Friday, March 4, 2011

Three Verne Books

This will be a short post.  I am watching "Mutiny on the Bounty" with Clark Gable and Charles Laughton.  No, I did not dig up their bodies and place them in my house.  I meant to say the film starring Clark Gable and Charles Laughton.  Anyways, Linda and I were talking about pirates and mutinies and things of the sea when I mentioned Jules Verne's classic "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" and how long a league is.  Do you know this?  A league is the distance a man can walk in an hour or roughly three miles.  So, 20,000 leagues is around 60,000 miles.  Do you know the diameter of the earth?  The diameter is just under 8,000 miles.  These distances were known at the time Jules Verne wrote his novel in 1870.  Either the Fact Checker had not been doing his job, or that position had not yet been conceived.  In either case, "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" is over 52,000 miles outside the opposite end of the planet. If you were going "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" you would have to start out by taking a "Journey to the Center of the Earth," continue through to the other side and travel one sixth the distance "From the Earth to the Moon."  Do you think Jules thought about this when titling his books?

I just had to put that out there to give you something to ponder and discuss.

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