Michel Ardan – a Frenchman who first comes into the story when announces-rather than asks-that he is going to be coming to Florida to ride in the capsule to the moon.

In the end, he is rewarded for his work by becoming trapped in a capsule orbiting the moon with no sign that he will ever break free from it. The canon is his dream and eventually, most likely becomes his tomb.Barbicane is dauntless in pursuit of his dream, spending millions of dollars and a year of his life devoted to getting the canon and the capsule just right. It is Barbicane who comes up with the idea for the canon that can shoot to the moon and he who solves most of the dilemmas in the planning process. However, wealth does not seem to matter much to Barbicane who only cares about the excitement of a new invention.

He spent the entirety of the American Civil War developing new gun technologies to sell and is now a wealthy man.

Impey Barbicane – Barbicane is the president of the Gun Club and and adventurous inventor.

Read the book and you, too, will be fooled into accepting the realistic possibility in Verne's time of that dream of flying to the Moon.I gave this book 4 stars because I liked the characters but I prefer a happier plot. By skilful misdirection he drew the attention of readers away from weaknesses in the project. He had used the science of the day to construct a literary conjuring trick, a hoax, one of the most successful in all history. Curiously, however, Verne is unlikely to have thought it possible that a manned projectile could actually be fired out of a giant cannon, rising higher than the Moon, swinging around it, and then landing safely back on Earth.

Directly inspired by Verne's story, enthusiasts worked successfully at overcoming the practical difficulties, and within a century, human beings did indeed fly to the Moon. In From the Earth to the Moon and Around the Moon, Jules Verne turned the ancient fantasy of space flight into a believable technological possibility - an engineering dream for the industrial age. The popularity of his novels led directly to modern science fiction.

Jules Verne (1828-1905) was internationally famous as the author of novels based on `extraordinary voyages.' His visionary use of new travel technologies inspired his readers to look to the industrial future rather than the remote past for their dreams of adventure.

Jules verne from earth to moon