111 Jean-François Champollion was the first Orientalist to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphs, translating part of the Rosetta stone—but that involved understanding the referents of the symbols, not being able to pronounce them, since they are not phonetic symbols, so his achievement cannot explain what Ossipoff seems to have accomplished in discovering a common pronunciation.
112 The text has “periaplerodite,” which must be a typesetter’s error occasioned by unclear handwriting in the manuscript; the authors have improvised the word, as others have since, by analogy with perihelion, to mean “closest point to Venus” (Aphrodite being of course, the Greek equaivalent of the Roman goddess Venus).
113 The mean distance between Mercury and Venus, when they are in conjunction, is nearer to 50 million kilometers than “nine million leagues” (36 million kilometers), although the eccentricity of Mercury’s orbit introduces a large variation into the calculation. At quadrature, applying Pythagoras’ theorem gives a mean distance between Venus and Mercury of approximately 124 million kilometers, or 31 million leagues, although the actual distance to be traveled would be greater because of the motion of the destination planet.
114 The quotation is from Virgil’s Georgics; the phrase itself refers to excessive happiness, but the full line, implicit in the ellipsis, translates as “O how happy farmers would be if they would only count their blessings.”
115 The first two figures are not much different from those cited in modern reference books, but the figure for the relative volumes of Mercury and Earth seems to have been miscalculated; Mercury’s volume is only 0.056 of Earth’s.
116 This statement, although intended humorously, is nevertheless somewhat confused.
117 Ludvig Holberg’s Nicolai Klimii Iter Subterraneum (1741; tr. as A Journey to the World Underground by Nicholas Klimius) features a series of “planets” orbiting a central Sun inside a hollow Earth, inhabited by various kinds of fantastic hybrid beings. The anonymous Relation du monde de Mercure [An Account of the world of Mercury] (1750), which was reprinted in Charles Garnier’s classic collection of imaginary voyages in 1787, was the work of the Chevalier de Béthune; it features winged humanoid Mercurians whose exotic anthropology is described in some detail.
118 This casual dismissal of the potential ambitions of serious speculative fiction would be rather remarkable, even if we did not know that, when these words first saw print, Camille Flammarion had recently addressed the question robustly, in the expanded version of Lumen published in 1887. Graffigny could not have known, however, that H. G. Wells had recently published “The Chronic Argonauts” in his Science Schools Journal, thus beginning the definitive rewriting of the prospectus of futuristic scientific romance that would culminate in the 1895 publication of The Time Machine.
119 Groombridge 1830 (the figure is the year of its identification) was shown by Friedrich Argelander in 1842 to have the greatest proper motion then known, although it was subsequently overtaken by Kapteyn’s Star and Barnard’s Star. Its unusual motion is no longer considered to be particularly puzzling, as Groombridge 1830 is now known to be a “halo star” rotating around the galaxy’s rim.
120 Nabonassar was king of Chaldea from 747 to 734 B.C. and the “Era of Nabonassar” used in ancient chronology was calculated from the year of his succession, so 265 B.C. was actually the 482nd year of that era. Alexander the Great died in 323 B.C. Flammarion quotes dates from the Era of Nabonassar in Les Terres du ciel, but gets them right.
121 Charles E. Burton (1846-1882) was better known for lending early support to the Martian canal hypothesis.
122 Sir William Huggins (1824-1910).
123 Modern figures give Mercury’s surface gravity as 0.38 of Earth’s.
124 Urbain Le Verrier (1811-1877) was able to study Encke’s Comet—first discovered in 1786 by Pierre Méchain—because it had an unusually short period of 3.3 years, whose calculation of J. F. Encke gave the comet its name. Encke’s Comet is also unusual in cutting across Mercury’s orbit.
125 Actually, Mercury’s mass is only 0.055 that of the Earth.
126 As Galileo is famously reputed to have demonstrated at the Leaning Tower of Pisa, lighter bodies fall just as fast as heavier ones, provided that the effect of air resistance is negligible. Given that the sphere is falling through the void, this principle would be strictly applicable; Fricoulet and Ossipoff would surely be aware of that, although Gontran presumably would not.
127 The authors are evidently using humanité [humankind] here merely to signify “dominant species” rather than to signify any closer biological kinship between the voyagers and their meal; even so, it is hardly surprising that Gontran reacts as he does, and perhaps a little odd that the narrative voice has no obvious sympathy with his sentiment.
128 This wordplay does not translate; the literal meaning of fumisterie, whose metaphorical meaning I have translated as “tomfoolery,” refers to the work of a fireplace-installer.
129 It is not the oxygen that is exploding, but the match that burns more rapidly—and hence more brightly, although not as productively as the authors seem to think—in pure oxygen than in air. Like several other passages in the narrative, this chapter borrows materials from Jules Verne, who dramatized the intoxicant effects of oxygen in “Le docteur Ox” and a famous sequence in Autour de la lune, and used a tangential comet strike to precipitate highly improbable anomalous phenomena in Hector Servadac.
130 Horace Parnell Tuttle (1839-1923) was an avid comet-hunter who sighted several of them; the one most often associated with his name, then as now, is the long-period comet nowadays known as Swift-Tuttle, discovered in 1862, but this one is the short-period comet now known as 8P/Tuttle, which he first sighted in January 1858 and whose return he observed in the summer of 1871; the body was subsequently identified as having first been sighted during an earlier passage in 1790.
131 As usual, the authors are following in the footsteps of literary precedent; the comet featured in Verne’s Hector Servadac heads back toward the Sun soon after passing beyond the orbit of Jupiter. In Albert Robida’s farcical alternative account of Servadac’s comet, featured in Voyages très extraordinaires de Saturnin Farandoul (1879; tr. in a Black Coat Press edition as The Adventures of Saturnin Farandoul), it impacts with Saturn in the same (highly improbable) tangential fashion that it had earlier impacted with the Earth and the comet in the present text has impacted with Mercury.
132 As the ensuing passage testifies, the Vulcan controversy was a hot topic in astronomical circles in the late 19th century. One of the century’s great triumphs was Urbain Le Verrier’s prediction of the position of a new planet, Neptune, which was confirmed by observation in 1846. Le Verrier had calculated the planet’s position after a mathematical analysis of anomalies in the orbit of Uranus, following a suggestion by François Arago, the director of the Paris Observatoire. Arago had also suggested that he examine anomalies in the orbit of Mercury, and Le Verrier—not unnaturally—also tried to account for these by hypothesizing the existence of another planet, Vulcan; he published the hypothesis in 1859, and then received a letter from the amateur astronomer Edmond Modeste Lescabault (1814-1894) claiming to have seen Vulcan transiting in Sun earlier that year. The new “discovery” caused a sensation—Lescarbault was awarded the Legion d’honneur in 1860, but the calculation of Vulcan’s orbit that Le Verrier, based on Lescarbault’s observation, gave rise to unfulfilled predictions, and he spent the rest of his life making successive amendments to it. During the solar eclipse of July 29, 1878, two American believers in Vulcan, Lewis Swift (1820-1913) and James Craig Watson (1838-1880) recorded separate observations of it, but other hunters failed to spot it and the Swift/Watson observations were widely dismissed as errors.
133 Theodore von Oppolzer (1841-1886).
134 Modern measurements of the precession of Mercury’s perihelion give a figure of 43 seconds of arc per century; Graffigny could not know it, but the anomaly would become a crucial element of the argument regardin
g Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity, which provided an alternative explanation of the precession that was generally regarded as successful and became established as a key item of empirical support for the theory.
135 This date is not entirely consistent either with the intervals of time spent by the voyagers on the Moon and Venus (after taking off from Earth in March 1882). More seriously, it is not consistent with the actual periodicity of 8P/Tuttle, which is 13.6 years; the authors should surely have been aware that its actual perihelion when it reappeared after Tuttle’s second sighting, was in the early months of 1885, not 1884.
136 The memoirist Ambroise Paré (1510-1590) was the chief surgeon to four French kings: Henri II, François II, Charles IX and Henri III.
137 All three of the dates in this paragraph—which I have corrected—are misquoted in the original text, although it should have been easy enough to copy them out of Flammarion’s Astronomie populaire or any other textbook dealing with comets and their history.
138 So, according to Farenheit’s own logic, he ought to be looking for the tail in the other direction. This entire passage is very confused; Fricoulet also reverses his own meaning by referring to the comet’s aphelion when he means its perihelion, while Ossipoff appears to have forgotten that they saw the comet’s tail while it was approaching them when he suggests that it might not have one, and then suggests a hypotheses to explain such tails which, if correct, would place the tail behind the comet, exactly where Farenheit expects to find it.
139 The full quotation, generally attributed to Seneca, translates as “To err is human, to persist [in error] is diabolical.”
140 These figures correspond very closely to those given in modern textbooks, and are accidentally revealing; the first, given in astronomical units, confirms that the comet in question gets no closer to the Sun than the orbit of Earth, and cannot possibly be in the location where Sharp has encountered it.
141 The figure comparing the Sun’s mass with Earth’s is not far removed from modern estimates, as is the comparing its volume, but modern textbooks quote the mass in metric terms as 2 x 1027 tonnes.
142 Actually, it would take about 284 years.
143 Samuel Pierpoint Langley (1834-1906).
144 Alaxander Wilson (1714-1786) was both right and wrong; sunspots really are “cavities” (his word was “depressions”) in the solar surface, not mountain-tops, but it is not the case that they are dark because they allow glimpses of a dark core within a bright shell, as Wilson thought. The “proof” lent to Wilson’s hypothesis by early spectroscropic analyses in 1861—on which de Graffigny, having no inkling of the fact that the Sun’s heat is actually produced by nuclear fusion, is presumably relying—was not as far-reaching as some interpreters thought, so Sharp’s “observations” give a misleading account of the actual processes ongoing within the Sun.
145 The atypical comet discovered by Wilhelm von Biela in 1826, which had a periodicity of only 6.6 years, split into two before disintegrating completely; the consequent meteor showers were easily attributable to the comet. It is understandable that many contemporary astronomers and writers of scientific romance were ready to believe that such melodramatic events might be more frequent than they now appear to be.
146 Jules-François Dupuis-Delcourt (1802-1864) was the most prolific early writer of textbooks and practical manuals of aeronautics, but the balloon he constructed out of copper strips weighed 770 lbs. and never got off the ground.
147 Abel Pifre’s work on insulation led directly to his pioneering work in solar energy capture and storage, his most famous invention being a solar-powered printing press—but most of that work was done after 1889.
148 Colcothar was the name improvised for the mixture of iron oxides resulting from this once-commonplace industrial process.
149 “Mignon aspirant au ciel” [Mignon yearning for Heaven] originated in 1839 as a water-color by Ary Scheffer (1795-1856) but achieved international celebrity as a mass-produced inspirational engraving by Aristide Louis. The heroine’s attitude was often used in literary comparison and parody; Fricoulet’s dig at Gontran’s yearning for the Town Hall, where the civil formalities of his marriage would be required to take place, is a trifle cruel.
150 Asaph Hall (1829-1907) discovered the oft-anticipated satellites of Mars in circumstances detailed later in the text.
151 The Martian year is approximately 687 terrestrial days, or 660 Martian days, in duration.
152 I have transcribed the names employed by the authors, which derive from Flammarion’s maps, although modern maps of Mars use a terminology derived, with appropriate modifications, from the competing maps drawn up by Schiaparelli. The authors occasionally acknowledge the competition by citing Schiaparelli’s names as alternatives to Flammarion’s.
153 Richard Anthony Proctor (1837-1888), a prolific popularizer of astronomy, produced the first good map of Mars in 1869; like Asaph Hall, he took advantage of conjunction of 1877 to make an assiduous search for the planet’s satellites, and eventually observed one of them, but not in time to claim credit for its discovery.
154 The actual diameter of Phobos is 27 kilometers, at its longest (its shape is rather irregular).
155 This quote from Micromégas (which was actually published in 1752) omits one minor phrase, which offers Père Castel a backhanded compliment in suggesting that he will write “pleasantly enough.” The use of the future tense may seem odd; the reference is inserted because the Jesuit mathematician Louis Bertrand Castel (1688-1757) had published a Traité de physique de la pesanteur universelle des corps [Treatise on the Physics of the Universal Gravitation of Bodies] (1724) that opposed Isaac Newton’s theory, without reference to empirical data, on the grounds that it was irrational and overcomplicated, and Voltaire—one of Newton’s chief defenders in France—is suggesting that Castel was the kind of man who would routinely deny facts if he found them unesthetic.
156 The second of these quotes from Chapter III of Part III of the book generally known as Gulliver’s Travels is slightly mistaken; the figure Swift gives is actually “21 and a half hours.” The great satirist goes on to explain that the squares of these times are in proportion to the satellites’ distances from the planet, thus providing an illustration of the universal law of gravitation—that being the principal importance of the discovery, from the viewpoint of the astronomers of Laputa.
157 Théramène is a character in Racine’s Phèdre; the narration that made his name proverbial in this fashion was his account of the death of his pupil, Hippolyte.
158 This may seem odd to the modern readers, but it was not until the observations made from Percival Lowell’s Flagstaff Observatory in the 1890s became the basis for the elaborate mythology of the canals of Mars that the idea took hold that Mars was a world that had become direly arid, whose inhabitants had been forced by necessity to transport water from the poles in order to sustain their decadent civilization. In the 1880s, Camille Flammarion’s writings, and those of other popularizers, not only still held to the notion that the Martian “seas” really were vast expanses of water, but took it for granted that the fact was manifest to the eye of the experienced observer, as Ossipoff here maintains.
159 The “hothouse effect” by virtue of which atmospheres may act as heat traps was first described by Jean-Baptiste-Joseph, Baron Fourier (1768-1830); unlike Fricoulet, however, Fourier recognized the importance of carbon dioxide as well as that of water vapor. When the authors wrote this passage, however, they were unaware of the calculations made in the 1890s by Svante Arrhenius, who asserted in consequence that doubling the amount of the carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere would result in a mean temperature increase of five degrees Celsius.
160 These figures are all reasonably accurate except the last, although the figure of 660 is closer to the actual number of Martian days in a Martian year (670) than the figure of 608 previously given.
FRENCH SCIENCE FICTION COLLECTION
Henri Allorge. The Gr
eat Cataclysm
G.-J. Arnaud. The Ice Company
Richard Bessière. The Gardens of the Apocalypse
Albert Bleunard. Ever Smaller
Félix Bodin. The Novel of the Future
Alphonse Brown. City of Glass
Félicien Champsaur. The Human Arrow
Didier de Chousy. Ignis
C. I. Defontenay. Star (Psi Cassiopeia)
Charles Derennes. The People of the Pole
Alfred Driou. The Adventures of a Parisian Aeronaut
J.-C. Dunyach. The Night Orchid; The Thieves of Silence
Henri Duvernois. The Man Who Found Himself
Achille Eyraud. Voyage to Venus
Henri Falk. The Age of Lead
Nathalie Henneberg. The Green Gods
Michel Jeury. Chronolysis
Octave Joncquel & Théo Varlet. The Martian Epic
Gérard Klein. The Mote in Time’s Eye
André Laurie. Spiridon
Georges Le Faure & Henri de Graffigny. The Extraordinary Adventures of a Russian Scientist Across the Solar System (2 vols.)
Gustave Le Rouge. The Vampires of Mars
Jules Lermina. Mysteryville; Panic in Paris; To-Ho and the Gold Destroyers; The Secret of Zippelius
José Moselli. Illa’s End
John-Antoine Nau. Enemy Force
Henri de Parville. An Inhabitant of the Planet Mars
Gaston de Pawlowski. Journey to the Land of the Fourth Dimension
Georges Pellerin. The World in 2000 Years
Maurice Renard. The Blue Peril; Doctor Lerne; The Doctored Man; A Man Among the Microbes; The Master of Light
Jean Richepin. The Wing
Albert Robida. The Clock of the Centuries; Chalet in the Sky
The Extraordinary Adventures of a Russian Scientist Across the Solar System (Vol. 1) Page 70
