astronomy

The Purchase of the North Pole

The Purchase of the North Pole is a astronomy topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand The Purchase of the North Pole rather than just read about it. In short: The Purchase of the North Pole or Topsy-Turvy (French: Sans dessus dessous) is an adventure novel by Jules Verne, published in 1889. It is the third and last novel of the Baltimore Gun Club, first appearing in From the Earth to the Moon, and later in Around the Moon, featuring the same characters but set twenty years later.

Key takeaways

The Purchase of the North Pole belongs to astronomy; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect The Purchase of the North Pole to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of The Purchase of the North Pole from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

The Purchase of the North Pole or Topsy-Turvy (French: Sans dessus dessous) is an adventure novel by Jules Verne, published in 1889. It is the third and last novel of the Baltimore Gun Club, first appearing in From the Earth to the Moon, and later in Around the Moon, featuring the same characters but set twenty years later. Like some other books of his later years, in this novel Verne tempers his love of science and engineering with a good dose of irony about their potential for harmful abuse and the fallibility of human endeavors.

Plot In an unspecified year in the 1890s (written "189–" in the novel), an international auction is organized to define the sovereign rights to the part of the Arctic extending from the 84th parallel, the highest yet reached by man, to the North Pole. Several countries send their official delegates, but the auction is won by a representative from an anonymous United States buyer. After the auction closes, the mysterious buyer is revealed to be Barbicane and Co., a company founded by Impey Barbicane, J.T. Maston and Captain Nicholl — the same members of the Baltimore Gun Club who, twenty years earlier, had traveled around the Moon inside a large cannon shell. The brave gunmen-astronauts had come out of their retirement with an even more ambitious engineering project: using the recoil of a huge cannon to remove the tilt of the Earth's axis — so that it would become perpendicular to the planet's orbit, like Jupiter's. That change would bring an end to seasons, as day and night would always be equal and each place would have the same climate all year round. The society's interest lay in another effect of the recoil: a displacement of the Earth's rotation axis, which would bring the lands around the North Pole, which they had secured in the auction, to latitude 67 north. Then the vast coal deposits that were conjectured to exist under the ice could be easily mined and sold. The technical feasibility of the plan had been confirmed by J. T. Maston's computations. The necessary capital had been provided by Ms. Evangelina Scorbitt, a wealthy widow and ardent admirer of Maston. The cannon needed for that plan would be enormous, much larger than the huge Columbiad that had sent them to the Moon. Once the plan became public, the brilliant French engineer Alcide Pierdeux quickly computes the required force of the explosion. He then discovers that the recoil would buckle the Earth's crust; many countries (mostly in Asia) would be flooded, while others (including the United States) would gain new land. Alcide's note sends the world into panic and rage, and authorities promptly rush to stop the project. However Barbicane and Nicholl had left America for a destination unknown, to supervise the completion and firing of the monster gun. J. T. Maston is caught and jailed, but he is unwilling or unable to reveal the cannon's location. Frantic searches around the world fail to find it either. The cannon in fact had been dug deep into the flanks of Mount Kilimanjaro, by a small army of workers provided by a local sultan who was an enthusiastic fan of the former Moon explorers. The projectile, a steel-braced chunk of rock weighing 180,000 tons, would exit the barrel at the fantastic speed of 2,800 kilometres per second — thanks to a new powerful explosive invented by Nicholl, which he had called "melimelonite". The cannon is fired as planned, and the explosion causes huge damage in the immediate vicinity. However, the Earth's axis retains its tilt and position, and not the slightest tremor is felt in the rest of the world. Alcide, shortly before the cannon was fired, had discovered that J. T. Maston, while computing the size of the cannon, had made a calculation error; he had accidentally erased three zeros from the blackboard when he was struck by lightning during a telephone call from Ms. Scorbitt. Because of that single mistake, twelve zeros got omitted from the result. Because Maston's calculations were undoubtedly considered correct when they were discovered, this error was not discovered early enough. The cannon he designed was indeed far too small: a trillion of them would have had to be fired to achieve the intended effect. Ridiculed by the whole world and bearing the bitter resentment of his two associates, J. T. Maston goes back into retirement, vowing to never again make any mathematical calculations. Ms. Scorbitt finally declares her feelings to Maston, and he gladly surrenders to marriage. Alcide gains worldwide recognition by revealing the cause of the failure of the operation to the public.

Trivia The notion of tilting the Earth's axis to affect the climate is first put forward by J.T. Maston in From the Earth to the Moon. The fancy name "melimelonite", based on the French word for 'mishmash', "méli-mélo", may be a reference to melinite, a high explosive composed of picric acid and guncotton adopted by the French army in 1887; and perhaps also to melon, a heptazine polymer described by Berzelius in 1830, whose structure remained a chemical puzzle until the 1930s.

Publication history 1890 USA: New York: J. G. Ogilvie and Company, published as Topsy-Turvy 1891, UK, London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, & Rivington. First UK edition. 2012, UK, London: Hesperus Press, new translation by Sophie Lewis with a foreword by Professor Ian Fells, published as The World Turned Upside Down

References

External links

Topsy-Turvy at Standard Ebooks

Topsy-Turvy at Project Gutenberg Topsy-Turvy public domain audiobook at LibriVox Sans dessus dessous available at Jules Verne Collection (in French)

Illustrations

The Purchase of the North Pole illustration

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with The Purchase of the North Pole

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what The Purchase of the North Pole claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In astronomy, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to The Purchase of the North Pole before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about The Purchase of the North Pole ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of The Purchase of the North Pole

In research: The Purchase of the North Pole appears in astronomy research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses The Purchase of the North Pole in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: The Purchase of the North Pole is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics 1880s French-language novels, 1889 French novels, 1889 science fiction novels, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for The Purchase of the North Pole outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study The Purchase of the North Pole in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what The Purchase of the North Pole means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain The Purchase of the North Pole out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is The Purchase of the North Pole in simple terms?

Why does The Purchase of the North Pole matter?

Because it connects several astronomy ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study The Purchase of the North Pole?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on The Purchase of the North Pole.