The Merchandise Guide
Annual 1975

How to get there--nineteenth century style! Happily, the in- ventor didn't test it! the revenue officers appeared, as they often did, having lain in wait in the dewy undergrowth, our country stalwarts would pretend to be imbeciles--"raking for the moon, reflected in the waters". Smart lads, those moonrakers! Lovers have praised the moon for as long as time remembers. It lights their way to their secret meetings. It shines gently upon them as they clasp and kiss. And songwriters, ever since the birth of recording around the early part of this century, have struggled with rhymes for it. Moon. June. Spoon. Croon, Buffoon. Buffoon? Now we're back to Sir Paul Neal! Baboon? Now we're on monkeys --and they were the first animals to be sent into orbit! One last thing. You've heard of the tem 'once in a blue moon'

--meaning practically never. The moon has been blue. Thanks to sulphur particles in the atmos- phere following violent natural volcanic eruptions like the Kra- katoa Island explosion of 1883 and the vast forest fire in British Columbia in 1950. It's amazing what the moon can do--but never fear, if they tell you the light of out full friend is going to send you nutty, forget it. Who's saner than Neil Armstrong? Maccap Moonschemes! Now we know how to get to the Moon, we can look back and laugh at some of the hair-raising ideas early sci-fi writers had for making the long journey! Jules Verne came closest to reality with a projectile blasted into space from a giant gun--which he coin- cidentally sited fairly close to Cape Kennedy/Canaveral. Moonrakers claimed to be cast- ing for the reflection in the water--but they weren't so daft! But his astronauts would have been pulped by the sudden acceleration of fir- ing!

The Moon was always popular with lovers. This was an idea for going on a lunar honeymoon in 1800!

One artist of Verne's time dreamed up a coal-burning train with a string of cylin- drical coaches--but he never explained how he'd get it off the ground! Another half-wit designed a chariot to be harnessed to a flock of swans. A whip, he thought, would be suffi- cient to persuade them to keep climbing! But the prize for idiocy surely goes to the writer who thought of making two giant mag- nets, anchoring one on Earth, and sitting on the other while the repelling force lifted him to his goal!

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