A voiceless protagonist of Verne’s novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Seas, The Nautilius, may not have been the first apparatus to be called a “submarine” but it certainly was a tempting fantasy of what submarines could become.

Verne named the Nautilus after Robert Fulton’s real-life submarine prototype Nautilus from 1800. Before creating Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Seas, Jules Verne studied a model of the brand new French Navy submarine “Plongeur” at the 1867 Exposition Universelle, which inspirited him to design his own underwater explorer.

The end of the 19th century was a period of intensive submarine development, yet all the apparatuses were designed strictly for the military purposes. Prolonged shape and chisel bow of Plongeur left little space for imagination regarding its exploration in non-military fields.

For a truly visionary like Jules Verne, it has taken just one encounter to fully grasp the potential of a submarine and depict it in his novel almost as we know this machine in the 21^st century.

Captain Nemo, the main character of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Seas, describes the Nautilus as follows:

“Here, M. Aronnax, are the several dimensions of the boat you are in. It is an elongated cylinder with conical ends. It is very like a cigar in shape, a shape already adopted in London in several constructions of the same sort. The length of this cylinder, from stem to stern, is exactly 70 m, and its maximum breadth is eight metres. It is not built on a ratio of ten to one like your long-voyage steamers, but its lines are sufficiently long, and its curves prolonged enough, to allow the water to slide off easily, and oppose no obstacle to its passage. These two dimensions enable you to obtain by a simple calculation the surface and cubic contents of the Nautilus. Its area measures 1011.45 square metres; and its contents 1,500.2 cubic metres; that is to say, when completely immersed it displaces 1500.2 cubic metres of water, or 1500.2 metric tons.”

Concerning technical characteristics, Jules Verne’s predictions can come across as somewhat outdated. The novel is set in the 1860s, and the technology described was fictional at the time. The submarine Nautilus was a marvel of its era, but modern technology has far surpassed the capabilities of Verne's imagination. For instance, now, underwater exploration is carried out using advanced submarines, remotely operated vehicles (ROVs), and autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs)- the technologies, people in the 18^th century could barely foresee.

However, not diminishing the writer’s outstanding ability to think beyond his time, it should be stated, that nobody before him could think of the way for a submarine to explore, not to damage. For it to house people, not be pointed at them.

As it follows, much of the ship is decorated to standards of luxury that are unequalled in a seagoing vessel of the time. These include a library with boxed collections of valuable oceanic specimens that are unknown to science at the time, expensive paintings, and several collections of jewels. The Nautilus also includes a galley for preparing these foods, which includes a machine that makes drinking water from seawater through distillation.

To summarize, while not all of Jules Verne’s prophecies have been implemented in reality, the scientists of all times have considered him one of their main sources of inspiration, a forerunner of many technologies we know today.

Громова Виктория, студентка 4 курса

направления 45.03.02 «Лингвистика», профиль «Иностранный язык и иностранный язык (английский / французский)» 

Факультета русской филологии и иностранных языков

Института гуманитарных наук и языковых коммуникаций

Федерального государственного бюджетного образовательного учреждения высшего образования «Псковский государственный университет»