Jules Verne's 'Around the Moon' — Passengers Weightless in the Projectile, c.1870

An 1870s French reader encountering this engraving would feel the uncanny thrill of science made visceral — three men and a dog suspended in helpless, dreamlike weightlessness inside their lunar projectile, bodies sprawled and limbs akimbo against a map labeled 'LA LUNE.' Émile-Antoine Bayard's masterful cross-hatching renders the impossible as domestic and absurd, giving Verne's theoretical zero-gravity a darkly comic humanity. The dog's bewildered alertness grounds the scene in warm reality against the cold void implied beyond the porthole-like window.