Read The End Of Books for Free Online

reader. Between the time of Jules Verne’s two lunar novels and the flight of the first liquid-fueled rocket in 1926, most of the theoretical groundwork for spaceflight was laid, and most of the possibilities had been imagined. To mention a very few:
    Edward Everett Hale described the first artificial manned satellite in his novelette The Brick Moon (1869)*, in which he listed nearly every function applied to modern satellites. The story describes the launch of a 200-foot sphere (made of brick to withstand the heat generated by atmospheric friction—and thereby anticipating the ceramic heat shields of today’s spacecraft). Once in orbit, the artificial moon acted as a navigational aid while its passengers transmitted observations regarding weather, crops, etc. back to the Earth.
    In 1881 Hermann Ganswindt first described his interplanetary spaceship. While never quite grasping the principles of rocket propulsion, Ganswindt did take into consideration the possible need for artificial gravity. He created this by spinning his spacecraft; he anticipated Hermann Oberth by nearly forty years by suggesting that two spacecraft could be joined by a cable and spun around their common center. Although he made errors in detail, he was one of the first to suggest the use of rockets in spaceflight, and the drawing he commissioned to illustrate his invention is one of the few nineteenth century depictions of a manned rocket operating in space.
    The year 1880 saw the appearance in St. Nicholas magazine of the charming short story “A Christmas Dinner With the Man in the Moon”* by Washington Gladden. The giant spaceliner Meteor traveled to the Moon on the “great electric currents” that passed between the Earth and its satellite. The iron hull of the spaceship was magnetized to take advantage of the currents. The Meteor was spindle-shaped and equipped with giant paddle wheels that raised it to the upper atmosphere. Because of the thinning atmosphere, Gladden equipped his passengers with respirators.
    A sign of the changing times came with the publication, in 1880, of Percy Greg’s two-volume novel, Across the Zodiac*. In the story, a mysterious force called “apergy” was used to negate gravity, providing the means for a voyage through space to Mars. The spaceship Astronaut was a monstrous affair with 3-foot thick metal walls. The deck and keel were described as “absolutely flat, and each one hundred feet in length and fifty in breadth, the height of the vessel being about twenty feet.” The apergy receptacle was placed above the generator, both located in the center of the ship, and from there “descended right through the floor a conducting bar in an antapergetic sheath, so divided that without separating it from the upper portion the lower might revolve in any direction through an angle of twenty minutes.” This sheath was used to direct a “stream of repulsive force” against the Sun or any other body.
    Greg’s “apergy” was apparently such an appealing element that it appeared in several other novels, notably John Jacob Astor’s A Journey in Other Worlds (1894)*. It is not particularly important what happened on Mars, which was reached in a little over 40 days. What is important is that the red planet was beginning to receive the attention of writers of space fiction that it astronomically deserves. By the onset of World War I more than one hundred novels and stories had been published, all dealing with flights to Mars. All of this was a result of increasing observational knowledge about the planet itself and the development of some meticulously worked-out concepts of the origin of the Solar System, of which Mars was an especially interesting component. It was the period of the discovery of canali on Mars by Giovanni Virginio Schiaparelli (who interpreted them as naturally occurring channels or grooves) and their popularization—or perhaps sensationalization—by Percival Lowell (to whom they were artificially