48 Fun Facts About Jules Verne

In which port city on the Loire was Jules Verne born in 1828?

Nantes put ships at his door: Verne recalled a boyhood fascination with the river's merchant vessels, and he and his brother Paul explored it in leaky boats right down to the sea.

Which Verne hero bets £20,000 that he can travel around the world in eighty days?

Phileas Fogg stakes half his fortune on the bet and spends nearly all of the other half on the road, so winning leaves him hardly any richer than when he set out.

What is the name of Captain Nemo's submarine in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea?

Nautilus was a borrowed name: Robert Fulton had shown a real submarine called Nautilus to the French government around 1800, decades before Verne wrote his novel.

In From the Earth to the Moon, how do Verne's travellers leave the Earth?

Fired from a giant cannon, because the men behind the plan are American artillerymen left idle when the Civil War ends. Their Baltimore club wants something new to shoot at.

In Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, which creatures attack the submarine and carry off a crewman?

Giant squid swarm the hull, and the crew climbs out to fight them on deck with axes. One sailor is dragged into the sea, and the narrator sees Captain Nemo in tears.

What subject did Verne's father send him to Paris to study in 1847?

Law was the family trade, and his father expected him to take over the practice. Verne took the degree, then refused to come home, staying in Paris to write for the theatre.

The teenage Verne wrote verse tragedies in the style of which French writer, whose plays he said influenced him most?

Victor Hugo excited him so much that he could recite whole pages of Notre-Dame de Paris by heart. Yet it was the plays, he said, that shaped him most.

In Around the World in Eighty Days, what does the hero buy in India when the railway line runs out?

An elephant, bought at a ruinous price because its owner refuses to hire it out. The newspapers had wrongly reported the line across India as finished, which is what made the bet look safe.

Which famous author's son helped Verne revise his comedy The Broken Straws and get it staged in 1850?

Alexandre Dumas fils met Verne at twenty-one and took him up at once: they reworked the play together and he got it produced. Verne called him his first protector and never forgot the debt.

What is the name of the French valet who goes around the world in eighty days with his English master?

Passepartout leaves London in such a rush that he forgets the gas lamp in his room, and it burns for all eighty days. His master takes the bill out of his share of the winnings.

Why does Verne's round-the-world traveller win his bet after believing he has lost it?

Going east gained him a day: by travelling towards the sunrise he saw one more dawn than the people who stayed in London. He learns it only when his valet goes to book a clergyman for a wedding.

From which US state do Verne's travellers set off in From the Earth to the Moon?

Florida qualified because the launch had to aim straight up at the Moon, which meant a site below the 28th parallel. Only it and Texas lay far enough south, and the two fought bitterly over the honour.

In Journey to the Center of the Earth, the explorers climb down into a volcano in which country?

Iceland holds the way down, or so says a coded note that drops out of an old manuscript. The right crater is marked only by a peak's shadow in the last days of June, so the professor has to race north.

The European Space Agency's cargo ship Jules Verne made a supply run to which destination in 2008?

The International Space Station took delivery in April 2008 after the robot freighter docked itself with no pilot aboard. Five months later it left full of rubbish and burned up over the Pacific as planned.

What day job did Verne take when he married, writing early each morning before work?

Stockbroker was the price of marriage: he wanted a secure income to win a widow with two young children. He later said the fever of the Paris exchange found its way into his novels.

What powers Captain Nemo's submarine in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea?

Electricity does everything aboard: it drives the engines, lights the cabins and cooks the meals. Nemo makes it with sodium he extracts from seawater, so he never needs to put into port.

Which studio made the 1954 film of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, starring Kirk Douglas and James Mason?

Disney shot the film's big sea-monster battle twice. The first take, staged as a calm sunset, looked wrong, so it was redone at night in a storm, which also hid the cables working the creature.

Which film scientist names his two sons Jules and Verne, after his favourite author?

Doc Brown and his wife Clara share a love of the novelist in Back to the Future Part III, set in 1885. Their two boys turn up in the final scene aboard a time-travelling locomotive.

Which story of an expedition across Africa, published in 1863, was Verne's first novel?

Five Weeks in a Balloon was, he said, a story about the continent and not about ballooning: a balloon was simply the only way to get his travellers across it. He had never been up in one.

Which French film pioneer turned Verne's lunar voyage into the 1902 silent film A Trip to the Moon?

Georges Méliès was a stage magician who took up film after seeing the Lumière brothers' show, which is why his Moon trip is full of trick shots. Its spacecraft famously lands in the Man in the Moon's eye.

Under what series title did Verne's publisher issue his adventure novels from 1866?

Voyages extraordinaires was announced in a publisher's preface promising that the novels would sum up all that modern science knew of geography, geology, physics and astronomy. His first three books were folded into the series afterwards.

How did Verne change the ending of Captain Hatteras at his publisher's request?

The hero survives instead of dying in the volcano at the North Pole, as the first draft had it. In print he comes home alive but struck dumb by 'polar madness', and spends his days at an asylum walking one path, always towards the north.

Which pessimistic Verne novel did Hetzel reject as too subversive, leaving it unpublished until 1994?

His great-grandson found the manuscript in 1989.

Verne first wrote Captain Nemo as a nobleman of which nationality, out for revenge on Russia?

Polish, because Russia had just crushed the Polish uprising of 1863 and Verne was appalled. France needed the Tsar as an ally, so the publisher called the book unprintable and Nemo's past was left a dark secret.

In which Verne novel are escaped Civil War prisoners marooned by balloon in the Pacific, secretly helped by an ageing Captain Nemo?

The Mysterious Island keeps its secret helper hidden almost to the end: medicine and rescues arrive from nowhere until the castaways find the old captain alone in his submarine. He dies aboard it, and it becomes his tomb.

As his novels began to sell, Verne bought three of what in succession, each grander than the last?

Yachts took him to Scotland, Denmark and round the Mediterranean, and he said every one of his novels had benefited from those cruises. The man who sent his heroes round the globe never went round it himself.

Who shot Verne in the leg in 1886, leaving him lame for life?

His nephew Gaston, who adored him, turned up one day muttering wildly, drew a revolver and fired. The bullet was never removed, and the young man, out of his mind, spent the rest of his life in asylums.

Which local office did Verne first win in 1888 and go on to win three more times?

Town councillor, and he meant it: one visiting journalist found a pile of proofs on one side of him and a report for the council on the other. He told another that friends thought him prouder of the post than of his literary reputation.

In which city on the Somme did Verne spend his last decades, dying there in 1905?

Amiens is where he had met his wife, as best man at a friend's wedding. He left Paris for it because steady work and society did not mix, and said that little by little all his affections centred on the town.

Who oversaw publication of Verne's posthumous novels and was later found to have rewritten them?

His son Michel did far more than edit: comparing the manuscripts, researchers found he had recast plots, added characters and in most cases rewritten the books outright. The rebellious boy had become his father's ghost.

In UNESCO's Index Translationum, which counts translations since 1979, who is the only author ranked above Jules Verne?

Agatha Christie leads the index, with Verne second and Shakespeare third. Yet his early English translations were so cut and rewritten that English-speaking readers long took him for a children's author.

Which English novelist is most often paired with Verne as a 'father of science fiction'?

H. G. Wells was a comparison the elderly Verne would not have: 'I make use of physics. He invents.' He asked to be shown the gravity-proof metal that carried the Englishman's heroes into space.

Read worldwide, what did Verne still call 'the great regret of my life'?

Never taking a place in French literature, he told an English journalist in 1894: the French Academy had filled forty-two seats without him. Letters still came from America addressed to 'Jules Verne of the French Academy'.

Captain Nemo chooses his own alias; what does 'nemo' mean in Latin?

No one: he has cut himself off from humanity, and gives his prisoners an alias rather than a name or a country. Years later, addressed by it on his deathbed, he answers, 'Sir, I have no name.'

Aboard Captain Nemo's submarine, what is the trade of the hot-tempered Canadian prisoner Ned Land?

Harpooner: the US Navy takes the 'King of Harpooners' along to kill a sea monster that has been sinking ships. The monster turns out to be a submarine, and he spends the book plotting his escape from it.

Where does Captain Nemo plant a black flag bearing a golden N, claiming the land as his own?

The South Pole, which he reaches in 1868, decades before any real explorer. Asked in which sovereign's name he claims it, he answers, 'In my own name, sir!', and the ice nearly entombs the submarine on the way back.

Which Apollo 11 astronaut invoked Verne's Moon book in a TV broadcast on the way home in July 1969?

Neil Armstrong opened the crew's last evening broadcast with a book written a hundred years earlier about a voyage to the Moon. He called Verne's ship Columbia, the name of their own command module.

Verne's novels are a founding influence on which science-fiction subgenre, named in 1987?

Steampunk pictures the future as the nineteenth century might have built it, all brass, rivets and airships. The joke is that Verne was never being nostalgic: for him those machines were the very latest thing.

Verne was made a knight of which French order in 1870?

The Legion of Honour reached him just as Napoleon III's regime collapsed, and he joked that he was the last man the Empire ever decorated. He wore the officer's red rosette in his buttonhole when interviewed in his sixties.

Which American reporter circled the globe in 72 days in 1889–90 to beat the record in Verne's novel?

Nellie Bly risked her schedule on a detour to France, where Verne and his wife met her at the station. He said he would applaud with both hands if she managed it in 79 days; she took 72.

How did Verne keep the facts he copied from every book, newspaper and scientific report he read?

On notecards, sorted by subject, a habit he began before he had written a single story. In his sixties he said some twenty thousand were still unused, and he credited them for the accuracy of his descriptions.

Deep underground in Journey to the Center of the Earth, what do the explorers watch from their raft?

Two sea monsters fighting: an ichthyosaur and a plesiosaur, extinct for millions of years, battle for hours on a vast underground sea. The explorers watch from a raft their guide has built out of half-fossilised wood.

In Around the World in Eighty Days, of what crime does Detective Fix suspect the hero he trails?

A bank robbery: a gentleman of his description had walked out of the Bank of England with £55,000 just before he set off. Fix finally arrests him on landing in England, three days after the real thief was caught.

How do Verne's explorers return from the center of the Earth?

A volcanic eruption blows them out: their raft rides a column of boiling water, then lava, up a shaft and onto the slopes of Stromboli, off Italy. They had gone underground two months earlier at the far end of Europe.

The Jules Verne Trophy goes to the fastest crew to circle the globe by sea in which sport?

Sailing: the trophy was created for the first crew to get round in under 80 days, which Bruno Peyron's catamaran managed in 1993 with less than a day to spare. The record has since been almost halved.

On a brief trip to America in 1867, Verne visited New York and which natural wonder?

Niagara Falls, which he recalled finding icebound, with torrents pouring into open jaws of ice. He crossed on the Great Eastern, then the largest ship afloat, and turned the voyage into the novel A Floating City.

The 1956 film of Around the World in 80 Days, starring David Niven, won which Academy Award?

Best Picture, beating Giant, The King and I and The Ten Commandments, though none of its cast was even nominated. Its famous balloon flight was the film's own invention: nobody leaves the ground in the novel.

In Around the World in Eighty Days, from what fate is the young widow Aouda rescued?

Burning on a funeral pyre beside her dead husband, an old rajah: the valet hides on the pyre as the corpse, then rises and carries her off. She travels on with them, and in the end it is she who proposes to the hero.