From the Earth to the Moon, Direct in Ninety-Seven Hours and Twenty Minutes and a Trip Round It

It tells the story of the Baltimore Gun Club, a post-American Civil War society of weapons enthusiasts, and their attempts to build an enormous Columbiad space gun and launch three people-the Gun Club's president, his Philadelphian armor-making rival, and a French poet-in a projectile with the goal of a Moon landing. Five years later, Verne wrote a sequel called Around the Moon.