Jules Verne

Jean-Marie Valheur 

No one ever got close to predicting the future as well as the French writer Jules Verne did. Nostradamus with his vague and multi-layered takes that can be explained in a million different ways is honestly a joke compared to Mr. Verne.

Despite leaving this earth in the year 1905, Jules Verne accurately predicted a great many things. For instance, the moon landing. Giant submarines. Helicopters. These are just the things he predicted in books published during his lifetime… The finest predictions Verne ever made, however weren’t in these books — they were in a book called Paris in the Twentieth Century that wasn’t published until 97 years after his death.

Verne’s publisher felt the book’s predictions were “too unrealistic and far-fetched” and readers would never buy it. So it lay on a shelf undiscovered, unread, for almost a century. The book described the following, and I quote:

• “The book's description of the technology of 1960 was in some ways remarkably close to actual 1960s technology. The book described in detail advances such as cars powered by internal combustion engines("gas-cabs") together with the necessary supporting infrastructure such as gas stations and paved asphalt roads, elevated and underground passenger train systems and high-speed trains powered by magnetism and compressed air, skyscrapers,electric lights that illuminate entire cities at night, fax machines ("picture-telegraphs"), elevators, primitive computers which can send messages to each other as part of a network somewhat resembling the Internet (described as sophisticated electrically powered mechanical calculators which can send information to each other across vast distances), the utilization of wind power, automated security systems, the electric chair, and remotely-controlled weapons systems, as well as weapons destructive enough to make war unthinkable.
• The book also predicts the growth of suburbs and mass-produced higher education(the opening scene has Dufrénoy attending a mass graduation of 250,000 students), department stores, and massive hotels. A version of feminism has also arisen in society, with women moving into the workplace and a rise in illegitimate births. It also makes accurate predictions of 20th-century music, predicting the rise of electronic music, and describes a musical instrument similar to a synthesizer, and the replacement of classical music performances with a recorded music industry. In addition, it predicts that the entertainment industry would be dominated by lewd stage plays, often involving nudity and sexually explicit scenes.”

It’s seriously crazy how much Jules Verne got RIGHT about the world as we now know it. His predictions were eerily on-point. So much of what he wrote about as fiction, dismissed as far-fetched by his publisher, is now very much a part of everyday life.

Did Jules Verne’s publisher really think what he wrote was impossible, or was he distressed perhaps by his vision of their future? We’ll never know now, but one thing is for sure… the future Jules Verne dreamed up is no longer a dream; it’s now our reality.