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speed. Cyrano de Bergerac, although writing a burlesque, felt constrained to limit himself to pseudoscientific methods of spaceflight. Though he was striving for strictly comic effects, it is important to note that none of his methods depended upon magic or the supernatural. He took a great deal of care in describing the fantastic devices he used in his attempts to travel to the Sun and Moon, even managing to stumble, however accidentally, upon the use of rockets.
    These and many other authors of the time were discovering verisimilitude— the evocation of a sense of reality by the use of masses of convincing detail . . . or convincing-sounding detail, at least.
    Still, the writers of space travel stories before the end of the 1700s were groping in the dark: there simply was no method by which a human being could leave the surface of the Earth. In all the history of mankind no one had ever left the Earth any farther than human muscles could push.

    III The Invention of the Spaceship
    The invention of the lighter-than-air manned balloon was a major revolution, and revelation, in mankind’s perception of his capabilities of exploring the universe. On two counts: For the first time in history a human being had gotten further away from the Earth than the distance one could jump. And it was not accomplished by magic or occult means but by the use of a man-made machine, a device of science. Although by the end of the eighteenth century balloons had drifted everywhere across the landscapes of France, England and other European countries, they seldom reached an altitude of more than a few thousand feet. The Moon was a great deal farther away than that, to say nothing of the planets. Nevertheless it seemed to the most enthusiastic and imaginative dreamers that if it were possible for a human being to lift himself from the surface of the Earth even half a mile, then a flight to the Moon was merely a matter of magnitude. This is the altered perception that is most important to realize: that by means of a manmade instrumentality, employing well understood physical principles, it was possible to leave the Earth. Therefore the problem of traveling to the other worlds that shared the universe with the Earth ought to also be surmountable by means of science and mechanics. That is, even if the wiser heads were aware that it was unlikely that anyone would ever travel to the Moon in a balloon—hot air, gas or otherwise— they were also cognizant that the idea of traveling there somehow was no longer a matter relegated to pure fantasy.
    As the nineteenth century progressed, it began to seem that there might, quite literally, be nothing that was beyond the abilities of science and engineering. Between 1800 and 1865, an astounded public saw the introduction of electric batteries, steam trains and steamboats, ironclad warships, photographs, gas lighting, telegraphy, high-speed rotary printing presses, and color printing, electric motors, calculating machines, blast furnaces, anaesthetics, revolvers, electric lighting, typewriters, sewing machines, Bessemer converters and transatlantic telegraph cables, among literally thousands of other inventions and discoveries in technology and science. Meanwhile, engineers were building vast iron bridges, cutting canals through deserts and jungles and spanning continents with railroads. At this same time, explorers were opening the hitherto unknown territories of Africa and the Poles. For the first time, engineers, explorers and scientists were considered public heroes; they were held in an esteem previously reserved for generals and admirals.
    By the arrival of the latter half of the nineteenth century there seemed to be little that science and technology could not accomplish.
    In the field of space literature, Edgar Allan Poe introduced scientific verisimilitude. His novelette Hans Pfaal*, in spite of its satiric and comic overtones, was packed with realistic and well-researched details; so much so that his