Cyrano de Bergerac Invented the Rocket — 30 Years Before Newton
If you know Cyrano de Bergerac, you probably know the wrong one.
Most people remember the romantic lead from Edmond Rostand's 1897 play — the man with the oversized nose, writing love letters for a less articulate rival. It's a moving story, and it has been running on stages somewhere in the world for well over a century. It also has almost nothing to do with Savinien de Cyrano de Bergerac: a Parisian soldier, freethinker, and comic novelist who died at 36 and left behind one of the stranger literary legacies in Western history.
Take the epitaph. The verse gets quoted as though the man wrote it for his own headstone — philosopher, physicist, rhymer, swordsman, musician, and, sitting oddly in the middle of that list, a traveler of the air. He didn't write it. Rostand did, for the final scene of the play, 242 years after Cyrano was buried: "Philosophe, physicien, / Rimeur, bretteur, musicien, / Et voyageur aérien." Which makes that last phrase the strangest thing in the verse. Even the invented Cyrano could not quite let go of the fact that the real one had already gone to the Moon on paper.
The soldier underneath the legend was real. Cyrano fought in the French army through the 1639 and 1640 campaigns, including the siege of Arras — the same ground that put the historical Charles de Batz de Castelmore d'Artagnan in uniform, though how well the two men knew each other is not something the surviving records will settle. Dumas would later turn d'Artagnan into a musketeer. And around 1649, writing a comic novel whose sharpest pages would be cut out before it ever reached print, Cyrano described two ways of leaving the ground. He invented neither one, and the Moon was not his idea either. What's his is stranger than an invention — one flight he built on purpose, and the other found him.
If this intersection of historical imagination and modern science interests you, our earlier piece on Jules Verne and Apollo 11 covers a related case — though the parallels here are, if anything, harder to explain.
Key Takeaways
- The novel was written around 1649 and printed in 1657, two years after Cyrano died. In it the rockets are ranked six and six, with a fuse between each half-dozen so that one rank lights the next — a designed firing order, not a lucky fire
- He did not invent rocket staging. Conrad Haas drew it up by the 1560s and Johann Schmidlap was flying step rockets by about 1590
- He did not invent the lunar voyage either. Francis Godwin's bird-drawn version was circulating in French by 1648, and Cyrano had read it
- The spent machine falls away and the traveler keeps climbing — but because the Moon is drawing marrow out of him, not because he is lighter
- A second flight in the same book puts the Sun to work, roughly 360 years before JAXA's IKAROS proved sunlight really can push a spacecraft
Published: April 24, 2026 · Updated: August 26, 2026 · 12 min read
Two propulsion ideas from a seventeenth-century comic novel, set beside the machines that eventually did the same job.
Who Was the Real Cyrano de Bergerac?
He was nineteen when he joined the guards, and the army was done with him by twenty-one. A musket ball had already gone clean through his body at the siege of Mouzon. Then came Arras, which opened on June 22, 1640 and lasted 48 days; the Spanish garrison, held together by Owen Roe O'Neill — an Irish exile in Spanish pay — surrendered the town on August 9. Cyrano was not there to see it. A sword had caught him in the throat during a sortie the day before.
He left the army in 1641, and what came next changed him more than the fighting had — at least according to the tradition that has followed him for three centuries. The early biographies put him in a private course taught by Pierre Gassendi, a priest and mathematician who set the ancient idea of atoms moving through empty space against the Aristotle the schools were still drilling into everyone; the same tradition seats a young Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, soon to take the stage name Molière, in the room with him. Modern scholars are more cautious about the details — Cyrano's actual presence in Gassendi's classes is disputed — but not about the outcome. Whatever the room looked like, the physics he absorbed in these years — atoms, void, a universe running without anyone steering it — is all over the book he wrote next.
L'Autre Monde — "The Other World, or the States and Empires of the Moon" — came out of that period. Cyrano appears to have written it around 1649 and passed it around in manuscript. He died in 1655 at thirty-six, and Charles de Sercy printed it in Paris two years later, in 1657.
Those two years in uniform are worth holding onto, because they matter more than they look. A man who spent them around powder charges and falling shot thinks about propulsion differently than one who has only read about it.
The Dragon of Fire: Rocket Staging, Aimed at the Moon
L'Autre Monde contains two flight mechanisms. The second is the one that keeps showing up in histories of rocketry.
The narrator builds a machine. Soldiers find it and lash quantité de fusées volantes — a quantity of flying rockets — to the frame, meaning to set off a spectacle they call a dragon de feu. In the French: la flamme d'un rang de fusées s'étant communiquée à l'autre — the flame of one row of rockets having passed to the next.
The 1687 English translation is more specific than the summaries usually let on. The squibs, it says, were "ranked by six and six, by means of a Train that reached every half-dozen" — a train being a laid line of powder, the period's word for a fuse. Six rockets to a rank, and a fuse deliberately run between the ranks.
That detail is the part I keep returning to. Nothing about it is accidental. Fire does not find its way from one bundle of fireworks to another by luck when somebody has run powder between them on purpose. Cyrano is not describing a bonfire. He is describing a firing order.
None of which he came up with himself, and it is worth being clear about that. Conrad Haas, an arsenal master in Transylvania, filled a manuscript with drawings and descriptions of multi-stage rockets sometime between 1529 and 1569, though it lay unnoticed in the Sibiu archives until 1961. Johann Schmidlap, a Bavarian fireworks maker, published on pyrotechnics in Nuremberg in 1561; by around 1590 he was experimenting with what he called step rockets, and most accounts credit him as the first to actually get one off the ground. By 1650 the Polish-Lithuanian artillery specialist Kazimierz Siemienowicz had a three-stage design in print, in a treatise European gunners would consult for the next two hundred years. Rocket staging was not a new idea in 1649. Designs had been on paper for a hundred years, and rockets had been leaving the ground in stages for sixty.
Neither was the destination original. Francis Godwin's The Man in the Moone had appeared in English in 1638 and in a French translation in 1648 — a year before Cyrano sat down to write — and he knew it. Godwin's traveler gets to the Moon harnessed to a flock of migrating birds. Kepler's Somnium used a demon. Ariosto had sent a knight up there in the sixteenth century to retrieve Orlando's lost wits.
So the pieces were all lying around, and what the story does with them is where it gets interesting — and I should say plainly that what follows is a reading, not a claim Cyrano ever made about himself.
The flying machine is his. The text says so twice, in almost identical words: "the work of my hands," "my machine." The rockets are not. Soldiers came across the thing sitting in a field, decided it would make a fine firework display, and started tying rockets to it. Cyrano's narrator, watching this happen, is furious rather than delighted — he runs at the soldier holding the match, wrenches the fuse out of his hand, and climbs into his own machine to strip the fireworks off before anyone lights them. He is a moment too late.
Which means the detail that makes this look like a staged rocket wasn't his idea at all. He didn't design the propulsion or choose gunpowder over Godwin's birds on purpose. Somebody else's fireworks, meant for a bonfire, happened to be strapped to a machine he'd built for something else — and the two together did what neither was built to do alone.
And here the story gets genuinely strange. The fireworks burn out — and the machine does come off. "Adieu Machine," the narrator says, watching it drop back toward Earth while he himself keeps rising.
The separation, at least, is on the page. A spent stage falls away, the passenger continues. What is not on the page is the reason. Cyrano's traveler goes on climbing because he had rubbed beef marrow into his bruises after an earlier crash, and the Moon in her waning quarter — he explains, quite seriously — draws the marrow out of animals. He is not moving faster because he is lighter. He is being sucked upward by a lunar appetite for bone grease.
That gap is the whole business in miniature. The choreography of staging is there — burn, discard, continue. The physics underneath it is alchemy. When SpaceX's Falcon 9 drops its emptied first stage before lighting the second, it does so for a reason Cyrano has no access to: a rocket hauling dead tanks upward is fighting itself, and shedding that weight is where the performance comes from. He gets the sequence and misses the arithmetic — which is about what you would expect from a man writing in 1649. Newton's Principia, which laid out the laws of motion the arithmetic would rest on, was still thirty-eight years off. The arithmetic itself — the rocket equation that says exactly what dropping a spent stage buys you — waited for Tsiolkovsky at the turn of the twentieth century.
Ranks of fireworks lighting one another, then a spent stage falling away. Cyrano has both moves. He has them for the wrong reasons.
The Vials of Dew and the Logic of Solar Propulsion
The first flight in the novel is stranger, and in some ways more interesting.
The narrator ties quantité de fioles pleines de rosée — vials full of dew — all around his body. The sun's heat draws the dew upward and he rises with it, fast enough that the Moon seems to be receding rather than approaching. So he starts breaking vials, one at a time, until his weight beats the pull and he begins to come down. He lands in New France — Quebec — which the story offers as proof that the Earth had turned beneath him while he hung in the air.
Breaking the vials is the detail that gives him away. The chemistry is nonsense — the whole thing rests on a 17th-century alchemical belief about the Sun pulling moisture skyward. But a man who invents a throttle for his own nonsense is thinking mechanically about it. And the premise underneath is startlingly modern: the Sun is doing the work. The instinct to put it in the driver's seat was not wrong at all.
JAXA's IKAROS mission, launched May 21, 2010 alongside the Akatsuki Venus orbiter, settled the question of whether light by itself can move a spacecraft. Photons have no mass, but they do carry momentum. When sunlight lands on a reflective surface and bounces back, that momentum transfers, and a membrane wide enough and thin enough collects it as a steady, minuscule force. IKAROS unfurled a square sail 14 meters to a side — 196 square meters — made from polyimide film 7.5 micrometers thick, about a tenth the width of a human hair by JAXA's own comparison. Loaded with thin-film solar cells, a liquid-crystal steering layer, and instruments, the deployed membrane weighed 15 kilograms, two of which were weights at the four corners that helped the spin unfurl it. The thrust it registered was around 1.1 millinewtons. That is vanishingly small. It matters only because it never stops.
That July the team went further and steered the craft without firing anything at all. Eighty small liquid-crystal panels set into the rim could be switched between a mirror finish and a dull one, and light presses harder on the mirror. Cycling them in time with the spacecraft's spin produced enough imbalance to swing the sail through half a degree over the course of a day — attitude control with no propellant aboard. JAXA stayed in touch with IKAROS for five years, until contact ended in 2015.
Dew in glass vials on the left, photon pressure on a polyimide membrane on the right. One of these was tested in flight.
Whether any engineer on that mission had ever read Cyrano is unknowable, and almost certainly not. But the dew vials carry an instinct — that light might be enough to push something forward — that sits surprisingly close to the core of solar sailing. Three and a half centuries later, photons did the work he had imagined dew doing. He was not the only writer to picture travel beyond Earth before the physics existed to support it: Edgar Allan Poe did something similar two centuries later, in a very different register.
"A Vision Realized" — Cyrano on the lunar surface, the IKAROS sail behind him.
LightSail 2 and the Practical Numbers
LightSail 2 took the compact approach. It went up on June 25, 2019 aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy — a 3U CubeSat, ten centimeters square and thirty centimeters long, carrying 32 square meters of Mylar that four metal booms unrolled the way a tape measure extends. The Planetary Society puts the cost of the whole LightSail program, spanning 2009 through early 2019, at about $7 million.
For the next three and a half years it did what it was built to do. Swinging the sail toward the Sun and away from it on each pass, the spacecraft changed its own orbit using nothing but light. It also mapped the ceiling. At 720 kilometers the atmosphere is thin but not gone, and drag eventually took back more than sunlight could give. After roughly 18,000 orbits and some 8 million kilometers, LightSail 2 reentered on November 17, 2022.
So the practical verdict is now on the record, and it is a modest one. It works. It is slow. Near Earth, drag sets the terms. The IKAROS team had already shown where the technique actually belongs — between planets, where there is nothing to push back.
Why L'Autre Monde Was Censored for 250 Years
Here's the thing: what most people read as Cyrano's work for two and a half centuries wasn't quite his.
Every early edition of L'Autre Monde, French and English alike, has holes in it — passages simply gone, marked by rows of asterisks. Something was cut, and it was cut from exactly the places where the book turns dangerous: the Garden of Eden relocated to the Moon, the treatment of original sin, the argument that people and animals are the same kind of thing.
Who did the cutting is still an open question, and the two candidate stories are both good ones. The 1687 English translator blamed a thief — someone who rifled Cyrano's trunks during his final illness and stole the pages. Modern scholarship tends to point at Henri Lebret instead: Cyrano's schoolmate from boyhood, lifelong friend, first biographer, and the man who saw the book into print. Lebret spent his whole life trying to make Cyrano more acceptable than Cyrano wanted to be. He would not have been the worst suspect.
Either way the consequence is the same. Readers who judged Cyrano as a novelist were judging a book with its teeth pulled, and the verdict was not kind. Nobody worked through the surviving manuscripts — one in Paris, one in Munich — until a German scholar, Leo Jordan, built a critical edition out of both of them in 1910. Frédéric Lachèvre's edition, the one that put the uncensored text in front of French readers, followed in 1921. What the manuscripts restored was a writer with an actual philosophical program. The Encyclopedia of Philosophy credits him with being among the first to bind together "a criticism of the religion of Moses and the philosophy of Aristotle" as one argument instead of two. In seventeenth-century France that was not a stylistic flourish. That was the part worth cutting.
The asymmetry is what stays with me. Somebody went through that manuscript line by line with a scalpel, and the rockets came through untouched. A machine climbing on ranks of fire was harmless. A sentence about where the line between a man and an animal actually falls was not.
Which is where Rostand's version stops looking so far off the mark. A man writing in the dark, hiding what he means behind what the audience will accept — that is roughly what happened to the book itself. Hiding radical ideas inside acceptable forms has a long history; for another case of an artist whose thinking outlasted his century, see our piece on the Leonardo da Vinci discovery nobody talks about.
1649, 1657, 1921, 2010 — four dates, and a book that took the long way around to being read.
Did Cyrano de Bergerac Actually Predict Modern Rockets?
No. The longer answer is the interesting one. Staging already existed, and so did the trip to the Moon; neither was waiting on him. What he ended up with is a sequence that still reads correctly today — and a set of reasons that are entirely wrong.
| In the Novel (written c. 1649) | What It Resembles — and What It Isn't | Distance |
|---|---|---|
| Squibs ranked six and six, a fuse carrying fire from one rank to the next | Resembles the sequential firing of a staged launch vehicle. It is not a staged-launch design, and staging was already old news in Europe | ~360 years to Falcon 9 |
| The spent machine drops away; the traveler keeps rising | Resembles stage separation. Misses the reason entirely — the discard buys him nothing | 38 years to Newton, 254 to the rocket equation |
| Vials of dew — the Sun as the motive force | Shares the premise of JAXA's IKAROS solar sail. The mechanism — alchemical attraction rather than photon momentum — is wrong | ~360 years to IKAROS |
He was writing a comedy. The rockets were not a forecast — they were current technology, borrowed for a gag and stacked in the right order almost by reflex. The dew was not an engineering proposal. Both were punchlines that happened to be pointed the right way.
Every time I come back to Rostand's Cyrano — composing love letters in the dark, signing someone else's name — I see him a little differently. Not as a tragic romantic. As someone whose imagination ran so far ahead of his own century that it lapped the science without meaning to.
Falcon 9 does in hardware what his fireworks did in fiction. IKAROS sailed on light in 2010. Verne earned his accuracy; he was aiming for it. Cyrano never knew he was being accurate at all — which is why prophecy is the wrong word for what he did, since prophecy takes intent. And that, I think, is exactly what makes it harder to shrug off.
More on the history of science and the ideas that outran their own era at thesecom.net.
Sources & References
- Cyrano de Bergerac, A Voyage to the Moon — Curtis Hidden Page's 1899 edition of A. Lovell's 1687 translation (Project Gutenberg). Source of the rocket passage quoted above (Chapter IV), the dew flight (Chapter II), the composition date, the Mouzon and Arras wounds, the Gassendi class, and the censored passages
- Lachèvre's bibliography of Cyrano's works (Wikisource) — the 1657 Charles de Sercy first edition and the 1659 second edition
- Wikisource — Edmond Rostand, Cyrano de Bergerac, Act V (source of the "epitaph" verse quoted above)
- Encyclopedia of Philosophy — Cyrano de Bergerac, Savinien de (1619–1655)
- Encyclopaedia Britannica — Cyrano de Bergerac
- EBSCO Research Starters — Other Worlds, by Cyrano de Bergerac (the censorship and the manuscript recovery)
- The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction — Cyrano de Bergerac (the 1910 Jordan critical edition and the 1921 Lachèvre edition)
- Wikipedia — L'Autre Monde (Comical History of the States and Empires of the Moon)
- Wikipedia — Siege of Arras (1640)
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — Pierre Gassendi
- Wikipedia — Conrad Haas and the Sibiu Manuscript
- Wikipedia — Johann Schmidlap and step rockets
- The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction — Rockets (Cyrano's tiered rockets as a precursor)
- JAXA — IKAROS press kit (sail material, 7.5 μm membrane, the human-hair comparison, membrane and tip-mass figures)
- Mori et al., "Development of First Solar Power Sail Demonstrator — IKAROS," ISSFD 2009 (spacecraft and membrane design, by the mission team)
- JAXA — IKAROS attitude control by liquid crystal device (July 2010 press release)
- Wikipedia — IKAROS Solar Sail (sail area, membrane mass, mission timeline)
- The Planetary Society — LightSail 2 Mission (program cost and mission summary)
- NASA — Solar Sail Technology
- SpaceX — Falcon 9
About the author: James was born in 1976 and grew up in the 1980s, reading Jules Verne long before he read anything about propulsion. He spent his working life in metals and materials — precision measurement, process engineering, and CNC machining — which is where the habit of asking how a thing actually works comes from. He writes about science history, early science fiction, and overlooked discoveries at thesecom.net.
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