History of the telescope received the report in November, and the English mathematician and astronomer Thomas Harriot, who used a six-powered telescope by the summer of 1609 to observe features on the moon. The Italian polymath Galileo Galilei was in Venice in June 1609 and there heard of the "Dutch perspective glass" by means of which distant objects appeared nearer and larger. Galileo states that he solved the problem of the construction of a telescope the first night after his return to Padua from Venice and made his first telescope the next day by fitting a convex lens in one extremity of a leaden
A Trip to the Moon him for "A Trip to the Moon", Méliès credited Jules Verne's novels "From the Earth to the Moon" (1865) and "Around the Moon" (1870). Cinema historians, the mid-20th-century French writer Georges Sadoul first among them, have frequently suggested H. G. Wells's "The First Men in the Moon" (1901), a French translation of which was published a few months before Méliès made the film, as another likely influence. Sadoul argued that the first half of the film (up to the shooting of the projectile) is derived from Verne and that the second half (the travelers' adventures on and in the moon)