At Nutty Scientists, we love Jules Verne for his curious character, for his adventure books,
his visionary ideas and his futuristic mechanisms that inspired and continue to inspire
different generations.

1. We love Julio Verne’s curiosity which led him to discover and invent totally new worlds.

He was a great reader and explorer, with an enormous curiosity about everything that
surrounded him. The scientific and technological achievements of his time and his
fascination for the world around him inspired him combine both passions in his stories. He
soaked up the technology of his time, came up with ideas that nobody else had, and then
brought them to exotic places, places where he sent his fictional explorers. Thus a new
kind of fiction was born, a genre of adventure driven by futuristic technology that went
beyond the possibilities of the Victorian era.

2. We love his adventure books that are always current, although they were written more than 150 years ago. Our favorite ones include:

• From the Earth to the Moon (1865), in this book, Verne imagines a mission in which a
  man goes to the moon, and Verne does this without having any idea of how to get
  to the moon! But he does the calculations, describes a capsule that carries
  astronauts inside, and much more.
• Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1869), narrates the adventures of Nemo,
  the captain of the Nautilus: a futuristic submarine of great dimensions.
• Around the World in 80 Days (1873), tells of a well-known trip around the world in
  which the means of transportation were entirely novel for the time in which they
  were used.

3. We love his visionary ideas

One of the reasons why Verne seems amazingly visionary for his time is because he used
the scientific knowledge of his time and then combined it with his new scientific formulas,
formulas and ideas which he investigated and developed to write his stories through the
help of scientific experts and many years of research in the library about geography, maps,
wind directions, weather, etc. He documented his research thoroughly in order to write
scientific adventures that could be considered as scientifically possible. He developed
technology to capture his vision of a world without war, but to do so he had to create a
world of his own.

4. We are impressed by his futuristic mechanisms

Different inventions that Jules Verne imagined and those that eventually became reality:

• Internet / Communications network:
  Verne describes in Paris in the Twentieth Century the existence of an international
  communications network, something like a world telegraph that would allow sharing
  information.
• Electric submarine:
  The Nautilus in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, a futurist wonder, that Verne
  imagined thanks to the novelty of the time, a submersible.
• Underwater photography:
  Also in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Verne narrates how Captain Nemo takes a
  photograph from the Nautilus, and a little more than 20 years later the underwater
  photography is born.
• Flight:
  Verne, despite having written about aerostatic balloons, was in favor of the man
  conquering the sky with large machines that weighed more than the air, the author
  influenced scientists like Santos Dumont to take a step forward in the creation of planes.
•  Travel to the Moon:
  Verne, in From the Earth to the Moon, not only does the calculations to reach the moon, but
  within a margin of error of only 10% predicts the place of departure, landing and other
  measurements.
• The conquest of the Earth’s poles:
  In The Adventures of Captain Hatteras, the North Pole was conquered and something
  similar happens in An Antarctic Mystery with the South Pole, but it wouldn’t be until 1909
  that this actually takes place in real life.

5. We admire the great inspiration of Jules Verne within the world of science.

Verne’s predictions opened the cosmos to unprecedented exploration and science fiction
influenced a whole generation of scientists, including the inspiration of those who made
the Apollo XI, the first nuclear submarine, which invented underwater diving and
exploration, and more – all of which occurred almost a century later.

In our Nutty Scientists workshops about Reading, we teach children in a fun and
interactive way the importance that Jules Verne had in relation to science, explaining the
visions of Jules Verne and seeing how his foundation in the scientific method led him to
predict surprising advances for his time.