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Re: Around the Moon

From: N Wolcott <nwolcott~at~dsdial.net>
Date: Thu, 25 Aug 2005 16:35:10 -0400
To: "Walter J Miller" <wjm2~at~nyu.edu>
Cc: "Jules Verne Forum" <jvf~at~Gilead.org.il>

Walter,

I'm afraid my little attempt at "irony" was perhaps not recognized. Of course there is little to recommend this retelling of the story. I did scan through it and looked at the pictures and was interested to see that Barbicane later dropped his moon ventures to work full time for the 1876 Centennial exhibition in Philadelphia. See last chapter!

Bad as it is there is perhaps some reason to preserve it. I believe it is the first English translation including the entirety of Chapter IV A Little Algebra, here entitled "For the Cornell Girls". (I do not know who they were). However this edition does also include the first publication in an English book (1876) of the two equations from the French original from which Barbicane calculates the escape velocity of the projectile. To my knowledge these equations represent the first publication of the equations of motion of a projectile engaged in an interplanetary mission. Although "Around the Moon" was not published until 1870, much of it was probably already written in 1865 when "Earth to the Moon" was published and Verne was certainly aware of these equations at that time. I believe it is now generally understood that one of Verne's relatives at the Ecole provided calculations for these books, and they were not "obtained from some standardized text". I believe there is evidence that Verne only added the last chapters for the 1870 publication and had probably completed the bulk of the book some time before. (note the total neglect of the dog Diana when the capsule is recovered !)

In the 1978 edition of the "Annotated Earth to the Moon" (W. J. Miller) a similar calculation (though not identical to Barbicane's) is given in an appendix calculating the escape velocity of a lunar projectile. You were probably unaware at that time that your English Mercier version had deleted all the algebra from chapter IV where you should have been able to find these equations, had Mercier not deleted them.

I believe that there is also an error in the second equation, which is printed correctly in the Roth version. Roth also included another derivation of this in a 2 page footnote provided by "one of our mathematical teachers". I did not see the footnote in the HTML version.

The complete English editions (in England) were not published until 1877 and 1878 and were not widely distributed in the United States.

For those who may be interested the preliminary annotated versions of "Around the Moon" are posted on ibiblio; by Christian Sanchez and myself.

http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/docs/books/sherwood/R-I.htm

http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/docs/books/sherwood/R-II-d.htm

R-I shows both the deletions (in strikeout text) from the Mercier version and the additions and corrections in red. R-II shows only the corrected version. Both versions show the corrected and added text in red.

PS. What did you think about reprlinting the "Annotaded 20K" as a POD book?

Cheers !

  ----- Original Message -----
  From: Walter J Miller
  To: nwolcott2~at~post.harvard.edu ; file://jv.gilead.org.il/forum/~at~nyu.edu
  Sent: Thursday, August 25, 2005 9:49 AM
  Subject: Around the Moon


  Dear Norman: What is there to be overjoyed about? The Roth translations, as I made clear in my Annotated Jules Verne: From the Earth to the Moon (1978), are the worst---adding much fRoth, distorting the story, daring to invent whole episodes and claiming he's improved Verne! Cheers anyhow. Walter James Miller
Received on Thu 25 Aug 2005 - 23:42:20 IDT

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