This Day In Tech

Photo: Public Domain/Wikimedia

1828: Author Jules Verne, considered to be the father of science fiction, is born in Nantes, France. Many of his technological imaginings, in novels such as Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and From the Earth to the Moon, will eventually come to be reality.

Verne was the son of a highly analytical father and a highly imaginative mother, and this amalgamation shows in his writing. “The Extraordinary Voyages,†as his works are collectively known, combine adventure and pure science. Sure, while en route to the center of the Earth you probably wouldn’t find dinosaurs and giant mushrooms, at least not while sober and well rested, but Verne’s grasp of biology, geology, astronomy and pretty much any other scientific discipline were remarkable for a time when folks thought that a nip of morphine was a great way to get an insufferable infant to stop screaming.

And when it came to technology, Verne was an oracle. His posthumously published novel Paris in the Twentieth Century predicted, among other things, the internet. The electric rifles from Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea that Captain Nemo and his men use to hunt animals are today called Tasers and are used to hunt unruly students. (The acronym “Taser,†though, stands for Thomas A. Swift’s Electric Rifle, taken from a novel published 40 years after Twenty Thousand Leagues.) And Verne’s descriptions of a space mission in From the Earth to the Moon and its sequel Around the Moon are remarkably similar to NASA’s Apollo 8 mission that first put men in orbit around our little white satellite. Although Verne’s projectile was fired from a giant gun, called the Columbiad, both missions took off from Florida and splashed down in the Pacific Ocean. Verne’s spacecraft and NASA’s, called Columbia, were both made of aluminum and were nearly identical in their shape and weight.

In his later years, though suffering from the deaths of his mother, publisher and mistress, as well as a bullet wound to the leg courtesy of his insane nephew, Verne remained a prolific writer. His work took an understandably darker tone in this period, abandoning giddy adventure for a more dystopian vision, but nevertheless retained that old Verne charm. The great writer succumbed to diabetes-related illness in 1905.

Verne’s works have been adapted into countless movies and TV shows, and have influenced countless others, such as the silent classic A Trip to the Moon and the Smashing Pumpkins’ similar but decidedly more audible video for “Tonight, Tonight.” He was even memorialized in an English shopping mall’s erstwhile Jules Verne Food Court, which, though thoroughly ridiculous with its big balloon à la Around the World in Eighty Days and its cosmopolitan cuisine, will never touch the unflinching irony of New York’s sprawling Walt Whitman Shops.

Source: Various