Jules Verne 
From The Earth To The Moon [EPUB ebook] 

Jules Verne published a book titled From the Earth to the Moon: A Direct Route in 97 Hours, 20 Minutes in 1865. It describes the attempts to build a massive Columbiad space gun and launch three people—the president of the Gun Club, his rival from Philadelphia who made armour, and a French poet—in a projectile with the goal of landing on the Moon by the Baltimore Gun Club, a society of gun enthusiasts founded following the American Civil War. Five years later, Verne published a sequel called Around the Moon. The cannon needs Verne attempted to estimate for the story are particularly noteworthy, and some of his estimates are quite precise given the relative paucity of available empirical data at the time. His design of a space gun for a non-rocket space launch, however, turned out to be unsuitable for secure human space flight since a significantly longer barrel would have been needed to achieve escape velocity while keeping acceleration within safe bounds for the passengers. The real-life photographer Félix Nadar served as the model for the fictional Michel Ardan, the French member of the group.