The shot on Kilimanjaro
The shot on Kilimanjaro (also no mess and everything in order ) is a novel by the French author Jules Verne . The novel was first published in 1889 by the Pierre-Jules Hetzel publishing house under the French title Sans dessus dessous , which translates as “no haywire”. The first German-language edition appeared in November 1891 under the title No mess at Hartleben in Vienna in the Verne Collection.
action
The cannon club from Baltimore , which had already transported three people from the earth to the moon with a bullet from the Columbiade , a huge cannon (see: From the earth to the moon and travel around the moon ), has new plans. James T. Maston - genius, leading mathematician, and club secretary - receives substantial funding from wealthy millionaire widow Evangelina Scorbitt to help advance the club's newest project.
With a large auction, the countries bordering the Arctic Ocean, the areas of the Arctic north of the 84th latitude in auction. They do not yet know whether the North Pole is on a land mass or in a frozen sea. At the auction, the representatives of Great Britain and the United States try to outbid each other. The representative of the United States finally wins the contract.
The world public was surprised when it became known that the cannon club from Baltimore with its president Barbicane was behind it. They plan to mine coal in the area north of the 84th parallel. In order to get to the mineral resources unhindered by ice and snow, JT Maston carried out calculations in order to straighten the earth's axis with a powerful recoil from the shot of a cannon and thus melt the polar ice. In his calculations, he received a phone call from Mrs. Scorbitt during a thunderstorm. A lightning bolt struck the phone line and cut the connection, and a gust of wind made his blackboard wet with rain. Another phone call from Mrs. Scorbitt disturbs him in correctly restoring his calculations on the blackboard, which had been blurred by the rain.
At the beginning, the plans of the club were very popular with the world's population, as they would then no longer be exposed to the influence of the changing seasons and could choose to live in a stable climate zone of their choice. When it became known what devastating effects such as changes in sea level by up to 8,415 m, changes in air pressure , the disappearance of seas and floods in other areas this venture would have, the mood turned into the opposite. JT Maston is arrested and thrown in prison. However, Barbicane has already traveled to Kilimanjaro with his employees to prepare the shot that is supposed to straighten the earth's axis. The Sultan Bali-Bali of Kisongo supports the construction projects of Barbicane for commercial and political reasons, even if the massive shot will wreak havoc on his Maasai subjects.
With the help of his workers, Barbicane is building a tunnel 600 m long and 27 m in diameter on the slope of Kilimanjaro. Ten 30 m high blast furnaces will be built, which will deliver a total of 1,800 t of iron for lining the tunnel to a gun barrel. In addition, a floor with a weight of 180,000 t will be built. For this purpose, 400,000 tons of iron ore, 70,000 tons of limestone and 400,000 tons of hard coal had to be brought in. Instead of gun cotton , 2,000,000 t of "Meli-Melonit" are used as propellant. The projectile should leave the muzzle of the cannon with an initial speed of 2800 m / s. JT Maston can only escape the mob's lynching through an escape made possible by Mrs. Scorbitt. The giant cannon is finally fired, the projectile rises into the sky with a tremendous roar and becomes a planetoid of the sun. However, the people of the earth find that they have been spared from all feared calamities. The earth's axis has not changed noticeably, the plans of the Baltimore Cannon Club have failed. Mocking poems referring to the project are disseminated to the public.
Alcide Pierdeux from the École polytechnique in Paris publishes an article in which he reveals the reason for the failure. JT Maston assumed the correct theoretical assumptions in his calculations, but made a fatal careless error. In his calculations he assumed a globe with a circumference of 40,000 m instead of one with a circumference of 40,000 km . Instead of a cannon with a million times the volume of a 27 cm cannon, a trillion such cannons would have been required to shift the earth's axis by 23 ° and 28 '. This number of cannons would have found no place on the earth's surface. The shot with one cannon only changed the pole of the earth by 3 micrometers and the sea level by +/- 9 / 1,000 micrometers. The error occurred because Mrs. Scorbitt interfered with JT Maston's calculations and the repair of the consequences of the lightning strike. JT Maston renounces mathematics and marries the widow Scorbitt, who asks for his hand.
literature
- Heinrich Pleticha (ed.): Jules Verne manual . Deutscher Bücherbund / Bertelsmann, Stuttgart and Munich 1992.
- Volker Dehs and Ralf Junkerjürgen: Jules Verne . Voices and interpretations of his work. Fantastic Library Wetzlar, Wetzlar 2005.
- Volker Dehs: Jules Verne . Jules Verne. A critical biography. Artemis & Winkler, Düsseldorf 2005. ISBN 3-538-07208-6
Web links
- Sans dessus dessous as an e-book on gutenberg.org
- The shot on Kilimanjaro on sarahs-buch-archiv.de
- "No mess" as an e-book in HTML on zeno.org
- The shot on Kilimanjaro in Andreas Fehrmann's Jules Verne Collection