The Extraordinary Adventures of a Russian Scientist Across the Solar System (Vol. 1)
Page 68
“It’s true,” the young man replied, “that from a few 100 kilometers one has things more clearly in view than one has from several million leagues.”
“How different it is from our globe! While three-quarters of the terrestrial surface is covered with water and our vastest continents are, properly speaking, only gigantic islands, here it’s the other way around. The seas and the continents are in almost the same proportion, but in favor of the continents.”
“And in consequence, curiously enough,” Fricoulet continued, “all its seas are, in effect, Mediterranean.” As he finished these words a hand fell on his shoulder. He turned round and saw Gontran, who signaled that he wanted to talk to him. Immediately, the two speakers were adapted to the two helmets.
“What is it?”
“It’s just,” replied the young Comte, “that I’m straining my eyes in vain to discover the bloody gleam that has made Mars the warrior planet, of which I can see absolutely nothing.”
“Which isn’t at all surprising, given that the reddish—or, to be strictly accurate, orange-yellow—tint is more appreciable to the naked eye than through a telescope. It has been remarked in observatories that the tint diminishes in intensity the more the instrumental magnification increases. That’s why you can’t even make it out.”
“A reddish atmosphere ought, however, to give everything it surrounds an appearance of the same hue.”
“Heresy, dear chap, heresy—for, if the coloration were due to the atmosphere, it would be more intense at the edges than in the center, by reason of the atmospheric thickness traversed by the luminous rays.”
“Is it necessary to attribute it to the soil itself?”
“If Ossipoff heard you, he’d have a fit,” said the engineer, “for that hypothesis is in flagrant contradiction with what we know about the world of Mars. How, indeed, can we admit that the age-long effect of the four elements that engender life—water, air, earth and fire—have remained ineffectual, and that no vegetation has dressed the surface of Mars?”
“So it’s the vegetation! But you must know something about that, since you arrived there.”
“On that subject, I can’t give you any information. For one thing, I landed on Mars at night—but even if it had been broad daylight. I’d have been too overcome by anguish to take any notice of it.”
Gontran remained silent for a moment. “In that case,” he said, “pending further instructions, what I’d better do is to adopt the vegetation theory, if Ossipoff interrogates me?”
“Pooh! It’s of little importance. Just remember that Mars is 5375 leagues in circumference, and that, by comparison with the terrestrial globe, its surface area is 27%, its volume 16%, its weight a fifth and its density 69%—which means that the intensity of gravity at its surface is a third of what it is on the Earth’s surface. Can you remember all that?”
“I think so—but is that all?”
“No, remember this, too: that Mars rotates on its axis in 24 hours, 37 minutes and 27 seconds, and around the Sun in 660 days—which makes its year twice as long as ours.”160
“And consequently, its seasons…”
“I’ll stop you there, for that’s one of the characteristic differences between this world and ours. Not only is the duration of the seasons longer, but it’s unequal, by reason of its elongated orbit. Thus, while spring and summer last 191 and 181 days, autumn and winter only last 149 and 147 days.”
The engineer was doubtless about to continue his explanations when a Martian approached and signaled to him that it was necessary to descend into the cabin.
THE STORY CONTINUES IN VOLUME II
1 Many bibliographical sources give 1889, that being the date on the copy currently available in electronic form, but several copies offered for sale on the internet at the time of writing are dated 1888, and one is described as being dated 1889 but actually published in October 1888 (it was not uncommon for volumes published late in a calendar year to be dated for the following year). Flammarion’s preface is, however, dated November 1888, so it is unlikely that the book was published before then. The first volume was certainly reissued when the second volume was published, and the copies dated 1889 might be a second edition. Sources also differ as to the date of the third volume, some giving it as 1891.
2 Available in a Black Coat Press edition, ISBN 978-1-934543-41-2.
3 Included in The Germans on Venus, a Black Coat Press anthology of French scientific romances, ISBN 978-1-934543-56-6.
4 Also included in The Germans on Venus, q.v.
5 Available in a Black Coat Press edition, ISBN 978-1-934543-45-0.
6 Lucian’s “True History” is a satire on travelers’ tales in which a ship is carried to the Moon by a whirlwind. Cyrano’s Swiftian trilogy, of which only the voyage to the Moon and part of the subsequent tour of the Solar System survive, was by far the boldest, broadest and most imaginative satire of its era, which is why it was only published in a partial and bowdlerized form. The Poe story to which Flammarion refers is, of course, “The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall.”
7 There are, in fact, no references in the text to discoveries made in 1888, and the reader will eventually discover that the authors, mindful of the fact that the adventures they are relating were bound to take several years, took care to set the beginning of their narrative in the relatively distant past. The now-established convention that allows a writer to establish a narrative viewpoint in the future was quite unknown in the 19th century, when all narrative viewpoints were tacitly assumed to be speaking in the present unless the author took care to place them in a manuscript relic of the past.
8 The Flammermont to whom Ossipoff is referring is, of course, a fictional equivalent of Camille Flammarion (although Flammarion will subsequently be cited under his own name too), and these titles are thinly-disguised equivalents of Les Terres du ciel (1877) and the frequently-updated Astronomie populaire (first published 1880). The former substitute text will play a considerable role in the plot, under the revised title Les Continents célestes.
9 The additional titles cited here are equivalents of Flammarion’s La Pluralité des mondes habités (1864) and L’Atmosphère (1873).
10 The French lieue [league] is equivalent to four kilometers; the text continual use of the term is inconvenient, but simply to translate all the references into kilometers would falsify the original, so I have retained it despite the inevitable confusion with the English league, which is equivalent to three miles.
11 The actual length of the Moon’s axial rotation is about 656 hours, which implies a duration of daylight of 328 hours.
12 George Airy (1801-1892) was the British Astronomer Royal from 1835-81. He published a significant volume of lunar observations in 1886, following 14 years of careful measurement.
13 The Danish astronomer Peter Andreas Hansen (1795-1874) published a landmark work on the moon in 1838, although his name was more familiar in connection with “Hansen’s Lunar Tables,” issued in 1857, based on his observations. He received the Royal Astronomical Society’s Gold Medal in 1854 for the theory of lunar deformation that Ossipoff cites here, but it was subsequently discredited.
14 This is presumably intended to imply that Lucian was active in the sixth century B.C.; in fact, he was active in the second century A.D.
15 Actually, they were geese, and it was Godwin’s Spanish protagonist, Domingo Gonsales, who claimed to have been transported by this means.
16 The very obscure Voyage à la lune published in Paris in 1865 by someone named Fauré (who might or might not have been related to the co-author of the present text) and credited to “A. Cathelineau” is probably a translation of A Voyage to the Moon (1864) by the pseudonymous “Chrysostom Trueman”, one of the more imaginatively-adventurous lunar voyages of the 19th century.
17 Venus’ “year” is approximately 225 days and its mean distance from the Sun is approximately 108 kilometers, or 27 million leagues.
18 Mars’ mean distance f
rom the Sun is actually 228 million kilometers, or 57 million leagues.
19 Actually it covers more than twice that—Graffigny appears to have multiplied the radius rather than the diameter by pi to obtain the circumference of the orbit.
20 The nearest star, Alpha Centauri, is actually 4.2 light years (approximately 9.4 trillion leagues) away, but measurements of stellar parallax—and hence of stellar distances—were still rather approximate in the 1880s.
21 The Pulkova (or Pulkovo) Observatory had been active since 1839, and was the most important in Russia. Pulkova is actually 19 kilometers south of St. Petersburg rather than being a suburb of the city.
22 Jean Picard’s La Connaissance du temps ou des mouvements célestes, first issued in 1679, was the pioneering astronomical ephemeris, recording all the phenomena whose observation was anticipatable in a particular place; updated versions are still issued annually in many nations. It is unclear why this edition refers to Biela’s comet, which was observed to have split into two in 1846 and was not seen again after 1852.
23 Johann Hieronymus Schröter (1745-1816) had a private observatory at Lilienthal, near Bremen, from 1772 onwards; he published his landmark work on the Moon in 1791. He was an enthusiastic advocate of the plurality of worlds and of the principle of plenitude: the notion that God would not have created all those worlds without equipping every single one with inhabitants. He was, as Ossipoff observes, no donkey, but he made all his observations with this item of faith in mind, and found nothing to disprove his conviction that the Moon must be home to intelligent beings; in addition to the hopeful calculation of the depth of the lunar atmosphere cited here, he also thought he had seen evidence of cultivation on the lunar surface.
24 The chronology of the novel has not yet been clarified within the text, so a contemporary reader would probably have assumed that this reference is to Alexander III, who had succeeded to the imperial throne in March 1881, after his father, Alexander II, was assassinated by nihilists. Dates subsequently included in the text, however, suggest that it actually refers to Alexander II, who was subject to a series of plots and assassination attempts in 1879 and 1880.
25 I have refrained from substituting N (nitrogen) for AZ (azote) in order to modernize this formula, which remains very odd, paying little heed to the principle of valency. At a later stage in the narrative, selenite is said to contain saltpeter—potassium nitrate, KNO3—which is the key component of gunpowder, but that seems inherently unlikely, given that selenite is said to be more powerful than such high explosives as dynamite and roburite.
26 Which is to say that it is not the name of a saint, as all names in a Catholic country like France are supposed to be.
27 Jean-Louis Burnouf (1775-1844) was the Professor of Latin Eloquence at the Collège de France and produced many of the Latin translations used in the French educational system during the 19th century.
28 I have transcribed Graffigny and Le Faure’s “aéroplane” and “propulseur” directly into English, just as the eventual inventors of actual aircraft did, although the authors—in common with their contemporaries—have not understood the actual principle that was eventually to facilitate heavier-than-air flight (which is to do with pressure differences above and below a fast-moving wing).
29 Aqua regia (eau royale in French) is a mixture of sulphuric and nitric acid, which serves as an exceedingly powerful inorganic solvent.
30 The assertion that the crucial date of August 8 falls on a Sunday might have been made at hazard, without reference to a calendar, but it may be worth noting that August 8 fell on a Sunday in 1880. This is inconsistent with information provided subsequently in the text, but I shall make some attempt to clarify the inconsistencies in an afterword.
31 The significance of 1863 is that a Societé d’encouragement pour la locomotion aérienne au moyen d’appareils plus lourds que l’air [Society for the Encouragement of Aerial Locomotion by means of Heavier-than-Air Machines] was founded in that year in Paris, under the presidency of “Nadar” (Gaspard-Félix Tournachon, 1820-1910). Gabriel de La Landelle (1812-1886) and Gustave Ponton d’Amécourt (1825-1888) were also founder members, as was Jules Verne, who was the organization’s secretary. After building Le Géant [The Giant]—the balloon that inspired Verne to write Cinq semaines en ballon (1863; tr. as Five Weeks in a Balloon) and launch his career as a popular writer—Nadar became convinced that the future of aeronautics belonged to heavier-than-air craft. La Landelle, who had long been a prolific writer of popular maritime romances, coined a new term for the speculative technology in Aviation, ou Navigation aérienne sans ballon (1863), shortly after his experimental collaborator Ponton had coined the term “hélicoptère” in an 1861 patent application for a steam-powered helicopter. Alphonse Pénaud (1850-1880) made numerous model aircraft powered by rubber bands in the 1870s, including some whose airscrews spun vertically (as in Graffigny’s model and actual heavier-than-air craft) rather than horizontally—it was a copy of one of these that allegedly inspired the Wright brothers. Crucially, however, none of these experimenters realized, any more than Graffigny did, how a fixed wing was able to obtain lift, so the society members and their successors were unable to make any significant progress in developing the technology in the 19th century. Henry Bright had taken out an even earlier patent for a helicopter in 1859, but remains historically obscure; Graffigny almost certainly found his name in a brief citation in Verne’s Robur le conquérant (1886; tr. as The Clipper of the Clouds).
32 I can find no other reference to this strangely-named Russian pioneer, who conducted his alleged experiments in what is now Warsaw.
33 Enrico Forlanini (1848-1930) designed a steam-powered helicopter in 1877, which rose to a height of 13 meters and remained airborne for 20 seconds—a significant achievement at the time.
34 The actual acceleration due to gravity at the Earth’s surface is 9.8 meters per second per second; it is the accelerative force that is the key figure, in accordance with Newton’s second law, not the velocity at any particular moment, so Fricoulet’s objection to Ossipoff’s contention is entirely specious. Graffigny seems to have difficulty distinguishing between velocity and acceleration; he continually mistakes the implications of Newton’s second law (force equals mass times acceleration), and this confusion is the principal factor making his various suggested means of space flight blatantly nonsensical.
35 This name is either invented or so badly mangled as to make the intended reference irretrievable. The argument Ossipoff employs is similar in structure, if not in numerical detail, to the one put forward in the first of George Cayley’s classic series of articles “On Aerial Navigation” published in Nicholson’s Magazine in 1809.
36 Poland ceased to exist as a political entity in 1795, when its territory was carved up between the Russian Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire and East Prussia, but survived as an idea and a cause until it was reconstituted in 1918.
37 I have retained the name used in the text, although the hill on which the Nice Observatory is sited is more commonly known as Mont-Gras.
38 The philanthropist Raphael Bischoffsheim (1822-1906) founded Nice Observatory in 1881, but it did not become fully operational until 1887, thus creating an anachronism in the narrative.
39 When this passage was written, Gustave Eiffel (1832-1923) had only just started constructing the tower that was to immortalize his name, for the 1889 Paris Exposition.
40 The term “carboazotate” is enigmatic, and presumably invented (this account does not correspond to the formula previously given).
41 This individual seems to be fictitious.
42 “Learned from a book.”
43 In writing this, the authors had the advantage of knowing that Cotopaxi had, indeed, erupted explosively early in 1882, but had they researched the matter more carefully, they would have discovered that the actual eruption began in January, and might have made more provision for that in their subsequent timetabling than they actually do. Cotopaxi was the most
active volcano in the world during the 1880s, and was the natural choice for this role. The statement a few lines hence that March 1882 is five months away places this scene in October 1881, which is inconsistent with the earlier statement that August 8 was a Sunday, but later dates in the text are adjusted—albeit crudely and inconsistently—to fit in with the pivotal date of March 1882.
44 The authors refer to the projectile at this point as a “wagon-obus” [wagon-shell] but subsequently use the two terms singly and interchangeably, also using “véhicule” [vehicle] for this and others spacefaring projectiles; I have also substituted “vehicle” for “wagon,” as the latter seems to me to ring false in its English meaning, and it would give a false impression to use “spaceship.”
45 Gustave Trouvé (1839-1902) was an electrical engineer, famous for designing the first electric automobile.
46 C. Tessié de Motay (1817-1890) was best known as a pioneer of photography. He also worked on air compression, but did not succeed in liquefying oxygen, as the two next-quoted scientists, Louis-Paul Cailletet (1832-1913) and Raoul Pictet (1846-1929), both did—albeit on a very small scale—in 1877.
47 Malpelo Island is actually situated at 30 degrees 59 minutes north latitude, and is thus outside the range earlier specified for the location of the cannon (between 28 degrees north and 28 degrees south), so it is unclear why Sharp and Farenheit would have chosen it as a site.
48 The cry in question was originally credited to the Revolutionary firebrand Georges Danton, but was subsequently echoed by many other sympathetic souls.
49 The Bréguets were a famous family of watchmakers and physicists; this particular reference is to Louis-François-Clément of that ilk (1804-1883), a pioneer of electric induction and telephony.
50 It is surprising to find Farenheit quoting from Act 3 Scene 3 of Racine’s Les Plaideurs (1668), in which a loquacious lawyer begins his speech for the defence by referring to the Creation, to which the judge responds: “Avocat, passons au déluge.”