• You can make a substance with much more explosive power than gunpowder if you soak cotton in nitric acid (yes, cotton!) for 15 minutes and then dry it out. That makes nitrocellulose
  
• one quart of gunpowder, when ignited, expands to 4,000 quarts' worth of fiery gaseous matter. Speak of some explosive power!
• The orbital speed of planets decreases as you go by the planets: Mercury spins around the sun fastest, and Pluto the slowest. It is Verne who so clearly stated the obvious for everyone to understand:

  Neptune moves at the rate of 12,500 miles per hour; Uranus at 17,500; Saturn at 22,145; Jupiter at 29,190; Mars at 55,030; Earth at 68,750; Venus at 80,080; and Mercury at 131,300. Some comets have a velocity of 3,500,000 miles per hour at their perihelion! As for us in our projectile, we will be loafing along at a leiursely pace of only 24,400 miles an hour at the beginning, and our speed will be constantly decreasing! Is that anything to be excited about? Isn't it obvious that all this will be surpassed some day by still greater speeds, whose mechanical agents will probably be light or electricity?

  We have harnessed the mechanical agent of electricity for the means of travel, but not yet light. Thanks, Jules Verne! I'm going to work on that remaining problem- propulsion by means of light.

If we're to believe certain narrow-minded people - I don't know what else to call them - mankind is enclosed in a circle from which there's no escape, and doomed to vegetate on this globe without ever being able to soar into interplanetary space! It is not true! We're about to go to the moon, and someday we'll go to the planets or the stars as easily and quickly as we now go from New York to Liverpool! The oceans of space will soon be crossed as the oceans of the earth are crossed today! Distance is only a relative term, and it will eventually be reduced to zero.

"Can you lend me the Theory of Colours for a few weeks? It is an important work. His last things are inspid." 1820.

"If the word tone, rather than tune, is to be still borrowed in future from music, and applied to colouring, it might be used in a better sense than heretofore.

"For it would not be unreasonable to compare a painting of powerful effect, with a piece of music in a sharp key; a painting of soft effect with a piece of music in a flat key, while other equivalents might be found for the modifications of these two leading modes.

"The word tone has hitertho understood to mean a veil of a particular colour spread over the whole picture; it was generally yellow, for the painter instinctively pushed the effect towards the powerful side." -Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"Evolution has been seen as a billion-year drama that led inexorably to its grandest creation: human intelligence. The emergence in the early twenty-first century of a new form of intelligence on Earth that can compete with, and ultimately significantly exceed, human intelligence will be a development of greater import than any of the events that have created human history. It will be no less important than the creation of the intelligence that created it, and it will have profound implications for all aspects of human endeavor, including the nature of work, human learning, government, warfare, the arts, and our concept of ourselves."