From the Earth to the Moon by Jules Verne Page A

namedBraconnot. He called it
xyloïdine.
In 1838 another Frenchman, Pelouze, studied its various properties, and in 1846 Schönbein, a chemistry professor in Basel, proposed that it be used as gunpowder. That powder is known as guncotton.”
    “Or pyroxylin,” said the major.
    “Or nitrocellulose,” said the general.
    “Wasn’t there at least one American involved in the discovery?” asked J. T. Maston, moved by a keen feeling of national pride.
    “Not a single one, unfortunately,” said the major.
    “If it will make you feel better,” said Barbicane, “I’ll tell you that one American’s work is important in the study of cellulose, because collodion, one of the main agents in photography, is simply pyroxylin dissolved in alcohol and ether, and it was discovered by Maynard, who was a medical student in Boston at the time.”
    “Hurrah for Maynard and pyroxylin!” cried the noisy secretary of the Gun Club.
    “To return to guncotton,” said Barbicane, “you all know the properties that will make it so valuable to us. It can be made very easily: you soak cotton in nitric acid for fifteen minutes, rinse it with water, let it dry, and that’s all.”
    “What could be simpler?” said the general.
    “Furthermore, guncotton is unaffected by humidity. That’s a valuable quality for our purposes, since it will take several days to load the cannon. It ignites at 160 degrees centigrade instead of 240, and it burns so quickly that if it’s placed on top of a charge of ordinary powder and ignited, the ordinary powder won’t have time to catch fire.”
    “It sounds perfect,” said the major.
    “However, it’s very expensive.”
    “What does that matter?” said J. T. Maston.
    “Finally, it can fire a projectile four times faster than ordinary powder can. And if it’s mixed with a quantity of potassium nitrate equal to eighty percent of its weight, its power is increased still more.”
    “Will that be necessary?” asked the major.
    “I don’t think so,” replied Barbicane. “So instead of 1,600,000 pounds of powder, we’ll have only 400,000 pounds of guncotton. Since 500 pounds of it can safely be compressed into a volume of twenty-seven cubic feet, the whole charge will take up only 180 feet of the cannon’s length, and the 2,500,000 cubic feet of gas will drive the shell through more than 700 feet of bore before sending it on its way toward the moon.”
    At these eloquent words, J. T. Maston was unable to contain his emotion: he threw himself into his friend’s arms with the force of a cannon ball, and would have knocked him flat if Barbicane had not been built to withstand the most violent bombardment.
    This incident ended the third meeting of the committee. Barbicane and his daring colleagues, to whom nothing seemed impossible, had just settled the complex questions of the projectile, the cannon, and the powder. Their plan was decided upon; they now had only to carry it out.
    “That’s only a detail, a mere trifle,” said J. T. Maston.
    Note: In the course of the above discussion, Barbicane credits one of his compatriots with the invention of collodion. This is a mistake, with all due deference to J. T. Maston, and it has arisen from the similarity between two names.
    It is true that in 1847 Maynard, then a Boston medical student, had the idea of using collodion in the treatment of wounds, but collodion was already known in 1846. The honor of that great discovery must go to a Frenchman, a distinguished mind, a chemist who is also a painter, a poet, a philosopher, and a Hellenist: M. Louis Ménard.

CHAPTER 10

ONE ENEMY AMONG TWENTY-FIVE MILLION FRIENDS
    T HE AMERICAN public took great interest in every detail of the Gun Club’s project. They followed the committee’s discussions day by day. They were fascinated by the simplest preparations for the great experiment, the questions of figures that it raised, the mechanical difficulties that would have to be overcome—in short, the whole