From the Earth to the Moon (10 page)

“Or pyroxylin,” said the major.

“Or nitrocellulose,” said the general.

“Wasn’t there at least one American involved in the discovery?” asked J. T. Maston, moved by a keen feeling of national pride.

“Not a single one, unfortunately,” said the major.

“If it will make you feel better,” said Barbicane, “I’ll tell you that one American’s work is important in the study of cellulose, because collodion, one of the main agents in photography, is simply pyroxylin dissolved in alcohol and ether, and it was discovered by Maynard, who was a medical student in Boston at the time.”

“Hurrah for Maynard and pyroxylin!” cried the noisy secretary of the Gun Club.

“To return to guncotton,” said Barbicane, “you all know the properties that will make it so valuable to us. It can be made very easily: you soak cotton in nitric acid for fifteen minutes, rinse it with water, let it dry, and that’s all.”

“What could be simpler?” said the general.

“Furthermore, guncotton is unaffected by humidity. That’s a valuable quality for our purposes, since it will take several days to load the cannon. It ignites at 160 degrees centigrade instead of 240, and it burns so quickly that if it’s placed on top of a charge of ordinary powder and ignited, the ordinary powder won’t have time to catch fire.”

“It sounds perfect,” said the major.

“However, it’s very expensive.”

“What does that matter?” said J. T. Maston.

“Finally, it can fire a projectile four times faster than ordinary powder can. And if it’s mixed with a quantity of potassium nitrate equal to eighty percent of its weight, its power is increased still more.”

“Will that be necessary?” asked the major.

“I don’t think so,” replied Barbicane. “So instead of 1,600,000 pounds of powder, we’ll have only 400,000 pounds of guncotton. Since 500 pounds of it can safely be compressed into a volume of twenty-seven cubic feet, the whole charge will take up only 180 feet of the cannon’s length, and the 2,500,000 cubic feet of gas will drive the shell through more than 700 feet of bore before sending it on its way toward the moon.”

At these eloquent words, J. T. Maston was unable to contain his emotion: he threw himself into his friend’s arms with the force of a cannon ball, and would have knocked him flat if Barbicane had not been built to withstand the most violent bombardment.

This incident ended the third meeting of the committee. Barbicane and his daring colleagues, to whom nothing seemed impossible, had just settled the complex questions of the projectile, the cannon, and the powder. Their plan was decided upon; they now had only to carry it out.

“That’s only a detail, a mere trifle,” said J. T. Maston.

Note: In the course of the above discussion, Barbicane credits one of his compatriots with the invention of collodion. This is a mistake, with all due deference to J. T. Maston, and it has arisen from the similarity between two names.

It is true that in 1847 Maynard, then a Boston medical student, had the idea of using collodion in the treatment of wounds, but collodion was already known in 1846. The honor of that great discovery must go to a Frenchman, a distinguished mind, a chemist who is also a painter, a poet, a philosopher, and a Hellenist: M. Louis Ménard.

T
HE AMERICAN
public took great interest in every detail of the Gun Club’s project. They followed the committee’s discussions day by day. They were fascinated by the simplest preparations for the great experiment, the questions of figures that it raised, the mechanical difficulties that would have to be overcome—in short, the whole process of getting the operation under way.

More than a year was to pass between the beginning of the work and its completion, but that time would not be devoid of excitement. The site to be chosen for the hole in the ground, the construction of the mold, the casting of the cannon, its highly dangerous loading: these things were more than enough to arouse the public’s curiosity. When the projectile was fired, it would be out of sight in a few tenths of a second; from then on, only a privileged few would be able to see what would become of it, how it would behave in space, and how it would reach the moon. For this reason, the main interest lay in the preparations for the experiment and the precise details of its execution.

But to its purely scientific interest was suddenly added the commotion stirred up by an incident.

We have already seen how many friends and admirers Barbicane’s project had attracted to him. Honorable and
extraordinary though it was, however, this majority was not unanimous. One man in all the states of the Union protested against the project. He attacked it violently at every opportunity, and human nature is so made that Barbicane was more strongly affected by that one man’s opposition than he was by the applause of all the others.

Yet he well knew the motive of that antipathy, the source of that solitary enmity, why it was personal and of long standing, and the rancorous rivalry that had produced it.

He had never seen that determined enemy. This was fortunate, for an encounter between the two men would certainly have had regrettable consequences. That rival was a scientist like Barbicane, a proud, dauntless, earnest, violent man, a pure Yankee. His name was Captain Nicholl. He lived in Philadelphia.

Everyone knows of the strange struggle that took place during the Civil War between cannons and naval armor, with the former determined to pierce the latter, and the latter determined to withstand the former. It led to radical changes in the navies of both continents. Projectiles and armor plate fought relentlessly; the first constantly grew larger as the second grew thicker. Ships armed with formidable guns moved into battle beneath the protection of their invulnerable iron shells. Vessels such as the
Merrimac,
the
Monitor
and the
Weehawken
fired enormous projectiles after armoring themselves against those of the enemy. They did unto others as they would not have had others do unto them, an immoral principle on which the whole art of war is based.

Barbicane was a great caster of projectiles, and Nicholl was a great forger of armor. One cast night and day in Baltimore, while the other forged day and night in
Philadelphia. Each was pursuing a line of thought essentially opposed to that of the other.

As soon as Barbicane invented a new projectile, Nicholl invented a new armor plate. Barbicane spent all his time making holes, Nicholl in preventing him from doing so—hence a constant rivalry that soon became personal. Nicholl appeared in Barbicane’s dreams as an impenetrable armor plate which he crashed into at high speed, and Barbicane appeared in Nicholl’s dreams as a projectile that cut him in half.

Although they were following divergent lines, the two scientists would eventually have encountered each other, despite all the axioms of geometry—but it would have been on the field of honor. Fortunately for these citizens so useful to their country, they were separated by a distance of fifty or sixty miles, and their friends placed so many obstacles along the way that they never met.

It was not clear which of the two inventors had gotten the better of the other; the results obtained made it difficult to form a precise judgment. It seemed, however, that in the long run the armor plate would have to yield to the projectile.

Nevertheless there were competent men who had their doubts. In a recent test, Barbicane’s cylindro-conical projectiles had stuck in Nicholl’s armor like pins. Nicholl had considered himself victorious and displayed unbounded contempt for his rival. But when Barbicane later replaced his conical projectiles with ordinary 600-pound shells, the captain had to change his tune. Although they had only a moderate velocity,
^*
these projectiles pierced, cracked, and shattered the best armor plate.

Things had reached this point, with victory apparently
won by the projectile, when the war ended on the very day that Nicholl finished his new forged steel armor! It was a masterpiece of its kind; it would defy all the projectiles in the world. Nicholl had it taken to the experimental range in Washington and challenged Barbicane to pierce it. But now that the war was over, Barbicane did not want to make the test.

Captain Nicholl, infuriated, offered to expose his armor to projectiles of every conceivable kind: solid, hollow, round, or conical. He met with another refusal from Barbicane, who was apparently determined not to jeopardize the victory he had won.

Thrown into a frenzy by this unspeakable obstinacy, Nicholl tried to tempt Barbicane by making the conditions as favorable for him as possible. He offered to put his armor only two hundred yards from the cannon. Barbicane maintained his stubborn refusal. A hundred yards? No, not even at seventy-five.

“Fifty yards, then!” Nicholl said through the medium of the newspapers. “Or I’m even willing to put my armor only twenty-five yards away, and I’ll stand behind it!”

Barbicane answered that even if Captain Nicholl stood in front of it, he still would not shoot.

Nicholl could no longer restrain himself when he learned of this reply. He made some personal remarks. He said that cowardice was cowardice, no matter what form it took; that a man who refused to fire a cannon was very close to being afraid to do it; that the artillerymen who now fought at a distance of six miles had prudently replaced individual courage with mathematical formulas; and that, furthermore, it took as much bravery to wait calmly for a cannon ball behind a sheet of armor as it did to shoot one under all the proper conditions.

Barbicane made no reply to these insinuations; he may
not even have known about them, for he was then completely absorbed in making plans for his great undertaking.

When Barbicane made his famous speech to the Gun Club, Captain Nicholl’s anger reached its peak. It was mingled with supreme jealousy and a feeling of absolute impotence. How could he possibly invent something better than that 900-foot cannon? What armor could ever withstand a 20,000-pound projectile? At first he was staggered, overwhelmed, stunned by that cruel blow. Then he recovered his strength and resolved to crush the project beneath the weight of his arguments. He violently attacked the work of the Gun Club. He wrote a number of letters which the newspapers did not refuse to print. He tried to demolish Barbicane’s plans scientifically. Once he had declared war, he resorted to all kinds of arguments, and it must be said that all too often they were specious and ungentlemanly.

First, Barbicane was violently attacked in his figures; Nicholl tried to demonstrate by rigorous logic that his calculations were wrong, and he accused him of not knowing the elementary principles of ballistics. Among other things, he stated that it was absolutely impossible to give any object a speed of 36,000 feet per second, and he further maintained, algebra in hand, that even at that speed such a heavy projectile would never get beyond the earth’s atmosphere. It would fall back before it reached a height of twenty miles! Furthermore, even assuming that the velocity could be attained, and that it would be sufficient, the shell would not withstand the pressure of the gas produced by the combustion of 1,600,000 pounds of powder, and even if it should withstand the pressure it would not resist the temperature: it would melt by the time it left the muzzle of the cannon, and would then fall
in a hot, searing rain on the heads of the foolhardy onlookers.

Barbicane ignored these attacks and went on with his work.

Nicholl took a different approach. Without considering its uselessness from every point of view, he regarded the experiment as extremely dangerous, for the towns near the deplorable cannon as well as for the citizens who would authorize such a reprehensible spectacle by their presence. He also pointed out that if the projectile did not reach its goal, which it could not possibly do, it would necessarily fall back to earth, and that the impact of such a mass, multiplied by the square of the distance, would cause great damage to some point on the globe. For these reasons he felt that, with all due respect to the rights of free citizens, this was a case in which the intervention of the government was necessary, in order to prevent one man’s whim from endangering large numbers of people.

Such were the extremes of exaggeration to which Captain Nicholl let himself be driven. His opinions were not shared by anyone, so no account was taken of his dire predictions. He was allowed to shout himself hoarse, since he apparently enjoyed it. He had made himself the defender of a cause that was lost in advance. He was heard but not listened to, and he did not take one single admirer away from Barbicane, who did not even bother to answer his rival’s arguments.

Nicholl was desperate. Unable to risk his life for his cause, he decided to risk his money. He publicly announced in the
Richmond Enquirer
that he was willing to make the following bets:

1. That the Gun Club could not obtain the funds necessary for its project.....................$1,000
   
2. That the casting of a 900-foot cannon was unfeasible and would not succeed..............$2,000
   
3. That it would be impossible to load the cannon, and that the guncotton would be prematurely ignited by the pressure of the projectile........$3,000
   
4. That the cannon would burst the first time it was fired....................$4,000
   
5. That the projectile would reach a height of less than six miles and would fall back to earth a few seconds after being fired...................$5,000