The two World Wars solidified the for-profit prosthetics industry in both the United States and Western Europe, and the ongoing War on Terror helped catapult it into a US $6 billion dollar industry across the globe. Civil War (during whichĦ0,000 amputations were performed) inaugurated the modern prosthetics era in the United States, thanks to federal funding and a wave of design patents filed by entrepreneurial prosthetists. And yet who better to design the next great leap in technology than men remade by technology themselves?Īs Verne understood, the U.S.
These piecemeal men are unlikely crusaders of invention with an even more unlikely mission. Their “crutches, wooden legs, artificial arms, steel hooks, caoutchouc jaws, silver craniums platinum noses” don’t play leading roles in their personalities-they are merely tools on their bodies.
The story of the Baltimore Gun Club propelling themselves to the moon is about the extraordinary masculine power of the veteran, who doesn’t simply “overcome” his disability he derives power and ambition from it. By the war’s end, with “not quite one arm between four persons, and exactly two legs between six,” these self-taught amputee-weaponsmiths decide to repurpose their skills toward a new projectile: a rocket ship. They had spent the war innovating new, deadlier weaponry. In Jules Verne’s 1865 novel From the Earth to the Moon, members of the fictitious Baltimore Gun Club, all disabled Civil War veterans, restlessly search for a new enemy to conquer.
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