From the Earth to the Moon

By Jules Verne

When the American Civil War ends, the members of the Gun Club of Baltimore, inventors and gunners, many of them maimed in the fighting, find themselves with nothing left to fire at. Their president, the cool and methodical Impey Barbicane, gives them a new target: he proposes that the club cast a cannon large enough to send a shell to the Moon. The idea grips the whole country, the astronomers of Cambridge are asked to check the figures, and money arrives from around the world to pay for the giant gun. Barbicane soon has an opponent in Captain Nicholl of Philadelphia, a maker of armour plate who spent the war trying to stop his shots, and who now attacks the scheme in the newspapers as impossible and dangerous. Jules Verne's novel follows the project from the first proposal through the arguments over where and how the gun should be built, and its story continues in Round the Moon.

Description community-written - CC BY-SA 4.0.

Series

• Baltimore Gun Club - book 1
• Voyages Extraordinaires - book 4

Guides

• Chapter-by-chapter recap of From the Earth to the Moon
• From the Earth to the Moon character guide

Genres: action-adventure, classics, literary-fiction, science-fiction

Recordings