From P. URBEN
‘It is widely known’ that Jules Verne gave a pretty accurate account
of the first manned Moon landing, says Lafferty.
Not to this reader it isn’t. The voyagers of De la Terre a la Lune are
shot from a gun (somehow remaining unflattened and unbaked) which is not
even placed on Mount Kenya, or another high-altitude, equatorial site,
but more or less at sea level. They do not land, merely circumnavigate.
Otherwise they are constrained by the demands of life and gravity, as were
the Apollo astronauts.
This canard I first saw propagated by the Brussels correspondent of
The Daily Telegraph, who had apparently been fed it by a French bureaucrat
as an example of the excellence of French scientific education. It is, in
fact, an excellent example of the limited learning, and less reading, of
journalist and bureaucrat. Myself a chemist, I am only too happy to add
physicists to the lists of the half-educated.
P. Urben Kenilworth, Warwickshire
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