The claim has been repeated so often that it now sounds like a fact: Jules Verne predicted the internet, video calls, submarines and spaceflight. Go back to the books and most of those claims become much less tidy. Verne did not foresee the modern world device by device, and he did not draw up a plan for NASA.
He had an exceptional feel for the science, machinery and industrial ambition of his own century. He pushed those things far enough that later readers can recognise parts of their world in his fiction. That is why the books have lasted.
A writer with an eye on the science of his time
Verne was not inventing in a vacuum. Railways, telegraphy, steam navigation, photography, electrical experiments and new theories of geology and astronomy were transforming Europe while he wrote. The Bibliothèque nationale de France describes the ambition behind his work as a way of gathering modern geographical, geological, physical and astronomical knowledge into an attractive narrative form.
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That approach matters. Verne’s stories are full of extrapolation, but they are also full of the assumptions and limits of their own time. His futures are powered by nineteenth-century materials, maps and engineering. They sometimes resemble later technologies; they just as often reveal how much changed in unexpected directions.
The Nautilus made a submarine feel possible
In Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas, published in 1870, Captain Nemo’s Nautilus is an extraordinary electric vessel: self-contained, mobile for long periods and equipped for a sustained scientific encounter with the ocean. It has become the standard example of Verne “predicting” submarines.
But submarines already existed in experimental and military forms. Verne’s accomplishment was not to conjure the basic idea from nowhere. He imagined what a capable underwater vessel would mean as a complete environment: power, food, observation, mobility and the psychological separation from the surface world. That is a stronger form of anticipation than simply naming a future machine.
The novel also helped give the sea a new cultural scale. For readers accustomed to ships that travelled on the surface, the Nautilus made the ocean floor a place that could be explored rather than merely crossed. Curiosmos has previously looked at the way Verne’s sense of scale can still feel real in its feature on the giant crystals beneath the Mexican desert that seem lifted from one of his novels.
A cannon to the Moon was never Apollo in disguise
From the Earth to the Moon, first published in 1865, is another favourite in prediction lists. Verne placed a crewed projectile on a journey toward the Moon and located the launch in Florida, details that invite comparison with the Apollo programme a century later.
Those parallels are real enough to be fun, but they should not be stretched into a claim that Verne predicted NASA. His spacecraft is fired from a gigantic cannon; its physics, launch method and mission architecture are not an engineering plan for Apollo. The later Moon programme depended on rockets, guidance systems, materials and orbital mechanics developed long after Verne’s book.
Verne understood the public drama of spaceflight. A journey beyond Earth would bring spectacle, argument, funding, national ambition and a mass audience trying to picture a place it had never seen. Apollo eventually brought all of those elements together by a route Verne could not have planned.
Paris in the Twentieth Century and the danger of hindsight
Verne wrote Paris au XXe siècle in the 1860s, but it was not published until 1994. In it, he imagines a future Paris marked by fast transport, financial power, mechanized work and a society that gives technical usefulness more prestige than art.
It is tempting to translate every striking image in the novel into a modern device: cars become our cars, communication networks become the internet, tall buildings become skyscrapers. Some parallels are real. Others come from hindsight, when a broad fictional idea is squeezed to fit a technology that arrived much later.
Verne’s anxiety is plain. He imagined a future in which efficiency and technical progress might leave little room for literature, music and the humanities. That is a cultural question, not a technological forecast, and it remains unsettled.
Why the “prophet” label persists
We like stories in which a genius sees our world before anyone else. They turn a complicated writer into a satisfying riddle. But they can also flatten the work. A list that says Verne “invented video calls” or “predicted the internet” usually skips over the original passages, the contemporary technologies he knew and the many ways the future did not develop as he imagined.
The original books reward close reading. Verne makes machinery feel consequential. His travel stories also ask who gets to explore, who pays for an expedition, what is discovered, and what happens when human ambition outruns certainty. Science fiction kept those questions because they outlast any one century’s gadgets.
There is a longer tradition behind that impulse. Long before Verne, writers were already using imagined voyages to ask real questions about other worlds and other societies. For a much older example, see Curiosmos’s look at Lucian of Samosata and the early roots of science fiction.
Verne’s real legacy
Verne began with contemporary knowledge, asked what it might permit, and made readers feel both the wonder and unease of taking that possibility to its limit.
The Nautilus still works even though real submarines are different. His lunar voyage still works even though Apollo used rockets rather than a cannon. Verne made new technology feel like a social force. His books keep asking what kind of world a machine will make once it becomes possible.
