Jules Verne is remembered today as the father of science fiction, but that description barely captures the scale of his achievement. Between 1863 and 1905, this French novelist produced more than sixty works under the collective title Voyages Extraordinaires, many of which described technologies that would not appear for fifty, eighty or even one hundred years. He imagined submarine exploration before the first modern submarine was built. He calculated the approximate speed and trajectory of a rocket to the Moon three generations before NASA launched Apollo 11. He described news broadcasting by video screen, electric automobiles, solar-powered ships and the environmental devastation of unchecked industrial expansion. Verne was not simply a dreamer — he was a rigorous researcher who based his speculations on cutting-edge science of his day, extrapolating with an accuracy that still astonishes engineers and historians. This article examines his most remarkable predictions and asks what made a 19th-century novelist see the future so clearly.
Who Was Jules Verne?
Jules Gabriel Verne was born in Nantes, France, in 1828. He trained briefly as a lawyer before abandoning the law for literature, becoming a playwright and librettist in Paris. His breakthrough came in 1863 with Five Weeks in a Balloon, published by the editor Pierre-Jules Hetzel, who became his lifelong publisher and collaborator. Over the next four decades Verne published a novel or story collection almost every year, collectively titled Voyages Extraordinaires, or Extraordinary Journeys. He was a tireless researcher who read scientific journals, corresponded with engineers and explorers, and maintained meticulous notebooks cataloguing technological developments across every field.
Verne was also a practical man of the sea. He crossed the Atlantic several times on his own yacht, sailed extensively around the coasts of Europe and North Africa, and drew on first-hand knowledge of navigation and ocean conditions in his fiction. He was fascinated by the relationship between technology and human character, and this is where he differs most importantly from later science fiction writers: he was never simply excited by machines. He worried deeply about what technology might do in the wrong hands. Captain Nemo in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea is not simply a genius engineer but a man warped by grief and vengeance into a weapon. Verne foresaw the moral ambivalence of technological power as clearly as he foresaw the technologies themselves.
The Nautilus: Submarine Technology Imagined in 1870
When Verne published Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea in 1870, the most advanced submarine in existence was a crude hand-cranked vessel called the H.L. Hunley, used briefly by the Confederate Navy during the American Civil War. The Hunley could barely manoeuvre underwater for a few hours and sank three times during its brief operational life. Verne's Nautilus, by contrast, was a luxuriously appointed, electrically powered submarine capable of circumnavigating the globe underwater, diving to extraordinary depths and maintaining comfortable quarters for its crew. It was equipped with a natural history library, an art collection and an organ. The Nautilus could replenish its air supply by briefly surfacing and could hunt fish for food using underwater rifles powered by compressed electricity.
The real USS Nautilus — the world's first nuclear-powered submarine, launched in 1954 — was deliberately named after Verne's fictional vessel by its advocates. In 1958, the USS Nautilus made the first submerged transit of the North Pole, a journey Verne had described in his sequel The Mysterious Island. The design principles Verne outlined — electric propulsion, ballast tanks for depth control, a pressurised hull — are precisely what real submarine engineers implemented, albeit decades later and with power sources Verne could not have predicted. Modern submarine designers have noted that the fundamental architecture of the Nautilus anticipates nuclear submarine design with remarkable accuracy. When we consider that Verne described self-contained underwater habitation and global underwater navigation in an era when most people had never seen the ocean, the intellectual achievement is extraordinary.
From the Earth to the Moon: The Blueprint for Space Travel
In From the Earth to the Moon (1865) and its sequel Around the Moon (1870), Verne sent three passengers to the Moon in a projectile fired from a giant cannon located in Florida. The cannon is indeed an unworkable propulsion method — the acceleration would be instantly lethal to any passenger — but the details Verne got right are more striking than this single mistake. He correctly predicted that the launch site would be in Florida: Cape Canaveral, where NASA launches its missions, is in Florida. He correctly calculated that the journey would take roughly three days, which is precisely how long the Apollo missions took. He described weightlessness in space with accuracy. He predicted the spacecraft would need to reach escape velocity to leave Earth's gravitational field. He described splash-down in the Pacific Ocean, which is exactly where Apollo capsules returned.
Wernher von Braun, the German-American rocket engineer who was the principal architect of the Saturn V rocket that carried Apollo 11 to the Moon, cited Jules Verne directly as a boyhood inspiration. Frank Borman, Commander of Apollo 8 — the first crewed mission to orbit the Moon — stated that Verne's novels had been formative reading for him. NASA engineers have confirmed reading Verne as childhood inspiration for their careers. The accuracy of Verne's physics, based on careful reading of 19th-century mechanics and trajectory calculations he worked out personally, is a remarkable intellectual achievement. He did not guess these things — he calculated them, to the best of his ability, using the science of his time.
Electric Power and the Hydrogen Economy
In The Mysterious Island (1874), Verne's castaways discuss their hope that one day the world will use water as its primary fuel source. 'I believe that water will one day be employed as fuel,' says the engineer Cyrus Harding. 'Hydrogen and oxygen which constitute it, used singly or together, will furnish an inexhaustible source of heat and light, of an intensity of which coal is not capable.' This passage was written more than a century before hydrogen fuel cells became a serious area of research and long before they began powering vehicles and buildings in the 2020s. The International Energy Agency in 2024 noted that hydrogen was one of the fastest-growing areas of clean energy investment globally — confirming Verne's intuition.
In Robur the Conqueror (1886), Verne's aerial vessel is powered entirely by electricity. In Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, the Nautilus operates on electricity extracted from sodium and mercury batteries charged by the ocean's own chemical properties. At a time when electricity was still a scientific novelty confined to telegraphs and early arc lamps, Verne envisioned electric transport as the inevitable future of human civilization. He also described solar-powered devices in various stories, anticipating photovoltaic technology by nearly a century. That hydrogen and electric power are now the twin pillars of the global clean energy transition validates his technological intuition with almost uncanny precision.
Video Calls and the Phonotelephote
In the story In the Year 2889, Verne described a future in which a newspaper editor communicates with his staff and readers via a device called the phonotelephote, which transmits both sound and image simultaneously across great distances. In the story, people in different cities can see and hear each other clearly and in real time. This is, in precise functional terms, a description of video calling — FaceTime, Zoom, Microsoft Teams or Google Meet — conceived sixty years before television became widely available and more than a century before video calling became a routine part of daily life. The concept is not vague or approximate; Verne described two-way real-time audio-visual communication between remote parties, which is exactly what video calling is.
In the same story, Verne described automated news delivery by telephone to subscribers: a system in which the day's events are read aloud by a broadcaster and transmitted directly to listeners at home. This anticipates radio news broadcasting by three decades and podcast subscriptions by more than a century. He also described a world where newspapers are replaced by continuous audio and visual news streams delivered directly to individuals — a description of 24-hour television news and streaming media that is startlingly accurate. The breadth of Verne's social imagination, his ability to think through how technology would change daily life rather than just imagining the hardware, is what truly distinguishes him.
The Internet and Global Information Networks
In Paris in the Twentieth Century (1863) — a manuscript Verne completed but which his publisher refused to release as too pessimistic — Verne described a world of global telegraph networks linking every city on Earth into a single communication system. Information could flow instantaneously across continents. Commercial and financial data moved through this network continuously. The young protagonist feels isolated in a world dominated by commerce and communication technology, unable to find genuine human connection in a world of machines. The manuscript was locked in a safe after its rejection and was only discovered by Verne's great-grandson in 1989, in a locked box in a Nantes apartment.
When Paris in the Twentieth Century was finally published in 1994, readers and critics were stunned to find a description of the internet — a global information network linking humanity in continuous commercial communication — written more than 130 years earlier. Verne did not predict every technical detail correctly, but the broad architecture he imagined, its social and psychological consequences, and the alienation it might produce all map recognisably onto the world of the early 21st century. He saw not just the technology but its human cost: the young poet who cannot find a place for art and emotion in a world optimised for information and profit is a figure contemporary readers will recognise immediately.
Climate Warnings and Ecological Anxiety
Verne was more anxious about ecological destruction than most modern readers appreciate. In The Fur Country (1873), he described the accelerating melting of Arctic ice and its consequences for wildlife and navigation. In Master of the World (1904), his final major novel, he returned to the theme of uncontrolled technological power threatening both civilisation and the natural environment. Long before climate science existed as a formal discipline, Verne was writing about the fragility of the natural world in the face of industrial expansion with a seriousness that anticipates the environmentalism of the late 20th century.
His descriptions of mass hunting and species depletion in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and The Mysterious Island carry an ecological urgency that reads very differently in 2026 than it did in 1870. Captain Nemo witnesses the hunting of sperm whales near the Crozet Islands and describes it with barely controlled horror, predicting that such slaughter will exhaust the species within decades. Verne's emotional attachment to the natural world, combined with his scientific literacy, allowed him to see threats that were invisible to most of his contemporaries. The International Whaling Commission estimates that global whale populations fell by over 90 percent during the industrial whaling era — precisely the catastrophe Nemo foresaw.
Why Verne Got So Much Right
Several factors explain Verne's extraordinary predictive accuracy. First, he was an obsessive reader of scientific journals and popular science magazines in French, English and German, maintaining notebooks that catalogued every major technological development. He had access to the best scientific minds of his era and corresponded with engineers and explorers throughout his career. Second, he extrapolated logically from existing trends rather than inventing from nothing. His submarines, aircraft and space capsules were extensions of real engineering trajectories that he had studied carefully. Third, and perhaps most importantly, he thought in systems. He did not just imagine a submarine; he thought through what it would need to do, how it would be powered, what problems its crew would face, how it would interact with the ocean environment, and what moral questions its existence would raise.
His mistakes are as instructive as his successes. He got the lunar launch method completely wrong. He underestimated the time it would take for some technologies to arrive. His social forecasts were sometimes coloured by the class assumptions and racial attitudes of his era. But the ratio of his correct predictions to his errors, across sixty volumes of scientific speculation written over forty years, is almost without parallel in literary history. No other writer has matched his combination of scientific literacy, systematic imagination and ethical seriousness. He was, in the truest sense, not a fantasist but a prophet.
Reading Jules Verne Today
Verne's books remain in print in dozens of languages, and his classic adventure novels are freely available in English translation through Project Gutenberg, since both his original French texts and early English translations are now in the public domain. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Journey to the Centre of the Earth, Around the World in Eighty Days, The Mysterious Island and From the Earth to the Moon all reward reading today, not only for their historical interest but for their genuine suspense, vivid world-building and philosophical depth. Verne is far more than a historical curiosity; he is a novelist of the first rank whose imagination helped create the modern world.
LifeWithBooks offers reading summaries and guides for several Verne titles in our adventure and literature categories. Browse our catalogue to find the Verne novel that matches your interests, download a free reference overview, and explore one of the most remarkable literary minds of any century. For context, pair your Verne reading with some history of 19th-century technology: understanding what was and was not possible in his era makes each prediction he got right all the more astonishing.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Jules Verne's most accurate prediction?
Most science historians point to his detailed description of space travel in From the Earth to the Moon and Around the Moon, which correctly predicted the Florida launch site, the three-day journey duration, the need for escape velocity, weightlessness in space, and Pacific Ocean splash-down — all decades before any of these were reality.
Did Jules Verne invent the submarine?
No — real submarines existed before Verne. But his fictional Nautilus was so far ahead of actual submarine technology that it directly inspired generations of engineers. The first nuclear-powered submarine, USS Nautilus, was named after Verne's vessel by its advocates, and its commander cited Verne as an inspiration.
Are Jules Verne's books in the public domain?
Yes. Verne died in 1905, and his original works — both in French and in the early English translations — have long since entered the public domain. They can be downloaded free of charge from Project Gutenberg (gutenberg.org) and Standard Ebooks (standardebooks.org).
Which Jules Verne book should I read first?
Around the World in Eighty Days is the most accessible starting point: brisk, funny and full of genuine adventure. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea is the most scientifically fascinating and philosophically rich. Journey to the Centre of the Earth is perhaps the most purely entertaining for readers new to Verne.
Why was Paris in the Twentieth Century never published in Verne's lifetime?
His publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel rejected it as too pessimistic, fearing that readers would not accept a gloomy vision of the future from the author known for thrilling adventure. The manuscript remained hidden until 1989, when Verne's great-grandson discovered it in a locked safe in Nantes.
References
- Jules Verne Society International — https://julesverne.ca/
- Project Gutenberg: Jules Verne — https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/60
- NASA History Division — https://history.nasa.gov/
- Arthur B. Evans, Jules Verne Rediscovered, Greenwood Press — https://www.greenwood.com/
- International Energy Agency: Hydrogen Report 2024 — https://www.iea.org/reports/global-hydrogen-review-2024