Excerpt From Jules Verne

An excerpt from Verne's From the Earth to the Moon (1865) follows. It's astonishing! Verne predicted accurately a number of things about the 1960's moon trips. And he wrote the book for young people!

I'll present more later.

FROM THE EARTH TO THE MOON

CHAPTER I

THE GUN CLUB

During the War of the Rebellion, a new and influential club was established in the city of Baltimore in the State of Maryland.  It is well known with what energy the taste for military matters became developed amongst that nation of ship owners, shopkeepers, and mechanics.  Simple tradesmen jumped their counters to become extemporized captains, colonels, and generals, without having ever passed the School of Instruction at West Point: nevertheless, they quickly rivalled their compeers of the old continent, and, like them, carried off victories by dint of lavish expenditure in ammunition, money, and men.

But the point in which the Americans singularly distanced the Europeans was in the science of gunnery. Not, indeed, that their weapons retained a higher degree of perfection than theirs, but that they exhibited unheard of dimensions, and consequently attained hitherto unheard of ranges. In point of grazing, plunging, oblique, or enfilading, or point blank firing, the English, French, and Prussians have nothing to learn; but their cannon, howitzers, and mortars are mere pocket-pistols compared with the formidable engines of the American artillery.

An Age of Exploration... Continued

Read this excerpt. (Find more on Google-Books - "Columbus and Columbia, by James Blaine et al., 1892)



THE TWO GREATEST SONS OF ITALY

The same "time spirit" which set one Italian at the head of Europe in point of art and learning, set another Italian at the head of the world in bold speculation regarding the unknown. The same Italy and the same year of our Lord that bore Lorenzo to the gates of farewell, flung wide open the gates of welcome in another hemisphere to a man who, all unwittingly, planted with his flag-staff the seeds of the greatest republic this planet has yet known. What the restrictions of time and place had never permitted even to the dreams of the one lofty mind, that, the equally lofty but utterly different aspirations of the other made possible -- a colossal republic whose foundation-stone is Liberty constitutionally organized by the popular will adequately educated and legally expressed.

On April 8 1492, at the early age of forty-three Lorenzo left his so called republic to crumble into swift ruin and passed into the unknown world. On the third of August, of the same year, Christopher Columbus set sail for a world which to him was far more problematical, more consciously unknown than, in that day of ecclesiastical faith, was the spiritual world to his great contemporary.

Christopher Columbus, a native of Genoa, discovered America in 1492 Thus we were taught in the trustful days of childhood, and though modern research, whose scientific motto seems to be "Whenever you find a fact challenge it," has had its tilt at every item in the lesson, it remains after the fray as before it, practically true that Christopher Columbus was born in Genoa and discovered America in 1492. It may indeed prove that the shabby little house, well inscribed in Cogoleto, monumentally honored, fifteen miles out from Genoa, and not Genoa itself, is the true birth place of Columbus...