"From the Earth to the Moon" is a science fiction adventure novel by the French writer Jules Verne, published in 1865.  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.