The moon, being the nearest to the earth of all the heavenly bodies, has always occupied the imagination of men. Many fanciful accounts have been written of voyages to the moon, of which the following story by Edgar Allan Poe is among the best. So wonderful has been the advance of science that it is conceivable that at some distant time in the future the inhabitants of this world may possibly be able to visit the beautiful body which lights the night for us.
I
After a long and arduous devotion to the study of physics and astronomy, I, Hans Pfaal of Rotterdam, at length determined to construct a balloon of my own along original lines and to try a flight in it. Accordingly I had made an enormous bag out of cambric muslin, varnished with caoutchouc for protection against the weather. I procured all the instruments needed for a prolonged ascent and finally prepared for the inflation of the balloon. Herein lay my secret, my invention, the thing in which my balloon differed from all the balloons that had gone before. Out of a peculiar [v]metallic substance and a very common acid I was able to manufacture a gas of a density about 37.4 less than that of hydrogen, and thus by far the lightest substance ever known. It would serve to carry the balloon to heights greater than had been attained before, for hydrogen is the gas usually used.
The hour for my experiment in ballooning finally arrived. I had chosen the night as the best time for the ascension, because I should thereby avoid annoyances caused by the curiosity of the ignorant and the idle.
It was the first of April. The night was dark; there was not a star to be seen; and a drizzling rain, falling at intervals, made me very uncomfortable. But my chief anxiety was concerning the balloon, which, in spite of the varnish with which it was defended, began to grow rather heavy with the moisture. I therefore set my assistants to working, and in about four hours and a half I found the balloon sufficiently inflated. I attached the car and put all my implements in it—a telescope, a barometer, a thermometer, an [v]electrometer, a compass, a magnetic needle, a seconds watch, a bell, and other things. I had further procured a globe of glass, exhausted of air and carefully closed with a stopper, not forgetting a special apparatus for condensing air, a copious supply of water, and a large quantity of provisions, such as [v]pemmican, in which much [v]nutriment is contained in comparatively little bulk. I also secured a cat in the car.
It was now nearly daybreak, and I thought it high time to take my departure. I immediately cut the single cord which held me to the earth, and was pleased to find that I shot upward with [v]inconceivable rapidity, carrying with all ease one hundred and seventy-five pounds of leaden ballast and able to have carried as much more.
Scarcely, however, had I attained the height of fifty yards, when roaring and rumbling up after me in the most [v]tumultuous and terrible manner, came so dense a hurricane of fire and gravel and burning wood and blazing metal that my very heart sunk within me and I fell down in the car, trembling with terror. Some of my chemical materials had exploded immediately beneath me almost at the moment of my leaving earth. The balloon at first collapsed, then furiously expanded, then whirled round and round with sickening [v]velocity, and finally, reeling and staggering like a drunken man, hurled me over the rim of the car; and in the moment of my fall I lost consciousness.
I had no knowledge of what had saved me. When I partially recovered the sense of existence, I found the day breaking, the balloon at a [v]prodigious height over a wilderness of ocean, and not a trace of land to be discovered far and wide within the limits of the vast horizon. My sensations, however, upon thus recovering, were by no means so [v]replete with agony as might have been anticipated. Indeed, there was much of madness in the calm survey which I began to take of my situation. I drew up to my eyes each of my hands, one after the other, and wondered what occurrence could have given rise to the swelling of the veins and the horrible blackness of the finger nails. I afterward carefully examined my head, shaking it repeatedly and feeling it with minute attention, until I succeeded in satisfying myself that it was not, as I had more than half suspected, larger than the balloon. It now occurred to me that I suffered great uneasiness in the joint of my left ankle, and a dim consciousness of my situation began to glimmer through my mind. I began to understand that my foot had caught in a rope and that I was hanging downward outside the car. But strange to say! I was neither astonished nor horror-stricken. If I felt any emotion at all, it was a sort of chuckling satisfaction at the cleverness I was about to display in getting myself out of this [v]dilemma.
With great caution and deliberation, I put my hands behind my back and unfastened the large iron buckle which belonged to the waistband of my pantaloons. This buckle had three teeth, which, being somewhat rusty, turned with great difficulty on their axis. I brought them, however, after some trouble, at right angles to the body of the buckle and was glad to find them remain firm in that position. Holding with my teeth the instrument thus obtained, I proceeded to untie the knot of my cravat; it was at length accomplished. To one end of the cravat I then made fast the buckle, and the other end I tied, for greater security, tightly around my wrist. Drawing now my body upward, with a prodigious exertion of muscular force, I succeeded, at the very first trial, in throwing the buckle over the car, and entangling it, as I had anticipated, in the circular rim of the wicker-work.
My body was now inclined toward the side of the car at an angle of about forty-five degrees; but it must not be understood that I was therefore only forty-five degrees below the [v]perpendicular. So far from it, I still lay nearly level with the plane of the horizon, for the change of position which I had acquired had forced the bottom of the car considerably outward from my position, which was accordingly one of the most extreme peril. It should be remembered, however, that when I fell from the car, if I had fallen with my face turned toward the balloon, instead of turned outwardly from it as it actually was—or if, in the second place, the cord by which I was suspended had chanced to hang over the upper edge instead of through a crevice near the bottom of the car—in either of these cases, I should have been unable to accomplish even as much as I had now accomplished. I had therefore every reason to be grateful, although, in point of fact, I was still too stupid to be anything at all, and hung for perhaps a quarter of an hour in that extraordinary manner, without making the slightest farther exertion, and in a singularly tranquil state of idiotic enjoyment.