Science fiction, French -- Translations into English
On the 14th of September the cable dispatch was sent to the office of the
Observatory at Washington, with orders to figure out the final
consequences upon geographical locations. Two days afterwards the problem
was all worked out. The Old World was notified of the results by cable and
the New World by telegram. After this calculation had been published by
thousands of papers, it was the only thing talked of in the great cities
and everywhere. What will happen?
This was the question which everybody was asking at every point of the
globe.
The following was the notice made by the Observatory at Washington:
IMPORTANT NOTICE
The operation which is being tried by President Barbicane and Capt.
Nicholl is as follows:
The production of a recoil, on the 22d of September, at midnight, by means
of a cannon a million times larger in volume than the cannon of
twenty-seven centimetres, throwing a projectile of 180,000 tons, with a
powder giving it a velocity of 2,800 kilometres.
Now, if this shooting takes place below the equatorial line, nearly on the
thirty-fourth degree of latitude west of the meridian of Paris, at the
foot of Kilimanjaro, and if it is directed towards the south, these are
the mechanical effects which it will have on the earth's sphere:
Instantly, in consequence of the shock acting with the daily movement a
new axis will be formed and, as the old axis will be displaced to the
amount of twenty-three degrees and twenty-eight minutes, according to the
figures obtained by J.T. Maston, the new axis will be perpendicular to the
direction of the ecliptic.
Which point will the new axis start from? As the point of shooting is
known, it has been easy to calculate this.
In the North the extremity of the new axis will be situated between
Greenland and Grinnelland, exactly on that part of Baffin's Sea where it
cuts the Arctic polar circle. In the South it will be on the line of the
antarctic circle, a few degrees east of Adelialand. Under these conditions
a new zero meridian, starting from the new North Pole, will pass through
Dublin in Ireland, Paris in France, Palermo in Sicily, the Gulf of Grand
Sytre on the coast of Tripoli, Obed in Darfur, the mountain chain of
Kilimanjaro, Madagascar; the Kerguelen Island, in the Central Pacific; the
new antarctic pole, the antipodes of Paris, Cook Island, the Island of
Quadra, Vancouver, on the margin of British Columbia; across North America
to Melville Island, in the neighborhood of the North Pole.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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