The great traveler and predictor - Jules Verne. Jules Verne's predictions What invention did Jules Verne predict?

No matter what I write, no matter what I invent, all this will always be below the actual capabilities of a person. The time will come when science will outstrip imagination.

Jules Verne

Jules Verne is considered not only one of the founders of science fiction, but also a writer who, like no one else, knew how to predict the future. There are few authors who would do as much to popularize science and progress as the great Frenchman. Today, in the 21st century, we can judge how often he was right - or wrong.

From a cannon to the moon

Verne sent three travelers to the Moon - the same number were on the crew of each Apollo. The Columbiad projectile was aluminum - and it was aluminum alloys that were used to create the Apollo lander.

Young Jules Verne

One of Verne's boldest prophecies is space travel. Of course, the Frenchman was not the first author to send his heroes to the celestial spheres. But before him, literary astronauts flew only miraculously. For example, in the middle of the 17th century, the English priest Francis Godwin wrote the utopia “Man on the Moon”, the hero of which went to the satellite with the help of fantastic birds. Except that Cyrano de Bergerac flew to the Moon not only on horseback, but also with the help of a primitive analogue of a rocket. However, writers did not think about the scientific basis for space flight until the 19th century.

The first who seriously undertook to send a man into space without the help of “devilishness” was precisely Jules Verne - he naturally relied on the power of the human mind. However, in the sixties of the last century, people could only dream of space exploration, and science had not yet seriously addressed this issue. The French writer had to fantasize solely at his own peril and risk. Verne decided that the best way to send a man into space would be a giant cannon, the projectile of which would serve as a passenger module.

One of the main problems of the “lunar cannon” project is connected with the projectile. Verne himself understood perfectly well that the astronauts would experience serious overloads at the moment of the shot. This can be seen from the fact that the heroes of the novel “From the Earth to the Moon” tried to protect themselves with the help of soft wall coverings and mattresses. Needless to say, all this in reality would not have saved a person who decided to repeat the feat of the members of the “Cannon Club”.

However, even if the travelers managed to ensure safety, two more practically insoluble problems would remain. Firstly, a gun capable of launching a projectile of such mass into space must be simply fantastic in length. Secondly, even today it is impossible to provide a cannon projectile with a starting speed that allows it to overcome the gravity of the Earth. Finally, the writer did not take into account air resistance - although against the background of other problems with the idea of ​​​​a space gun, this already seems like a trifle.

At the same time, it is impossible to overestimate the influence that Verne’s novels had on the origin and development of astronautics. The French writer predicted not only the journey to the Moon, but also some of its details - for example, the dimensions of the “passenger module”, the number of crew members and the approximate cost of the project. Verne became one of the main inspirations of the space age. Konstantin Tsiolkovsky spoke about him:

The desire for space travel was instilled in me by the famous dreamer J. Verne. He awakened the brain in this direction.

Ironically, it was Tsiolkovsky at the beginning of the 20th century who finally substantiated the incompatibility of Verne’s idea with manned astronautics.

The ISS crew delivered Jules Verne's manuscripts into orbit

Bringing Fantasy to Life: Space Gun

Almost a hundred years after the release of Man on the Moon, the space gun project has found new life. In 1961, the US and Canadian departments of defense launched the joint HARP project. His goal was to create guns that would allow scientific and military satellites to be launched into low orbit. It was assumed that the “supergun” would significantly reduce the cost of launching satellites - to only a few hundred dollars per kilogram of useful weight.

By 1967, a team led by ballistic weapons specialist Gerald Bull had created a dozen prototypes of a space gun and learned to launch projectiles to an altitude of 180 kilometers - despite the fact that in the United States, space flight is considered to be beyond 100 kilometers. However, political differences between the United States and Canada led to the closure of the project. Now the HARP cannon is abandoned and overgrown with rust.

This failure did not put an end to the idea of ​​a space gun. Until the end of the 20th century, several more attempts were made to create it. But so far no one has managed to launch a cannon shell into Earth orbit.

Submarine

In fact, Jules Verne most often anticipated not the emergence of new technologies, but the direction of development of existing ones. This can be most clearly demonstrated by the example of the famous Nautilus.

The first projects and even working prototypes of underwater vessels appeared long before Verne himself was born. Moreover, by the time he began work on 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, the first mechanical submarine, which was christened the Diver, had already been launched in France, and Verne was collecting information about it before he began writing the novel.

But what was the “Diver”? A crew of 12 people could hardly fit on board the ship; it could dive no more than 10 meters and reach a speed of only 4 knots underwater.

Against this background, the characteristics and capabilities of the Nautilus looked absolutely incredible. Comfortable as an ocean liner, and perfectly suited for long expeditions, the submarine had a diving depth of several kilometers and a top speed of 50 knots.

Fantastic! And so far. As happened more than once with Verne, he overestimated the capabilities of not only contemporary but also future technologies. Even nuclear submarines of the 21st century are not able to compete in speed with the Nautilus and repeat the maneuvers that it performed playfully.

Nor can they go without refueling and replenishing supplies for as long as the Nautilus could. And, of course, today’s submarines can never be handled by one person - and Nemo continued to sail on the Nautilus even after he lost his entire crew. On the other hand, the ship did not have an air regeneration system; to replenish its supply, Captain Nemo needed to rise to the surface every five days.

Despite all this, one cannot help but admit that Verne foresaw the general trends in the development of submarines with amazing accuracy. The ability of submarines to make long autonomous journeys, large-scale battles between them, exploration of the depths of the sea with their help, and even a trip under the ice to the Pole (the North Pole, of course, not the South Pole - Verne was wrong here) - all this has become a reality. True, only in the second half of the 20th century with the advent of technologies that Verne had never even dreamed of - in particular, nuclear energy. The world's first nuclear submarine was symbolically dubbed the Nautilus.

In 2006, Exomos created a working submarine that is as close as possible to the literary Nautilus, at least in terms of appearance. The ship is used to entertain tourists visiting Dubai.

Bringing Fantasy to Life: Floating City

In the novel “The Floating Island,” the French novelist made a prediction that has not yet come true, but very soon may come true. The action of this book took place on an artificial island, on which the richest people on Earth tried to create a man-made paradise for themselves.

The Seasteading Institute organization is ready to implement this idea these days. It intends to create not just one, but several floating city-states by 2014. They will have sovereignty and live by their own liberal laws, which should make them extremely attractive for business. One of the sponsors of the project is the founder of the PayPal payment system, Peter Thiel, known for his libertarian views.

Aircrafts

To talk about the conquest of the air element, Verne came up with Robur the conqueror. This unrecognized genius is somewhat reminiscent of Nemo, but devoid of romance and nobility. First, Robur created the Albatross aircraft, which rose into the air using propellers. Although outwardly the Albatross looked more like an ordinary ship, it can rightfully be considered the “grandfather” of helicopters.

And in the novel “Lord of the World,” Robur developed an absolutely incredible vehicle. His "Terrible" was a universal machine: it moved with equal ease through the air, land, water and even under water - and at the same time it could move at a speed of about 200 miles per hour (this sounds funny these days, but Verne believed that such The car will become invisible to the human eye). This universal machine remained the writer’s invention. Is science lagging behind Verne? It's not just that. Such a station wagon is simply impractical and unprofitable.

Attempts have been made to create a hybrid aircraft and submarine. And, oddly enough, successful ones. In the 1930s, Soviet designers tried to “teach” a seaplane how to scuba dive, but the project was not completed. But in the USA in 1968, at the New York industrial exhibition, a prototype of the Aeroship flying submarine was demonstrated. This technical wonder has never found practical application.

Hitler and weapons of mass destruction

Jules Verne passed away in 1905 and did not see the horror of the world wars. But he, like many of his contemporaries, sensed the approaching era of large-scale conflicts and the emergence of new destructive types of weapons. And, of course, the French science fiction writer tried to predict what they would turn out to be like.

Verne paid serious attention to the theme of war and weapons in the novel “Five Hundred Million Begums.” He made the main villain of the book the German professor Schulze, an obsessive nationalist with a thirst for world domination. Schulze invented a giant cannon capable of hitting a target many kilometers away, and developed poisonous gas projectiles for it. Thus, Verne anticipated the advent of chemical weapons. And in the novel “Flag of the Motherland,” the Frenchman even depicted the “Fulgurator Rock” super-shell, capable of destroying any building within a radius of thousands of square meters - the analogy with a nuclear bomb literally suggests itself.

At the same time, Vern preferred to look into the future with optimism. The dangerous inventions in his books, as a rule, ruined their own creators - just as the insidious Schulze died from a freezing bomb. In reality, alas, anyone suffered from weapons of mass destruction, but not their creators.

The gas created by Professor Schulze could instantly freeze all living things. But Hitler's predecessor was let down by the unreliability of his inventions.

The appearance of the 20th century

At the dawn of his career, in 1863, the then little-known Jules Verne wrote the novel Paris in the Twentieth Century, in which he tried to predict what the world would look like a century later. Unfortunately, perhaps Verne’s most prophetic work not only did not receive recognition during the writer’s lifetime, but also saw the light only at the end of that very 20th century.

The first reader of “Paris in the 20th Century” - the future publisher of “Extraordinary Journeys” - Pierre-Jules Etzel rejected the manuscript. Partly due to purely literary shortcomings - the writer was still inexperienced - and partly because Etzel considered Verne’s forecasts too incredible and pessimistic. The editor was confident that readers would find the book completely implausible. The novel was first published only in 1994, when readers could already appreciate the visionary insight of the science fiction writer.

In the Paris of “tomorrow,” skyscrapers rose, people traveled on high-speed electric trains, and criminals were executed by electric shock. Banks used computers that instantly performed complex arithmetic operations. Of course, when describing the 20th century, the writer was based on the achievements of his contemporaries. For example, the entire planet is entangled in a global information network, but it is based on an ordinary telegraph.

But even without wars, the world of the 20th century looks pretty gloomy. We are accustomed to believe that Verne was inspired by scientific and technological progress and glorified it. And “Paris in the 20th Century” shows us a society where high technology is combined with a miserable life. People only care about progress and profit. Culture has been consigned to the dustbin of history, music, literature and painting have been forgotten. Here, fortunately, Verne greatly exaggerated the colors.

Among other things, Paris in the 20th Century anticipated the “theory of containment” developed by the American diplomat George Kennan only in the 1940s. Verne assumed that with the advent of weapons capable of destroying the entire planet in several countries, wars would come to an end. As we know, the science fiction writer was in a hurry here: there are plenty of local armed conflicts today.

* * *

Of course, many of his predictions now seem naive. But few prophets in history managed to predict so accurately how technical thought and progress would develop.

Contemporaries of Verne

Albert Robida: Visionary Artist

If a Frenchman of the late 19th - early 20th centuries were asked who most convincingly describes the future, then the name “Albert Robida” would be mentioned along with the name “Jules Verne”. This writer and artist also made amazing guesses about the technologies of the future, and he was credited with an almost supernatural gift of foresight.

Robida predicted that not a single home of the future would be complete without a “telephonoscope,” which would broadcast the latest news 24 hours a day. He described devices that resemble prototypes of modern communicators. Along with Verne, Robida was one of the first to talk about chemical weapons and super-powerful bombs, which, despite their small size, would have incredible destructive power. In his drawings and books, Robida often depicted flying cars that would replace ground transport. That prediction hasn't come true—yet. Let's hope that over time it will come true.

Thomas Edison: The Word of a Scientist

Not only science fiction writers tried to predict in which direction scientific thought would develop. In 1911, the outstanding inventor Thomas Edison, a contemporary of Verne, was asked to tell how he saw the world a hundred years later.

Of course, he gave the most accurate forecast as far as his area was concerned. Steam, he said, was on its last days, and in the future all equipment, in particular high-speed trains, will run exclusively on electricity. And the main means of transportation will be “giant flying machines capable of moving at a speed of two hundred miles per hour.”

Edison believed that in the 21st century all houses and their interior decoration would be made of steel, which would then be given a resemblance to certain materials. The books, according to the inventor, will be made of ultra-light nickel. So in one volume a couple of centimeters thick and weighing several hundred grams, more than forty thousand pages can fit - for example, the entire Encyclopedia Britannica.

Finally, Edison prophesied the invention of... the philosopher's stone. He believed that humanity would learn to easily turn iron into gold, which would become so cheap that we could even make taxis and ocean liners from it.

Alas, the imagination of even such outstanding people as Edison is greatly limited by the framework of their contemporary world. Even the forecasts of science fiction writers who wrote only fifteen to twenty years ago are already difficult to perceive without a condescending smile. Against this background, Edison's foresight looks impressive.

“These are simple coincidences, and they can be explained very simply. When I talk about some scientific phenomenon, I first examine all the sources available to me and draw conclusions based on many facts. As for the accuracy of the descriptions, in this regard I am indebted to all sorts of extracts from books, newspapers, magazines, various abstracts and reports, which I have prepared for future use and are gradually replenished.”- this is how Jules Verne explained inventions and phenomena, some of which began to come to life during the writer’s lifetime.

We decided to remember which scientific phenomena predicted by the science fiction writer have become part of our lives.

Flights into space and to the moon

Where is it predicted: novels "From the Gun to the Moon", "Around the Moon" and "Hector Servadac"

In addition to the space flights themselves, Jules Verne accurately predicted the widespread use of aluminum in the creation of aircraft and spacecraft. In the 19th century, the production of this light metal was extremely expensive, so for contemporaries the phrase “machines made of aluminum” sounded approximately the same as for us now “machines made of gold.”

Interestingly, the area of ​​Stones Hill in Florida was chosen as the launching site for the lunar expedition. Let us remind you that the modern American spaceport at Cape Canaveral is located nearby.

Like Jules Verne, and in reality in 1969, during the first flight to the Moon, the crew consisted of three people.

Fast travel around the world

Everyone knows that Jules Verne's hero, the Englishman Phileas Fogg, traveled around the world in 80 days. However, the novel says more than once that the time will come when it will be possible to travel around the Earth in just 80 hours!

Well, the science fiction writer was not so far from the truth: now the minimum time for a trip around the world is about 72 hours (three days). Although in March 2010, a Swiss pilot set a record by covering this distance in 58 hours on a business class passenger plane.

Fast submarines

The history of underwater shipbuilding began back in... the 17th century! Even then, the British mechanic and physicist Cornelius Drebbel designed and built a rowing vessel capable of diving under water. And during the American Civil War, the submarine was first successfully used as a weapon. So Jules Verne had a lot of factual material at hand when he came up with The Nautilus.

However, the writer was able to predict how submarines would develop. Captain Nemo's ship dives for many kilometers, reaches speeds of up to 50 knots, allows you to conduct research on the seabed and fight effectively. To tell the truth, many of the Nautilus indicators still look extremely fantastic. But science does not stand still, and we all know it. On the other hand, modern submarines have something that Jules Verne could not even imagine, for example - a nuclear engine and the ability to stay under water without surfacing for several months in a row.

Scuba

In the same novel, Jules Verne described the prototype of modern scuba gear, invented in 1943 by another equally famous Frenchman, Jacques-Yves Cousteau. At the time of the science fiction writer’s life, diving suits already existed and were quite widely used, but working in them was extremely difficult and dangerous.

Airplanes and helicopters

The world's first airplane, the Wright brothers, took off during Jules Verne's lifetime in 1903, but it was he, along with another visionary writer, H. G. Wells, who predicted the widespread use of aircraft similar to modern airplanes and helicopters for military purposes. The titles of the novels speak for themselves: “Lord of the World” and “Robur the Conqueror.” Verne described an aircraft with a variable thrust vector in “The Extraordinary Adventures of the Barsak Expedition” (unfortunately, the writer did not have time to finish this book during his lifetime; his son completed it - it was published only in 1919).

Electric chair

Where is it predicted:"Paris in the 20th century"

In an early dystopian novel written in 1860, Jules Verne showed the capital of France in the 60s of the now last century. Death sentences were carried out using a powerful electrical discharge passed through the human body. This method of execution was first used in the United States on August 6, 1890 at Auburn Prison in New York. But in the writer’s homeland, the guillotine continued to be used for many years, and the electric chair never became widespread.

Video communication, television and modern computers

Where is it predicted:"Paris in the 20th century"

In the same novel, the author described the prototype of television, as well as the ability to communicate by seeing the interlocutor on the monitor. At the same time, computing operations in banks were performed by special machines similar to bulky computers of the second half of the 20th century.

Trans-Siberian and Trans-Mongolian railways

The adventure novel "Claudius Bombarnac", written in 1893, tells about the opening of the great Trans-Asian Highway (from Russia to Beijing). By that time, construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway had just begun, but in Europe many people considered this project a gamble. However, by 1916 the road was completed. Unfortunately, Jules Verne did not live to see this significant event. The writer died in 1905.

Giant guns and chemical weapons

Published in 1879, The Five Hundred Million Begums tells the story of German Professor Schultz, an obsessive nationalist who created a giant cannon that was capable of sending heavy projectiles filled with poisonous gas miles into the distance. Similar weapons were used during the First World War.

Explosions of colossal power

The invention of Tom Rock, the hero of the novel “Flag of the Motherland,” is very reminiscent of nuclear weapons. The Doom Fulgurator super projectile is capable of destroying all life within a radius of several square kilometers. But in the writer’s book it never falls into the hands of the military. There are also two submarines in the novel.

34-year-old self-taught physicist Alexey Rasulov from the village of Vorontsovo, Kursk region, is confident that time travel is possible. He supports his theory with the necessary calculations and diagrams of the “machine of the future.”

The village of Vorontsovo, not indicated on all maps and even invisible to a satellite navigator, is hidden in a real rural outback. This, however, does not prevent its resident Alexei Rasulov from conducting research on a global scale.

At home, the Kursk self-taught scientist has neatly arranged volumes of encyclopedias, reference books and monographs on physics, mechanics and problems in the study of the Universe on the shelves.

If other Vorontsovites are more interested in gardening and farming, then the Rasulovs in everyday life use “hadron colliders”, “quanta”, “deuterium” and “black holes”, which are incomprehensible to many. It is difficult to judge to what extent Alexey’s projects are scientifically substantiated and realistic for implementation, but we responded to the invitation to come visit him in order to see with our own eyes the place where the possibilities of cold nuclear fusion are discussed and a time machine is being developed.

Alexey was born into a family of engineers, which determined his choice of specialty. He studied to become an electrical engineer, first at the Kursk Railway Technical School, and then at the Polytechnic Institute (now South-West State University). Even then, the inquisitive student’s mind was excited by the theory of cold nuclear fusion, which involves the implementation of an atomic reaction without heating the substance.

Since childhood, Rasulov loved to read a lot, studied well, and physics was one of his favorite subjects at school. Having become disabled 10 years ago, he devoted himself entirely to research; his youthful hobbies grew into something more. But the roots of everything, without a doubt, come from there.

“The same Jules Verne foresaw many scientific discoveries, which we are convinced of over the years,” says the Kuryan. – Among other things, he believed that energy could be extracted from water and air. Based on the fact that nitrous oxide appears due to high voltage on power lines, I assumed that it also exists in clouds - there is also a high electric field strength there.”

Alexey, of course, is not so naive as to rely only on fiction. Spent more than one week in the regional scientific library named after. N.N. Aseeva, persistently studying all the works available on the topic of interest to him. Particular emphasis was placed on the work of Miguel Alcubierre, Kurt Gödel, John Richard Gott and Nobel laureate in physics Vitaly Ginzburg.

Time machine - a message from aliens

Rasulov considers his debut in the scientific arena to be his speech at the international congress “Fundamental Problems of Natural Science and Technology” in St. Petersburg in 2010. The response to the report he read on cold nuclear fusion was a review from the organizers: “Rasulov’s short essay proposes a particularly noteworthy idea about the need to take into account nitrogen in nuclear reactions, which is involved in the processes of decay and fusion with a positive energy output.”

Kuryanin was published in the newspaper “Anomaly”, the magazines “Inventor and Innovator”, “Itogi” and even in “Energetics”, which is included in the list of peer-reviewed scientific publications of the Higher Attestation Commission under the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation and included in the list of international citation databases.

The theory of cold nuclear fusion also holds the secret to time travel. Based on it, Rasulov made a guess: what a mechanism that could move a person to the past or future would look and operate.

“A huge installation the size of the Kursk region or even larger should be built underground, like the hadron collider on the border of Switzerland and France,” explains Alexey. – Inside the diameter there are several arcs of electromagnets interacting with a ball of electrons at the nuclear level.

To create a gravitational field sufficient to form a black hole, the ball must be accelerated to the speed of light. At this moment, space and time are deformed, and a “wormhole” appears in the black hole - a tunnel through which a person can travel in time.”

By the way, at one time Rasulov tried to unravel the mystery of crop circles allegedly left by alien civilizations. In his opinion, it is possible that these mysterious drawings of UFOs depict a time machine, thanks to which they themselves end up on Earth. In 2014, he observed similar circles near Kursk - one of the regional TV channels even filmed a story about it.

The project to create a time machine requires enormous financial investments, but there are also technical difficulties. The researcher admits: there is no computer in the world yet that is powerful enough to control the new cyber system. However, humanity does not stand still, and in the future this will become possible.

“Traveling to other worlds, the past and the future will allow us to rewrite history and avoid many wars and disasters,” says Rasulov. “It would be the property of all people.” Personally, I would use a time machine to travel back several years to when the tragedy that left me disabled could have been prevented.”

By the power of imagination, J. Verne takes readers of the novel, written in 1863, to Paris in 1960 and describes in detail such things that no one would have guessed were invented in the first half of the 19th century: cars move along the city streets (though in J. Verne they they do not run on gasoline, but on hydrogen to preserve the cleanliness of the environment), criminals are executed using the electric chair, and piles of documents are transmitted using a device very reminiscent of a modern fax machine.

Probably, these predictions seemed too fantastic to the publisher Etzel, or maybe he considered the novel too gloomy - one way or another, the manuscript was returned to the author and was eventually lost among his papers for a century and a half.

In 1863, the famous French writer Jules Verne published the first novel in the “Extraordinary Journeys” series, “Five Weeks in a Balloon,” in the Journal for Education and Leisure. The success of the novel inspired the writer; he decided to continue to work in this “key,” accompanying the romantic adventures of his heroes with increasingly skillful descriptions of incredible, but nevertheless carefully thought out scientific miracles born of his imagination. The cycle continued with novels:

• "Journeys to the Center of the Earth" (1864)
• "From the Earth to the Moon" (1865)
• "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" (1869)
• "The Mysterious Island" (1874), etc.

In total, Jules Verne wrote about 70 novels. In them, he predicted many scientific discoveries and inventions in a variety of fields, including submarines, scuba gear, television and space flight. Jules Verne foresaw practical applications:

• Electric motors
• Electric heating devices
• Electric lamps
• Loudspeakers
• Transmitting images over a distance
• Electrical protection of buildings

Incredible similarities between fiction and reality

The remarkable works of the French writer had an important cognitive and educational effect for many generations of people. Thus, one of the phrases expressed by the science fiction writer in the novel “Around the Moon” regarding the fall of a projectile on the lunar surface contained the idea of ​​jet propulsion in emptiness, an idea later developed in the theories of K. E. Tsiolkovsky. It is not surprising that the founder of astronautics repeated more than once:

“The desire for space travel was instilled in me by Jules Verne. He awakened the brain in this direction.”

Space flight in details very close to reality was first described by J. Verne in the essays “From the Earth to the Moon” (1865) and “Around the Moon” (1870). This famous duology is an outstanding example of “seeing through time.” It was created 100 years before manned flight around the Moon was put into practice.

But what is most striking is the amazing similarity between the fictional flight (J. Verne’s flight of the Columbiad projectile) and the real one (meaning the lunar odyssey of the Apollo 8 spacecraft, which in 1968 made the first manned flight around the Moon ).

Both spacecraft - both literary and real - had a crew of three people. Both launched in December from the island of Florida, both entered lunar orbit (Apollo, however, made eight full orbits around the Moon, while its fantastic “predecessor” made only one).

Apollo, having flown around the Moon, returned to the opposite course with the help of rocket engines. The crew of the Columbiana solved this problem in a similar way, using rocket power... signal flares. Thus, both ships, with the help of rocket engines, switched to a return trajectory, so that again in December they would splash down in the same area of ​​the Pacific Ocean, and the distance between the splashdown points was only 4 kilometers! The dimensions and mass of the two spacecraft are also almost the same: the height of the Columbiada projectile is 3.65 m, weight is 5,547 kg; the height of the Apollo capsule is 3.60 m, weight – 5,621 kg.

The great science fiction writer foresaw everything! Even the names of the heroes of the French writer - Barbicane, Nicole and Ardan - are consonant with the names of the American astronauts - Borman, Lovell and Anders...

No matter how fantastic all this sounds, this was Jules Verne, or rather his predictions.

During his lifetime he was considered an excellent science fiction writer, and today, more than a hundred years later, he is called a seer. This man in his books predicted about a hundred inventions and discoveries that were actually made in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Only about ten of his ideas remained unimplemented or were erroneous. There is hardly a scientist who could boast of such a gift of foresight. The scientific predictions of the French science fiction writer continue to come true today: he was the first to invent televisions, electric cars, automatic guns, telephones and many other things. What other ideas of Jules Verne were put into practice?

1. Jules Verne was one of the first daredevils to talk about space flight. Before him, there were already authors who sent their characters into space - but they used various miracles and did not justify such travel scientifically. For example, the English priest and writer Francis Godwin wrote a utopian novel called “The Man on the Moon,” but his hero went to the earth’s satellite riding fantastic birds, which cannot be called a scientific prediction. Writers and even scientists did not think about this until the nineteenth century.

And Jules Verne was the first who decided to rely on the power of science and begin space travel on paper. In the sixties of the nineteenth century, science had not yet considered this issue, so the writer had to rely on his imagination and intuition. So he sent his character to the moon using a huge cannon. This seems impossible, because a person would not be able to survive in this case - but Verne foresaw this and created special shock-absorbing conditions to reduce the overload. In reality, the devices he described would hardly have worked, but this idea significantly influenced the development of astronautics. In the mid-twentieth century, scientists began to tackle the problem of creating such a gun, and although they have not yet succeeded, attempts do not stop.

2. It is often mistakenly believed that Jules Verne was the inventor of the submarine. This is not true; in his time, such ships already existed - when the writer began his famous novel “20 Thousand Leagues Under the Sea,” the first mechanical submarine was launched in France. Verne collected information about her to use in the novel, but greatly improved his Nautilus. Compared to the small French boat, unable to dive deeper than ten meters, it was a real submarine. The characteristics of the Nautilus still seem fantastic, although some technologies have already been studied - Verne perfectly foresaw the general trends in the development of submarines.

3. Verne’s prediction made in his novel “The Floating Island” has not yet come true, but it is quite likely and may soon come true. In the book, the action takes place on an artificially created island, where rich people lived who sought to create an ideal world. By 2014, this idea will be implemented by the Seasteading Institute, which plans to build several island cities.

4. Jules Verne lived in peacetime, before the start of the world wars, but apparently he felt the tense situation and predicted the emergence of a cruel dictator and new types of weapons. The novel “Five Hundred Million Begums” describes the villain Professor Schulze, who was obsessed with the idea of ​​​​nationalism and domination over the whole world. He came up with a huge cannon with poisonous projectiles - this is how Verne predicted the appearance of chemical weapons. In another book, a Frenchman invented a prototype nuclear bomb - a huge projectile that could hit a target within several thousand square meters.

5. One of the most famous predictions of the French writer is the book “Paris in the Twentieth Century,” which was found and published only in 1994. It instantly became a bestseller, and modern scholars realized that Verne was a talented seer. When the writer took the manuscript of this book to the publisher, he considered the forecasts too pessimistic and implausible. It described skyscrapers, electric trains with enormous speeds, banks with computers, and even a global information network, albeit based on the telegraph.

6. In addition, Jules Verne predicted the appearance of the electric chair, airplane, helicopter, video communication and television. Even before the appearance of the Eiffel Tower, he described the construction of a tower in the center of Europe, which very much resembles the symbol of Paris. And his book “From Russia to Beijing” quite accurately describes the construction of the trans-Asian highway. One of the writer’s unfulfilled predictions is related to the location of the earth at the poles: he thought that there was a continent at the north pole, and the south was covered with an ocean, but it turned out that the opposite was true.