When French author Jules Verne died in 1905, powered air flight, which he put at the center of his 1886 book Robur the Conqueror, had moved from fiction to reality. Just two years earlier, the Wright brothers had achieved the first manned air flight in human history
Yet more of were still far from being realized when he died. Being able to orbit the on a spaceship, as he depicted in his 1865 novel Around the Moon, seemed like a distant fantasy. But it came true just sixty years later with Apollo 8 mission in 1968.
Verne’s brilliance lay in the way he vividly imagined how existing technologies might be developed, then embedded his ideas in exciting adventure stories.
This fascinating combination of fact and fiction makes Verne’s novels ideal for stimulating interest in science and technology even today, despite all the progress since they were written. That’s why Verne’s stories inspired countless scientists and inventors, and still do today. Here are four such examples.
Simon Lake (1866-1945), submarine designer
Simon Lake was a US naval architect who designed some of the first submarines for the US Navy. He said he was indebted to Jules Verne, in particular Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas (1869-1870), which he first read at the age of 10 or 11.
This book features the Nautilus, an undersea vessel far more advanced than the rudimentary submarines that existed when the book was written.
Lake was gripped with the ambition to build a submarine that matched or exceeded the Nautilus in its performance.
Lake made some progress, designing a submarine called the Argonaut. A successful 1,000-mile (1,609-kilometer) voyage of the Argonaut in 1898 earned Lake the delight of receiving a congratulatory telegram from Verne himself.
Later, Verne’s grandson, Jean-Jules Verne, was invited to be a “godparent” of one of Lake’s later, more advanced submarines. The vessel was even rebaptized as the Nautilus ahead of an Arctic expedition in 1931, in honor of the French author.
Alberto Santos-Dumont (1873-1932), aeronaut and inventor
The Brazilian inventor Alberto Santos-Dumont not only designed and built some of the first powered airships, but also flew them too. Among his many trips, he circled the Eiffel Tower in Paris with his airship No. 6 in 1901, a performance which brought him great fame across the world at the time.
Santos-Dumont went on to design, construct, and fly powered aircraft like gliders and ornithopters. He carried out a flight of 220 meters (241 yards) at a height of 6 meters (20 feet) in his “14-bis” in November of 1906.
In his book, My Airships, Santos-Dumont mentioned several of Verne’s works as inspirations for his curiosity about the world and technology, calling the French writer the “favorite author” of his youth.
Igor Sikorsky (1889-1972), aviation pioneer
Igor Sikorsky’s mother, Mariya Stefanovna Sikorskaya, instilled a love for Jules Verne’s stories in the Russian-American aviation pioneer Igor Sikorsky.
In particular, Robur the Conqueror, with its vividly described aircraft, inspired Sikorsky to build the for which he became famous.
After several failed attempts early in the 20th century, Sikorsky succeed in designing and flying the Vought-Sikorsky VS-300, the first workable American helicopter in 1939
The early form of a helicopter was modified to become the Sikorsky R-4, the first mass-produced helicopter in the world.
Sikorsky also designed numerous fixed-wing airplanes, mostly after he emigrated from Russia to the US in 1919 after the 1917 Russian Revolution.
Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (1857-1935), rocket scientist
Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky, one of the pioneers of and astronautics, also named Jules Verne as the person who inspired his interest in .
Tsiolkovsky also emulated Verne as a writer, publishing the novel “On the Moon” in 1893. He also wrote many philosophical and scientific works related to space travel and the human relationship with the cosmos.
Verne’s fictional depictions of spaceships carrying lunar voyagers as a shell shot from a cannon could never succeed in reality. In contrast, Tsiolkovsky developed theories on many principles of rocket propulsion and space travel that are workable and still hold true today.
Like Verne, Tsiolkovsky was convinced that humans would one day move out further into the solar system.
“Man will not always stay on Earth; the pursuit of light and space will lead him to penetrate the bounds of the atmosphere, timidly at first, but in the end to conquer the whole of solar space,” reads the epitaph on his obelisk that Tsiolkovsky himself wrote.
Edited by: Fred Schwaller
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