The Science That Jules Verne Got Right: How a 19th Century Novelist Predicted the Modern World

I have been thinking about Jules Verne lately in a way that goes beyond “oh cool, he predicted submarines.” The submarine thing is well-known. What’s less discussed is how much of what he got right wasn’t just technology, it was specific technical detail. Not just “a boat that goes underwater” but the propulsion system, the range, the interior layout, the depth capacity. Not just “a rocket that goes to the moon” but the launch site, the crew size, the trajectory, and the weightlessness the crew would experience. He got details right that he had no business getting right, from a century out, with Victorian technology as his reference point.

Verne was not a scientist. He was a lawyer’s son from Nantes who was supposed to practice law. He read scientific journals obsessively, attended lectures, and corresponded with inventors. He did his homework. But there is still a gap between reading about early diving bell experiments and writing a novel in which the submarine operates on electricity, travels 20,000 leagues under the sea, and foreshadows the engineering choices that actual naval engineers would make decades later. The homework doesn’t fully explain it.

The Moon Landing That NASA Apparently Studied

From the Earth to the Moon, published in 1865, describes a manned mission to the moon launched from Florida by a projectile fired from a giant cannon. The parallels to the actual Apollo program a century later are genuinely unsettling.

Verne’s launch site: Tampa, Florida. Apollo 11’s launch site: Cape Kennedy, Florida. Verne’s crew: three men. Apollo 11’s crew: three men. Verne’s spacecraft dimensions: roughly 9 feet in diameter. Apollo capsule’s dimensions: roughly 12 feet in diameter. The mission in the novel splashes down in the Pacific Ocean on return. The Apollo missions splashed down in the Pacific Ocean.

Verne also wrote extensively about the weightlessness the travelers would experience once they left Earth’s gravitational sphere, describing the physical sensation with reasonable accuracy at a time when nobody had experienced it and the physics involved were not widely understood. He calculated the required escape velocity at approximately 25,000 miles per hour. The actual escape velocity from Earth is about 25,000 miles per hour. He was working from Newtonian physics and a lot of arithmetic, but still.

The differences are real: a cannon launch would not survive the acceleration forces, which Verne knew but couldn’t solve, and his timing was off in various ways. The similarities, however, are remarkable enough that NASA engineers have cited the novel as a genuine part of the intellectual tradition they worked within.

The Nautilus and What It Got Right

Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, published in 1870, describes the submarine Nautilus in technical detail that would have been speculative nonsense at the time. Electric propulsion for a submarine was a concept without a practical implementation in 1870. Early submarines existed but relied on manual power or compressed air.

Verne had the Nautilus run on electricity, with a sophisticated battery system that could sustain long journeys. The first practical electric submarine came in the 1880s. Modern nuclear submarines run on a principle that produces electricity, which they use for propulsion, closely paralleling the Nautilus’s energy architecture. The novel describes a pressurized hull, an airlock for underwater egress, lights on the exterior hull for deep navigation, a library and organ inside, and a dining room where the crew eats food sourced entirely from the ocean.

The pressurized hull, the airlock, the external lighting: all of these became standard submarine engineering. The library and organ did not, though the long-voyage amenity concept is real. Captain Nemo is also significantly more interesting than most submarine captains in fiction before or since, but that is a separate conversation.

Paris in the Twentieth Century, the Book His Publisher Refused

Here is the one that genuinely broke my brain when I found out about it. In 1863, Jules Verne wrote a novel called Paris in the Twentieth Century. His publisher, Pierre-Jules Hetzel, rejected it. He told Verne it was too pessimistic, that the predictions were too fantastic to be believable, and that nobody would want to read it. The manuscript sat in a safe for over 130 years. A great-grandson discovered it in 1989 and published it in 1994.

The novel describes Paris in 1960. It features a network of gas-powered automobiles filling the streets and poisoning the air. It describes a worldwide communications network allowing instant transmission of text over long distances. It describes elevated trains and subways. It describes a calculating machine that can perform mathematical functions. It describes street lighting powered by electricity. It describes something closely resembling the internet, with terminals in libraries that allow people to access vast stores of information.

Hetzel told Verne the automobiles were implausible. He told him instant global communication was fantasy. He said nobody would believe any of it. The book sat in a safe until 1989. By the time anyone published it, essentially everything Verne described existed and people were already taking most of it for granted.

Why He Got So Much Right

The genuine answer is probably a combination of things. First, Verne read more scientific literature than almost any fiction writer of his era and understood it well enough to extrapolate. He wasn’t guessing. He was identifying trends that were already visible in the scientific community and following them forward.

Second, he was writing adventure stories, which meant he needed his technology to be dramatic and functional rather than merely decorative. A submarine that doesn’t actually work as a submarine breaks the story. The functional constraints pushed him toward technical accuracy in ways that more fantastical fiction doesn’t require.

Third, and this is the part I keep coming back to: he had the imagination to take scientific principles seriously and ask where they led, rather than stopping at “this seems impossible.” The electric submarine seemed impossible in 1870. Verne wrote it anyway, worked out how it would function, and described it in detail. That combination of scientific grounding and imaginative willingness to follow the logic wherever it went produced a body of work that keeps lapping the century it was written in.

He died in 1905. The Wright Brothers made their first flight in 1903. Verne didn’t quite live to see powered flight, which was one of the things he got right in Robur the Conqueror in 1886. He did live to see the first practical submarines, the early automobiles, and a few other technologies he had described in fiction years before they existed.