The Man Who Invented the Future — Then Watched It Come True

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.