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Born
in the French port city of Nantes, Jules Verne (1828-1905)
was educated for the law
and worked as a stockbroker, but his literary and technical
interests eventually brought him enormous success as the
first real “science fiction” novelist. He
wrote Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
in 1870. |
Paris,
the Law, and Literature
Jules-Gabriel
Verne was born in 1828 in the French seaport of Nantes, upriver
from the Bay of Biscay. Although his younger brother Paul
became a naval officer, and Jules attempted to run away to
sea in his early teens, his lawyer father intended that he
should enter the legal profession and sent him to Paris in
1847 to study law. There, provided an entrée by his
uncle, he joined the literary circle of Alexander Dumas, pere
et fils, and while continuing his legal studies, turned
increasingly to writing plays, articles, and stories. In 1849,
Verne passed his law degree, but his father grudgingly agreed
to his remaining in Paris to pursue a literary career. Over
the next several years, he published a series of short stories
to no particular acclaim, served as secretary of the Théâtre
Lyrique, and collaborated on an operetta libretto. Then, in
1857, having married a young widow from Amiens with two children,
he accepted employment as a stockbroker, presumably because
it promised a more reliable income.
Even so,
Verne continued his literary work and simultaneously began
indulging a latent interest in natural science and technology
by reading assiduously on geology, engineering, and astronomy
in the libraries of Paris. The first fruits of this dual avocation
were his 1863 novel Five Weeks in a Balloon, which
achieved immediate success in establishing the new genre of
“science fiction.” This was followed, with growing
acclaim, by Journey to the Center of the Earth in
1864, From the Earth to the Moon in 1865, and then by Twenty
Thousand Leagues Under the Sea in 1870.1
By then, Verne had given up his stockbroker practice and devoted
himself entirely to writing.
Verne’s
Tale of Undersea Adventure
Verne’s
plot in Twenty Thousand Leagues is relatively simple and serves
largely as a framework for describing both the wonders of
the underwater world and the technologies needed to realize
the author’s prophetic vision of undersea travel and
exploration. The year is 1866, and the maritime community
is shaken by sporadic sightings of what appears to be a gigantic
sea creature unlike any seen before. When this “cetacean”
collides with two merchant ships and nearly sinks them, the
U.S. Navy sends the steam frigate Abraham Lincoln
to hunt the creature down, augmenting her crew with a French
naturalist, Professor Pierre Aronnax – who narrates
the tale – his servant Conseil, and American master
harpooner Ned Land. After fruitlessly searching down the eastern
coast of South America and over much of the Pacific, Lincoln
happens on the “monster” southeast of Japan and
attempts to subdue it with both cannon-fire and harpoon. In
response, the beast inundates the frigate with jets of water
and carries away her rudder in a ramming attack that also
throws Aronnax, Conseil, and Land into the sea.
Deserted
by Lincoln, the three castaways soon find themselves
marooned on the “back” of the creature, which
is, in fact, an advanced submarine – the Nautilus
– designed, built, and commanded by the mysterious Captain
Nemo, who takes Aronnax, Conseil, and Land onboard as his
prisoners but gives them the run of the ship. There follows
a long underwater adventure – 20,000 leagues under the
sea2
– in which the Nautilus explores virtually
the entire world ocean and the sea floor beneath. Aronnax
is fascinated by this extraordinary access to the undersea
realm and the research opportunities it affords him in his
specialty. From his long conversations with Nemo, we learn
how Nautilus is designed and operated, of its total
independence of support from land, and of the submarine’s
“mission” to roam the globe supporting struggles
against tyrannical oppression. Meanwhile, Ned Land is increasingly
frustrated by his confinement and eventually convinces the
professor and Conseil to join him in escaping from Nemo. Just
as this attempt gets underway, the Nautilus is sucked
into that legendary whirlpool, the Maelstrom, off the coast
of Norway, and when the resulting violence subsides, presumably
only Aronnax, Conseil, and Land have survived to be picked
up by a passing ship and tell the story.3
Nemo’s
Submarine Precursors
Although
very early submarine experimenters such as Cornelius van Drebbel
in early 17th-century London and David Bushnell in the American
Revolution had demonstrated occasional successes, it was only
in the early and mid-19th century that the problems of underwater
navigation were attacked in earnest. In France, for instance,
the American Robert Fulton – later renowned as the “inventor”
of the steamboat – attempted to win the support of the
government of First Consul Napoleon Bonaparte for an undersea
craft capable of breaking the British blockade. Awarded a
contract for building a man-powered submersible of his own
design, Fulton christened his boat Nautilus –
the same name chosen by Jules Verne 70 years later –
and successfully demonstrated it on the Seine in 1800 and
later at Le Havre. Napoleon soon lost interest in Fulton’s
initiative, but subsequently, he supported the evaluation
of a less-expensive wooden submersible built at Le Havre by
two brothers named Coessin. Their prototype achieved some
limited success, but then nothing more was heard of it.
In the
1830s and 1840s, several other French inventors – DeMontgery,
Petit, Villeroi, and Payerne – offered other submersible
concepts, and some were actually built. But it was only when
the French Navy became interested in a design by Captain Simon
Bourgeois and naval constructor Charles Brun that significant
progress was made. In 1863, Bourgeois and Brun launched Le
Plongeur (“the Diver”) at Rochefort and experimented
with the boat for three years. Powered by a reciprocating
engine driven by stored compressed air, the 140-foot long
Le Plongeur managed to average five knots submerged
but suffered from inadequate longitudinal stability and was
eventually abandoned. At the same time, other European countries
were pursuing their own submarine programs, and on the far
side of the Atlantic, the American Civil War had stimulated
more immediate interest in submersible combatants, particularly
in the Confederacy, where raising the Union economic blockade
was a primary objective. There, the most spectacular success
was achieved by the hand-cranked submersible CSS Hunley,
which in February 1864 sank the USS Housatonic in
Charleston Harbor – the first-ever sinking of a warship
by a submarine. In light of his voracious reading and exhaustive
reportage of the Civil War by the European press, Jules Verne
would certainly have known of these events at the time he
embarked on writing Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the
Sea.
For the
submarine community, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the
Sea raises fascinating questions: Just how prophetic
was Verne in exploiting technologies nascent in 1870 to create
Captain Nemo’s Nautilus? How accurately did
he predict the actual evolution of the modern submarine? And
how many of the undersea innovations he envisioned 130 years
ago have actually been realized?
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| Reproduced
from the original 1871 French edition published by J.
Hetzel et Cie in Paris, this engraving shows Captain Nemo’s
Nautilus underway as Verne himself must have
envisioned it. In this view, the craft is moving from
right to left, the course ahead illuminated by a powerful
electric searchlight mounted abaft the pilothouse. |
In
another first-edition engraving, Captain Nemo is portrayed
at Nautilus’s wheel behind the “bi-convex”
windows of the small pilothouse. Nemo’s cloudy origins
are only fully revealed in Jules Verne’s 1875 novel,
The Mysterious Island, where it emerges that
he was born an Indian prince and educated in Europe, before
his overthrow by the British led him to build Nautilus
as a weapon against tyranny and oppression worldwide. |
Designing
and Building Nautilus
According
to Verne’s tale, Captain Nemo and his men built Nautilus
on a desert island in total secrecy by ordering components
and materials from disparate sources and arranging their delivery
to a variety of covert addresses. The design was entirely
Nemo’s, based on the engineering knowledge he had gained
from extensive study in London, Paris, and New York during
an earlier part of his life. The steel double hull is spindle-shaped
and 70 meters (230 feet) long, with a maximum diameter of
8 meters (just over 26 feet). As Captain Nemo describes it,
…Nautilus
has two hulls, one interior, one exterior, and they are
joined by iron T-bars, which gives the boat a terrific rigidity.
Because of this cellular arrangement, it has the resistance
of a solid block. The plating can’t yield; it’s
self-adhering and not dependent on rivets; and the homogeneity
of its construction, due to the perfect union of the materials
involved, permits it to defy the most violent of seas.4
Submerged,
the submarine displaces 1,507 metric tons (roughly 1,670 short
tons) and surfaced, with only one-tenth of the hull above
the water, it displaces 1,356 metric tons (1,495 short tons)
– Verne is quite precise about this.5
Nautilus
is controlled from a small, retractable pilothouse set into
the top of the hull about a quarter of the way back from the
bow. Several large bi-convex glass windows – 21 centimeters
thick at the center – provide an all-around view, augmented
by illumination from a separate electric searchlight mounted
in an external pod abaft the pilothouse. There is no periscope
– these would not come into general use for more than
three decades. For use while surfaced, a small, flat deck
fitted with removable manropes is apparently installed just
behind the pilothouse, and this can be accessed by a hatch
from below. Nemo and his first mate frequently use this platform
for celestial navigation in conjunction with a pit log read
out by electrical telemetry. The only other protuberance topside
is a low “dry-deck shelter” faired into the hull
for housing a metal dinghy that can be entered and launched
from within, even while underwater. |
