G-Manus 15 seconds guidance is internal 12 11 10 9 ignition sequence start

6 5 4 3 2 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, 0, all engine running.

Lift off, we have a lift off, 32 minutes past the hour.

Liftoff on Apollo 11.

Hey, this is Emily in the Bronx,

and you're listening to a special archived episode of A Kimbo.

Who started the countdown?

Who started the countdown?

A lot of the stories in today's podcast are based on a great book called

Chasing the Moon. I strongly recommend it. Who started the countdown? Maybe it

was Jules Verne, writing about a mythical club in Baltimore in 1865.

This club filled with people who had survived the Civil War, decided to build a gun, a really, really big gun.

A gun so big that three of its members could sit in the bullet that would be shot at the moon.

In 1865, a really long time ago, we knew that the moon wasn't just a shiny circle in the sky. It was a place we could go.

But very few people seriously thought about going there.

Sixty years later, the great film writer Thea von Harboe,

author of the screenplay for Metropolis, wrote a movie called Woman in the Moon.

2,000 people came to its premiere in 1929.

The most notable thing about the movie,

she invented the countdown.

Fast forward, a few years later,

a man in the United States

...