The Man Who Designed the Future

Jules Gabriel Verne was born on February 8, 1828, in Nantes, France. His father was a lawyer. His mother came from a family of shipbuilders and navigators. Verne wanted to be a writer. His father wanted him to be a lawyer. Verne tried law, lasted a few years in Paris, and then abandoned it for the page.

In 1862, he met the publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel, who recognized his talent for embedding scientific ideas inside adventure narratives. Hetzel published Five Weeks in a Balloon in 1863, and it became an international bestseller. Over the next four decades, Verne produced the Voyages Extraordinaires, more than sixty novels including Journey to the Centre of the Earth, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, and Around the World in Eighty Days.

Verne didn't predict the future. He extrapolated the present. He read scientific journals, attended lectures, and corresponded with engineers. His submarines, flying machines, and space capsules were engineering projections grounded in the physics of his time. From the Earth to the Moon, published in 1865, described a spacecraft launched from Florida that orbited the Moon and splashed down in the Pacific. Apollo 11, a century later, did exactly that.

a second portrait of jules verne, photographed by étienne carjat, showing the author who would go on to write 54 novels in his "voyages extraordinaires" series. source: wikimedia commons

He became the second most translated author in history. Submarine designer Simon Lake, aviator Alberto Santos-Dumont, and rocket pioneers Tsiolkovsky and Goddard all cited Verne as inspiration. He died in Amiens on March 24, 1905. Over 5,000 people attended his funeral. He spent his life imagining what technology could do, and technology spent the next century proving him right.