Content Feed

On February 8, 1828, a boy was born in Nantes, France, who would grow up to predict submarines, helicopters, space travel, and video calls — all without a single engineering degree. Jules Verne didn't just write science fiction. He wrote the blueprint for the twentieth century, and the engineers who built it openly admitted they were cribbing from his novels.

Today marks 198 years since his birth, and we're still catching up to his imagination.

Let's start with the part nobody talks about: Jules Verne was supposed to be a lawyer. His father, Pierre Verne, had the whole thing mapped out — respectable career, good income, carry on the family practice. Young Jules even went to Paris to study law. And he did finish the degree. He just never used it. Instead, he started hanging around theaters, writing plays, and falling in with a crowd that included Alexandre Dumas the Elder. Imagine your kid goes off to law school and comes home best friends with the guy who wrote The Three Musketeers. Pierre Verne was not amused. He cut off his son's allowance. Jules responded by selling his law books and buying more paper.

The turning point came in 1862 when Verne met publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel, a man with a nose for commercial gold. Hetzel saw something in Verne's manuscript "Five Weeks in a Balloon" and offered him a contract: two novels a year for twenty years. Two novels a year. Let that sink in. Most modern authors struggle to produce one book every three years, and here was Verne, churning out adventures like a literary factory. Over his lifetime, he produced 54 novels in the "Extraordinary Voyages" series alone. The man wrote more than most people read.

But quantity isn't what makes Verne terrifying. It's accuracy. In "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea" (1870), Captain Nemo cruises the ocean in the Nautilus — an electrically powered submarine, at a time when actual submarines were glorified barrels that sank more often than they surfaced. Verne described the vessel's electrical systems, its ability to desalinate water, even its massive viewing windows. When Simon Lake built one of the first modern submarines in 1898, he sent Verne a telegram thanking him for the inspiration. The U.S. Navy's first nuclear submarine, launched in 1954? They named it USS Nautilus.

Then there's "From the Earth to the Moon" (1865). Verne launched three men from Florida — Florida! — in a projectile aimed at the moon. A hundred and four years later, NASA launched three men from Florida in Apollo 11. Verne's capsule was called the Columbiad. The Apollo 11 command module was called Columbia. He even got the weightlessness right, describing his astronauts floating inside the capsule at the point where Earth's gravity and the Moon's gravity cancel each other out. The man figured out Lagrange points while sitting in a Parisian café.

"Around the World in Eighty Days" (1873) deserves special mention, not because of predictions, but because of sheer cultural impact. When Phileas Fogg set off on his wager, the serialized novel drove readers into actual frenzy. People placed real bets on whether Fogg would make it. Travel agencies started offering around-the-world packages. In 1889, journalist Nellie Bly took on the challenge for real and completed the trip in 72 days, stopping in Amiens to visit Verne himself. He told her she wouldn't make it. She did. He sent congratulations anyway. That's class.

What most people don't realize is that Verne had a dark side that his publisher systematically suppressed. His original manuscript for "Twenty Thousand Leagues" portrayed Captain Nemo as a Polish revolutionary whose family was murdered by Russians. Hetzel made him change it — too political. Verne's unpublished novel "Paris in the Twentieth Century," written in 1863 and rejected by Hetzel as too depressing, predicted gas-powered automobiles, high-speed trains, a global communications network, and a society so obsessed with technology that it had abandoned the arts. The manuscript was found in a safe in 1989 and published in 1994. Read it today and try not to feel personally attacked.

Verne's personal life was, to put it charitably, complicated. His marriage to Honorine de Viane was more of a business arrangement — she was a widow with two children, and he needed someone to manage the household while he wrote. His relationship with his son Michel was a disaster. Michel was wild, reckless, and constantly in trouble. Verne had him committed to a reformatory. Later, Michel would heavily edit his father's posthumous works, rewriting endings and altering themes. In 1886, Verne's nephew Gaston shot him in the leg. The bullet was never removed, and Verne walked with a limp for the rest of his life. The family hushed up the incident, claiming it was an accident. It was not an accident.

Here's what grinds my gears about how we remember Verne: we've turned him into a children's author. A harmless dreamer with a telescope and a big imagination. Nonsense. Verne was a sharp, sometimes bitter social critic who used adventure as camouflage. Captain Nemo isn't just a cool guy with a submarine — he's a furious anti-imperialist who declares war on the British Empire. Robur the Conqueror is a tech-bro nightmare who believes his inventions give him the right to rule. "The Begum's Fortune" is about a megalomaniac building a weapon of mass destruction. Verne was writing about the dangers of unchecked technological power in the 1870s. We're still having that conversation today.

He was also, let's be honest, the second most translated author in history, right behind Agatha Christie. More translated than Shakespeare. More translated than Dickens. He's been adapted into over 200 films. And yet, in the English-speaking world, most people have only read him in butchered Victorian translations that cut out huge chunks of the science and all of the politics. If you read Verne in a bad translation, you're reading maybe 60% of the actual book.

Verne died on March 24, 1905, in Amiens, France, partially blind, diabetic, and still writing. His gravestone in the Cimetière de la Madeleine shows him bursting out of his tomb, reaching toward the sky. It's the most perfectly on-brand monument in literary history.

So, 198 years on, what do we do with Jules Verne? We could start by actually reading him — not the Disney versions, not the children's abridgments, but the real, uncut, properly translated novels. Because the man who predicted submarines, moon landings, and the internet also predicted something else: a world so dazzled by its own technology that it forgot how to think critically about it. If that doesn't sound familiar, you haven't been paying attention.

Jules Verne didn't just write science fiction. He wrote blueprints. Submarines, moon rockets, video calls, electric chairs — this 19th-century Frenchman sketched out the next 150 years of human progress from a cramped study in Amiens, armed with nothing but newspapers, encyclopedias, and an imagination that should have been classified as a weapon. Today marks 198 years since his birth, and honestly, we still haven't caught up with everything he predicted.

Let's get the obvious out of the way: Jules Gabriel Verne was born on February 8, 1828, in Nantes, France. His father was a lawyer who expected his son to follow the same tedious path. Young Jules actually studied law in Paris, passed his exams, and then did what any reasonable person would do — he told his father to keep the law firm and started writing plays instead. His dad cut off his allowance. Verne nearly starved. And literature got one of its greatest prophets. Sometimes bad financial decisions change the world.

Before Verne became the grandfather of science fiction, he was basically a broke playwright hanging around Parisian literary salons, befriending Alexandre Dumas (the son, not the famous one, though the famous one helped too). He wrote forgettable comedies and operettas. Then in 1863, he met publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel, and everything changed. Hetzel saw something in Verne that nobody else did — or more accurately, he saw a market nobody was serving. He signed Verne to a contract for two novels a year. Two. A year. For twenty years. That's the kind of deal that either kills you or makes you immortal. For Verne, it was the latter.

The books came like cannon fire. "Five Weeks in a Balloon" in 1863. "Journey to the Center of the Earth" in 1864. "From the Earth to the Moon" in 1865. "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea" in 1870. "Around the World in Eighty Days" in 1872. Each one was a cultural earthquake. And here's what made Verne different from every other adventure writer of his era: he did his homework. He didn't just imagine a submarine — he researched pressure tolerances, oxygen systems, and marine biology. His Nautilus wasn't a fantasy; it was an engineering proposal wrapped in a novel. When Simon Lake built one of the first modern submarines in 1898, he openly credited Verne as his inspiration. When Robert Goddard started experimenting with rockets, he'd been reading "From the Earth to the Moon" since he was a teenager.

But let's talk about the book that still gives people chills: "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea." Captain Nemo is one of the most complex antiheroes in all of literature, and Verne created him in 1870 — decades before the concept of an antihero was even fashionable. Nemo is a genius, a humanitarian, a murderer, and a revolutionary all at once. He rejects civilization, builds the most advanced machine on Earth, uses it to explore the ocean's wonders, and also rams it into warships full of sailors. He's basically what Elon Musk thinks he is, except Nemo actually built his submarine himself. The novel doesn't just predict submarines — it predicts the entire emotional relationship humanity would develop with technology: awe, dependence, and terror, all tangled together.

"Around the World in Eighty Days" is a different beast entirely. It's essentially a 19th-century action comedy, and it holds up embarrassingly well. Phileas Fogg is the most British character ever written by a Frenchman — pathologically punctual, emotionally constipated, and willing to spend his entire fortune just to prove a point at his gentleman's club. The novel was serialized in a newspaper, and readers lost their minds. People actually placed real bets on whether Fogg would make it. Bookmakers in London were taking wagers on a fictional character. That's not just popularity — that's cultural hypnosis. Verne understood something that modern Netflix executives are still trying to figure out: give people a ticking clock and they'll follow you anywhere.

Now, about those predictions. Verne wrote about electric submarines fifty years before they existed. He described a global communication network in "Paris in the Twentieth Century" — a novel so ahead of its time that his own publisher refused to print it, calling it too unbelievable. It was finally published in 1994, and readers discovered that Verne had predicted skyscrapers, high-speed trains, gas-powered cars, calculators, and something eerily similar to the internet. In 1889, he wrote "In the Year 2889," which described newscasts transmitted to screens in people's homes. The man was writing about television sixty years before it was invented. At some point, you have to stop calling it imagination and start calling it something else.

What nobody tells you about Verne is how dark his life got. In 1886, his nephew Gaston shot him in the leg. No clear motive — possibly mental illness, possibly a family dispute. Verne limped for the rest of his life. His marriage was unhappy. His son was a perpetual disappointment. His later novels grew increasingly pessimistic, trading wide-eyed wonder for ecological warnings and social critique. "The Eternal Adam," published posthumously, describes a future civilization discovering the ruins of ours. The man who invented optimistic science fiction died writing cautionary tales. There's a lesson in there somewhere, and it's not a comfortable one.

Here's what really gets me about Verne's legacy: he's the second most translated author in the history of the world. Second. Only behind Agatha Christie. He wrote sixty-four novels in the "Extraordinary Voyages" series alone. He outsells most living authors. And yet, in English-speaking literary circles, he's often treated as a children's writer — a guy who wrote fun adventures about balloons and submarines. The French take him seriously. The rest of the world reads him in butchered translations that strip out half his science, most of his politics, and all of his irony, then wonders why he seems simplistic. The standard English translations of Verne are literary crimes. They cut up to 40 percent of his text. Imagine reading Moby Dick with every other chapter removed and then complaining it lacks depth.

Verne died on March 24, 1905, in Amiens. Twenty thousand people attended his funeral. His tombstone shows him rising from the grave, arm outstretched toward the sky. It's dramatic, over the top, and completely earned. By the time he died, submarines were real. Airships were flying. The Trans-Siberian Railway had made Fogg's journey almost quaint. The future was arriving exactly on schedule, and Verne had written the itinerary.

So here we are, 198 years after his birth, still living inside his imagination. Every time you watch a rocket launch, every time you read about deep-sea exploration, every time some billionaire announces a plan to colonize another planet — that's Verne's fingerprint on the world. He didn't predict the future because he was psychic. He predicted it because he understood something fundamental: humans will always build what they can first imagine. And nobody imagined harder than Jules Verne. The real question isn't why so many of his predictions came true. It's which ones haven't yet — and whether we should be excited or terrified when they do.