From the Earth to the moon; and, round the moon

From the Earth to the Moon: A Direct Route in 97 Hours, 20 Minutes is an 1865 novel by Jules Verne. 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. There are two modern unabridged English translations by Walter James Miller (1978) and Frederick Paul Walter (2010).

Summary source: Wikipedia: From the Earth to the Moon · CC BY-SA 4.0