Page:This New Ocean, a history of Project Mercury, Swenson, Grimwood, Alexander (NASA SP-4201).djvu/18



HE yearning of men to escape the confines of their Earth and to travel to the heavens is older than the history of mankind itself. Religion, mythology, and literature reaching back thousands of years are sprinkled with references to magic carpets, flying horses, flaming aerial chariots, and winged gods. Although "science fiction" is a descriptive term of recent vintage, the fictional literature of space travel dates at least from the second century A.D. Around the year 160 the Greek savant Lucian of Samosata wrote satirically about an imaginary journey to the Moon, "a great countrie in the aire, like to a shining island," as Elizabethan scholars translated his description 1500 years later. Carried to the Moon by a giant waterspout, Menippus, Lucian's hero, returns to Earth in an equally distinctive manner: The angry gods simply have Mercury take hold of his right ear and deposit him on the ground. Lucian established a tradition of space-travel fiction, and generations of later storytellers spawned numerous fantasies in which by some miraculous means—such as a flight of wild lunar swans in a seventeenth-century tale by Francis Godwin or a cannon shot in Jules Verne's classic account of a Moon voyage (1865-1870)—earthlings are transported beyond the confines of their world and into space.

But apparently the first suggestion, fictional or otherwise, for an artificial manned satellite of Earth is to be found in a short novel called "The Brick Moon," written in 1869 by the American Edward Everett Hale and originally serialized in the Atlantic Monthly. Although, like most of his contemporaries, Hale had only a vague notion of where Earth's atmosphere ended and where space began, he did realize that somewhere the "aire" became the "aether," and he also understood the mechanics of putting a satellite into an Earth orbit:

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