The Victorians didn’t actually travel to the moon. But they were the first people, observes my guest Iwan Morus, to think that travel to the Moon was not only possible, but that “their science already possessed – or would soon possess – the means of getting there.” This confidence was based on the cascades of “new technologies, new ways of making knowledge and new visions about the future came together during the nineteenth century to create a new kind of world.” In an important sense, then, it was indeed the Victorians who took us to the moon.

Iwan Rhys Morus is professor of history at Aberystwyth University in Aberystwyth, Wales. Among his recent books are Michael Faraday and the Electrical Century (20127) and Nikola Tesla and the Electrical Future (2019); his most recent book is How the Victorians Took Us to the Moon. 

For Further Investigation

For a related conversations, see Episode 251 on the history of technology, from the early modern world to the present; and Episode 258 with Simon Heffer on the early Victorian era as the "pursuit of perfection"
The Public Domain Review offers "A 19th Century Vision of the year 2000"
An excellent website devoted to the Wright brothers and their achievement
Collections at the Oxford History of Science Museum
"On Verticality": a blog about "the innate human need to leave the surface of the earth"