Jules Verne's Lunar Projectile in Space — Émile-Antoine Bayard Engraving, 1872

Victorian readers encountering this image would have felt a vertiginous shock of wonder — a bullet-shaped iron capsule tumbling through the star-filled void toward a cratered Moon, with a tiny human figure floating free in the vacuum outside. Rendered in meticulous crosshatched engraving, this illustration from Jules Verne's 'Around the Moon' captures the bullet-projectile Columbiad and a spacewalking figure with startling scientific audacity, decades before space travel was anything but fantasy.