Jules Verne · 1865 · global

Verne's 1865 novel and its sequel Around the Moon. A Baltimore gun club with no war left to fight builds a nine-hundred-foot cannon in Florida and fires three men at the Moon - and gets the launch site, the crew size, the free-fall and the Pacific splashdown close enough that people have been comparing it to Apollo ever since.

1. 1
   Baltimore

   The Gun Club, a society of artillerymen with nothing left to shoot at after the Civil War and a collective shortage of limbs - and Impey Barbicane's proposal that they fire a projectile at the Moon.

2. 2
   Stones Hill

   Florida, chosen over Texas after a fight, because it is nearest the equator - and nine hundred feet of cast-iron Columbiad sunk vertically into the ground, which is very nearly where Cape Canaveral was built a century later.

3. 3
   The Moon

   Three men in an aluminium shell fired at the Moon at eleven miles a second, and Verne's arithmetic is close enough that the comparison with Apollo 8 is still made - launch site, crew of three, and a Pacific splashdown.

4. 4
   The Pacific

   They miss, loop the Moon and fall back, and the corvette Susquehanna picks them out of the Pacific - which is what happened to the Apollo capsules from the same ocean a hundred and four years later.