Verne:Jules:From the Earth to the Moon:Halfway

From the Quicksilver Metaweb.

Verne anticipates weightlessness in space, but gets it wrong. His characters only feel weightless at the "halfway" point between the earth and the moon. Apparently they feel the gravitational part of acceleration, but not the acceleration due to external applied forces. (Even this part he gets a bit wrong.)

Perhaps it is just as well that Verne characters do not know about Einstein's Principle of Equivalence since they have just been fired out of cannon which accelerated them to escape velocity in only 700 feet. Had they known about it, their 4 kiloton weights would have left them smeared into a thin layer of grease on the floor of the ship.