Jules Verne: A Writer Who Predicted The Future

Electrical submarines, helicopters, tasers, newscasts, video conferencing, solar sails, skyriding. Although he lived in the 90th century, he managed to predict this and other inventions that are so commonplace in our world today. What a fantastic imagination! Welcome to Personality Matters. I'm Arthur Kemps and today we'll be talking about Jules Verne. Jules Verne was born on 8th February in 1828 in France. He spent his childhood in a small maritime port city Nantes. He would come to the pier toward departures and arrivals of ships and vessels. This is what set the background for the future science fiction writer and gave boost to his imagination for adventure and travelling. Jules Verne tried writing while he was still at school. Although his passion was not encouraged by his father, who didn't see it as a particularly promising career. He wanted his son to follow in his footsteps and become a lawyer. So Jules Verne set off to Paris to study law. However, when the young man went to university, he was not able to get over his fascination with literature and theatre. He was a frequent visitor in the literary salons and made friends with many famous artists and writers of that time. Like, for example, Alexandre Dumas. He fell so in love with his Parisian life that he decided to stay in the city even after graduation and against his father's will. The father called on the son to get back to Nantes to open a law practice there. Jules Verne refused that offer. Instead, he landed a low-paying job in the theatre and started producing his own plays. At one point, however, he had to because, as it often occurs when men change something, he met his future wife, who happened to have two children from their previous marriage. Given the dim prospect of earning money from his stories and plays, he found a job as a stockbroker to provide wealth for his large new family. But he didn't completely abandon writing. He would get up early in the morning several hours before going to the office to write. Well, it's not by coincidence people say that persistence pays off. His literary career that stalled for years changed completely when they met the publisher and editor Jules-Pierre Herzl in 1862. Jules Verne signed a contract under which he was supposed to produce two volumes per year. Actually, the contract was a good deal because it provided him with a steady income for many years ahead. So, between 1863 and 1905, the most thriving period of his career. He wrote and published 54 novels about adventure, travelling, history and technology. In fact, Herzl was more than just an editor. He worked closely with Jules Verne and was involved in elaborating characters, structures and plot. Like his own heroes, Jules Verne was a true adventurer. His career was thriving and he was making a lot of money. So, in 1867, he bought a boat and named it Saint-Michel after his son. He sailed the seas from the British Isles to the Mediterranean. It was during these voyages that he wrote some of his most famous works, Around the World in 80 Days and 30,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Gradually, he started earning more money and bought a new boat that he named Saint-Michel II. And a couple of years later he bought a big boat that he named, as you probably guessed, Saint-Michel III. Not so bad to be a writer, especially a successful one. You can have three boats. By 1870s, Jules Verne had tremendous professional success. Any writer would love to be half as successful and famous as Jules Verne was in his time. However, not everything went well in his personal life. Apart from health issues that worsened as he grew older and the great loss of his publisher Herzl, he also had some family problems. In 1876, he had to send his rebellious son to reformatory and later suffered in a traumatic incident. He was shot by his mentally ill nephew. One day, Jules Verne got back home and his nephew, for no reason at all, shot him twice with a pistol. The first bullet missed Jules Verne, but the second one went through his leg, which left him with a permanent limp. Jules Verne kept writing and traveling, but from then on his writing contained darker and more pessimistic notes. Compared to the positive and lively tales of exploration and discovery, his focus shifted on the analysis of dangers that might be brought on by technologies. The change of style was probably also related to the adversities in his personal life. In his late years, he established his residence in the North French city Amiens, where he lived till his death in 1905. Jules Verne wrote his books in French, but they became popular and famous all over the world. In total, his books were translated in 150 languages, which made him the second most translated author ever lived after… JK Rowling. No, not JK Rowling. Shakespeare. No, not Shakespeare. Yes, that's right, Agatha Christie, whose record remained unbroken for many years. Besides, his books had around 153 movie productions. Well, in this category he's probably among top 10 most adopted writers. But what makes Jules Verne stand out among other writers is the predictions that he made, like the ones we mentioned at the beginning of the video, or like the ones he described in his novel Paris in the 20th century. In this novel, Jules Verne tried to imagine what Parisian society would look like in 1960, so he wrote about skyscrapers, elevators, cars with internal combustion engines, electric city lights and suburbs. He was so ahead of his time, given that he created this novel in 1863. He even wrote about a group of mechanical calculators, as in computers, that could communicate with one another over a network, like the Internet. What a fantastic sense of prediction for a person who was born in 1828. Considered by many as the father of science fiction, Jules Verne inspired a cohort of writers in different genres, from technology to adventure. As Ray Bradbury once said, we're all in one way or another children of Jules Verne. Me too, by the way. Thank you for watching Personality Matters. We talk about people who made the world. Until next time, I'm Arthur Kemps.