MOON TRIP

Telescopic study come of age in 1837, when Wilhelm Beer and J.H. Madler published their extremely accurate map. At the same time, there was a revival in fantastic literature and the description of trips to the Moon began to acquire modern characteristics. In 1835 Edgar Allan Poe published 'The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall'; in 1857 Ernesto Capocci, the director of Naples Observatory, published his novel 'On the First Voyage to the Moon Made by a Woman in the Year 2057'; in 1865 Jules Verne published 'From the Earth to the Moon', followed five years later by its sequel 'Around the Moon', describing the trip to the Moon by three men on board a shell launched by a 274-metre-long cannon; and in 1901, H.G. Wells published 'The First Men in the Moon'.
[...] Ernesto Capocci (1798-1864) at the Naples Observatory, wrote a letter to the Royal Academy of Sciences in Brussels, Belgium, read at a meeting 02 November 1850, that contained the first published description of a mercury mirror telescope, but Capocci did not pursue the idea.