VERNE, Jules.

£15,000 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

From the Earth to the Moon First edition in English of the complete lunar voyage, combining De la Terre à la Lune (1865) and its sequel Autour de la Lune (1869).The idea of a return trip to the moon has fascinated writers from Lucian of Samosata in the second century CE to Dante, Cyrano de Bergerac, Daniel Defoe, Edgar Allan Poe, and countless others. Verne's, however, is "the most important lunar voyage in science-fiction; the first hard science-fiction novel with full recognition that the preparations for a moon voyage may be just as interesting as the lunar voyage itself. It is also one of the first lunar voyages written from the point of view of scientific adventure, rather than as personal satire or religious speculation" (Bleiler).The calculations in the work, such as the escape velocity required to leave Earth's orbit, were produced with the assistance of the mathematicians Henri Garcet (a cousin of Verne) and Joseph Bertrand. Verne's scientific ideas inspired Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, a father of astronautics who envisioned multistage rockets as a feasible alternative to the large cannon or "space gun" design he encountered in the story. A century after its publication, Verne's tale was cited by Neil Armstrong during his own return voyage on Apollo 11. The work was also famously adapted by Georges Méliès for the film A Trip to the Moon (1902).De la Terre à la Lune alone had previously appeared in the English translation of J. K. Hoyt in America, where it was serialized

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