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| Neil Armstrong's Walk on the Moon remembered |
I like to call today "moon day" as this is the one that commemorates Armstrong putting his foot down on the moon. That was just short of 50 years ago (1969) so most of you out there in blogger land weren't born.
About a hundred years prior to that Jules Verne published his De la terre à la lune - From the Earth to the Moon, a book so famous and intriguing that even the composer Offenbach set the story as an opera/ballet. Didn't know that did you? In one of the dances there features a slide whistle that is supposed to be the rocket launching off earth.
About 175 years ago there were a fantastic set of stories published in London papers. Herschell, the great astronomer had just set up a big telescope in South Africa and an enterprising reporter wrote back about all kinds of fictional things supposedly seen on the surface of the moon; unicorns, strange plants and animals and of course the inhabitants of the moon. In 1865 Jules Verne wrote the story, "From the Earth to the Moon" and later HG Wells "A Trip to the Moon".
Anyway in 1902 this movie, A Trip to the Moon (French: Le Voyage dans la lune) a French black and white silent science fiction film came out. The film was written and directed by Georges Méliès. Enjoy.