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

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.