I originally intended to “correct” some of the numbers in the book. For example, page 207 has “thirteenth” where “thirtieth” would be more appropriate. Some of the densities and volumes and masses don’t match up. The business with the wrong exhaust velocity of the gun is also a bit confusing. The dates and times aren’t quite consistent throughout, although they are close enough that Verne must have been working from a time-line. For example, I think he has the time for the fall back to earth exactly matching the time for the trip out. There are also inconsistent spellings, for example “aluminum” and “aluminium”. Some of these annoyed me, in the sense of disturbing my reading; since the reader is reading for pleasure, the annoyance should be removed.
All cases of the British? spelling of aluminium have been changed to the American spelling aluminum.
I decided that the correction project was going to be a lot of trouble, and might be a perversion of the original work. I concentrated instead on producing an accurate rendition of the text. However, if a French speaker can find a French edition, it might be nice to see if the translators introduced errors. The measurements seem to have been converted from metric without regard for significant figures. Occasional conversions are simply omitted, with “feet” inserted for “meters” without fixing the numbers. These might be safely recomputed without doing violence to the spirit of the original work. Whether one should standardize the spelling of “aluminium” I don’t know. “Aluminium” has a certain charm. I don’t know what American or English usage was at the time. We might consider converting all the temperatures to Fahrenheit. I suggest removing the page numbers, undoing all the hyphenation, and repackaging the lines at a length of (up to) 72 characters, with only occasional word breaks.
Page #s and a full reformating has been done. Line widow/orphans have been painstakingly removed. Hypenated words at the end of lines have been eliminated to the best of my judgement.
I think a table of units should be offered for the reader.
myriameter = 10 km
fathom = 6 feet; league ~ 3 miles, but don’t know French usage in 1865.
page 125 has perigee 86,410 leagues (French), or 238,833 miles <mean>
Would be nice to know the currency conversions of the day.
We may criticize Verne for his errors, but the remarkable thing is how much he got right! I think this was the first engineering proposal for space travel, using physics instead of magic. Verne deserves much of the credit for inspiring the early rocket pioneers, and ultimately today’s space program. As “literary” history, I note that Heinlein’s “The Man Who Sold the Moon” borrows from it.
add conversion table for units. fathom, league, meter, mile, foot, C/F
contact publisher for translator information
is perihelium {sic} a real word? maybe substitute perihelion?
I have changed the one case of perihelium to the correct perihelion.
There’s an incorrect reference to Nov. 30 in the early part of book 2 to fix [I read it over and left it there. Close enough for fiction, but I am sure they would have missed the moon by a lot.]
Dates were not fixed.