations about lunar light, etc. He starts with a theory of how the stars and planets first formed a physical combination of forces of atoms slowly making a mass of one star. Then the molecules outside the central star form more stars, slowly forming 5,000 nebulae. The Milky Way is composed of 18,000,000 stars, each of which is the center of a solar system. Detail of the history of the measurements of the mountains on the moon is given. It started with Thales of Miletus in the fifth century B.C., then Copernicus in the fifteenth century and Tycho Brahe in the sixteenth century. After that, Galileo, Hevelius, Hershel, Halley, etc. made estimations. The measurements would increase and decrease around an estimation of about 20,000 feet as a maximum height of the

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