Jules Verne's Projectile Approaches the Moon — Around the Moon, 1870

From Jules Verne's Around the Moon (Autour de la Lune), this masterful wood engraving depicts the bullet-shaped spacecraft drifting through the star-filled void as the cratered lunar surface looms large in the upper right. Two figures float weightlessly outside the projectile in one of the story's most memorable scenes. Engraved by Henri Théophile Hildibrand after designs by Émile Bayard and Alphonse de Neuville, the image captures Verne's breathtaking vision of human spaceflight decades before it became reality.