Prophet or futurist? 10 technologies Verne predicted in the 19th century

Image: Albert Robida, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Before science fiction was even a thing, Jules Verne was already inventing the future in his novels. He filled his adventures with strange contraptions, daring machines, and ideas that seemed unlikely in the 19th century. The twist? So many of those daydreams turned into everyday reality. From submarines gliding beneath the seas to rockets racing skyward, Verne’s stories can be read less as fantasy and more as a premonition of what was to come. What follows are ten of his most remarkable visions, proof of how closely imagination can become reality.

Image: Victor Serban

In the 19th century, people regarded Verne’s stories as mere fantasy adventures. But flip through them today, and they feel like you are reading an early NASA mission report. In From the Earth to the Moon (1865) and its sequel Around the Moon (1869), the French writer imagines three daring men being shot into space from Florida, traveling inside a metal capsule. After a five-day trip to lunar orbit, the projectile lands safely in the ocean.

Although it was probably a crazy and far-fetched idea at the time, a century later, Apollo astronauts followed nearly the same playbook, proving that Verne’s "make-believe" wasn’t so impossible after all.

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Jules Verne was probably one of the first to dream of machines fueled by water instead of coal or oil. In his vision, the humble liquid would be split into hydrogen and oxygen, releasing its hidden energy to drive engines of the future. For readers in the 19th century, this idea felt both magical and oddly precise, as if Verne had peeked into tomorrow’s laboratories. Today, hydrogen power is still experimental, yet it remains one of science’s most promising—and elusive—goals, holding the potential for clean energy on a grand scale.

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Rising from the earth like shimmering glass mountains, Jules Verne imagined ever-shining cities. He pictured towers of steel and glass that didn’t go dark at sunset but glowed brilliantly through the night, powered by the then-new magic of electricity. Inside, elevators would whisk people effortlessly upward, transforming the way cities could be built. Back then, most buildings barely climbed ten stories, and the idea of infinite skylines was almost otherworldly. Today, it’s exactly what we see through the window in any modern city.

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Imagine reading about a ship that could submerge into the waves and roam the oceans like a sea creature long before such a thing was possible. That’s exactly what Jules Verne wrote about in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870). His Nautilus was a 230-foot machine, armed with a library of 12,000 books and capable of sinking any ship.

Although Verne didn’t actually invent submarines, at the time of the book’s publication, they were no more than unreliable and primitive prototypes. If anything, Verne’s fictional vessel anticipated the technology of the submarines that now explore the oceans of the real world. His invention might have been a fantasy, but it was also a glimpse into the future.

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Can you imagine having to hear the news secondhand in the town square? Jules Verne probably knew that, in the future, people would need to be informed at all times. So, he invented a daily news report delivered by voice—spoken bulletins that could be piped straight into homes and even announced at public kiosks. We can only imagine what this meant for his readers in the 19th century, but we can now easily relate to the news being available whenever we want. Long before antennas or TV screens, he foresaw a world where the latest headlines could arrive instantly, without a scrap of paper.

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Many years ago, a machine flying through the sky as high as a cathedral with the ease of a bird would have seemed improbable. But Jules Verne’s imagination could go as far as he wanted. In Robur the Conqueror (1886), he introduces the "Albatross," a fantastic flying ship that can lift straight off the ground, hover in place, and maneuver with uncanny grace. Does this description sound familiar? That’s because Verne outlined the blueprint for the helicopter decades before engineers made it real in the 20th century.

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What seemed like a futuristic gadget in 1889 now feels like part of our everyday lives. In his novel In the Year 2889, Jules Verne describes the "phonotelephote," a device that allows people not only to communicate with others who are miles away but also to see each other’s faces in real time. For 19th-century readers, the idea was dazzling, almost too magical to believe. Yet today, we hardly think twice before tapping into a video call on our phones or computers. Verne essentially predicted FaceTime and Zoom calls a full century before the first computer was even connected to the internet.

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Many decades before the first electric cars ever rolled off an assembly line, Jules Verne was already letting his imagination race ahead. In The Mysterious Island (1874), he described wagons that needed no horses, powered instead by rechargeable batteries. To 19th-century readers, the idea of a vehicle moving smoothly on its own was unthinkable, closer to magic than mechanics. Yet Verne’s vision sounds strikingly familiar to anyone who has seen a quiet electric car glide down the highway today. What was once a dream in the pages of a novel has become a daily sight in traffic.

Image: Geoff Maredi

Poetic yet technical—that was Jules Verne’s gift. Take his vision of music made not with violins or flutes, but with machines. In his once-shelved novel Paris in the Twentieth Century (written in 1863 but not published until the 1990s), the writer imagined concerts filled with sounds produced by electrical instruments. For 19th-century readers, it probably sounded absurd. Yet a hundred years later, synthesizers and electric keyboards defined popular music, proving Verne had once again tuned in early to the future.

Image: Tim Dennert

A ship that needs no fuel, gliding through space on nothing but light—it sounds like poetry. Yet Verne imagined exactly that. He described enormous sails stretched wide, catching not the wind but the faint pressure of sunlight itself and using it to push vessels across the vast silence of space. In his day, it was a dream almost too delicate to believe, like navigating the ocean with moonbeams. But the image stuck, and now scientists and space agencies are testing real solar sails, proving that his most poetic vision wasn’t just fantasy but a glimpse of tomorrow waiting to unfold in orbit.

Some names stick around

From Table Tap Joe to Ziggy Stardust: Who are the best song characters?

Sometimes, a character is the perfect alter-ego to write a song about oneself without self-referencing so much. Other times, a character is just a character. Over the years, musicians have come up with lonely dreamers, fearless heroes, mysterious strangers, and even supernatural villains who have become just as famous as the songs themselves. Some were inspired by real people, others sprang entirely from imagination, but all of them left a lasting mark on music history. Which of these 12 do you remember?

Tom Waits has always had a soft spot for society's oddballs, and few are even stranger than Table Top Joe. Introduced on the 2002 album Alice, Joe is born with only a head and hands, yet grows into a brilliant piano player whose extraordinary talent earns him fame despite the odds stacked against him.

The song unfolds like a forgotten American folk tale, complete with references to Coney Island's legendary Dreamland amusement park and composer Igor Stravinsky. Although many listeners assume the story is based on an old carnival legend, Table Top Joe is entirely Tom Waits' own creation.

Few fictional musicians have ever become as famous as Ziggy Stardust. Introduced in 1972, Ziggy is an alien rock star sent to Earth shortly before humanity's end, only to be consumed by the very fame that makes him a savior to millions.

David Bowie blurred the line between fiction and reality by performing as Ziggy onstage for more than a year. When he unexpectedly announced Ziggy's retirement during a concert at London's Hammersmith Odeon in 1973, many fans believed the character, and perhaps Bowie himself, had truly reached the end of the story.

Tommy Walker isn't just the hero of a song, he's the central figure of one of rock music's first great operas. After witnessing a traumatic event as a child, Tommy becomes deaf, mute, and blind, yet somehow develops astonishing pinball skills that transform him into an unlikely celebrity.

Pete Townshend built an entire musical world around Tommy, exploring themes of trauma, faith, and redemption. First released in 1969, Tommy later became a hit film, a Broadway production, and one of the most influential concept albums ever recorded.

Johnny B. Goode is every aspiring musician's dream. Growing up in rural Louisiana with little more than a guitar and natural talent, he plays so brilliantly that listeners predict "his name will be in lights."

Chuck Berry based the character partly on himself and partly on pianist Johnnie Johnson. Originally described as a "colored boy," Johnny became a "country boy" in the final lyrics, making the song more likely to receive airplay during the segregation era. Nearly two decades later, Johnny's anthem would even travel into space aboard NASA's Voyager Golden Record.

Few fictional characters have captured loneliness as powerfully as Eleanor Rigby. She quietly moves through life unnoticed, while Father McKenzie delivers sermons that no one hears, creating one of popular music's saddest portraits of isolation.

Paul McCartney later explained that Eleanor's name came from actress Eleanor Bron and the Liverpool shop Rigby & Evens. The discovery of an actual Eleanor Rigby gravestone in Liverpool only deepened the song's mystique, though McCartney maintained the coincidence was unintentional.

Billie Jean may be one of pop music's most famous women, yet Michael Jackson insisted she wasn't a real person. Instead, she represented several women who falsely claimed that he had fathered their children during the height of the Jackson 5's fame.

Released in 1983 as part of Thriller, the song became a global phenomenon. It also provided the stage for Jackson's legendary moonwalk during Motown 25.

Unlike many legendary song characters, Stagger Lee actually existed. His real name was Lee Shelton, a St. Louis criminal who murdered Billy Lyons during an argument over a hat on Christmas Eve in 1895.

The shocking crime quickly entered American folklore through countless folk songs before Lloyd Price transformed it into a chart-topping hit in 1958. More than a century later, Stagger Lee remains one of the most enduring antiheroes in American music.

Tom Dooley was inspired by Thomas Dula, a Confederate veteran executed in North Carolina in 1868 after being convicted of murdering Laura Foster. His surname was locally pronounced "Dooley," giving the ballad its familiar title.

The Kingston Trio revived the old Appalachian folk song in 1958, turning it into an international hit and helping launch America's folk music revival.

When the narrator of "Lola" meets an intriguing stranger in a Soho nightclub, expectations quickly give way to surprise. Ray Davies crafted one of rock's earliest mainstream stories exploring gender ambiguity, decades before the topic entered popular conversation.

The recording rarely reached British radio. Because BBC rules prohibited commercial product names, Davies had to interrupt a U.S. tour and fly back to London simply to replace the lyric "Coca-Cola" with the now-famous "cherry cola."

Unlike most famous song characters, the Piano Man is really Billy Joel himself. Before becoming a superstar, Joel spent six months in 1972 and 1973 performing under the pseudonym Bill Martin at the Executive Room, a piano bar in Los Angeles, after becoming trapped in a bad recording contract. The song transforms those experiences into a bittersweet portrait of ordinary people searching for escape at the end of another week.

Joel has said that virtually every character in the song was based on a real person, from bartender John to "Paul, the real estate novelist" and Davy, who really was in the Navy. Yet the Piano Man himself became the story's most enduring character: a quiet observer who offers music as a brief refuge for dreamers, lonely souls, and regulars alike. More than fifty years after its 1973 release, "Piano Man" remains Billy Joel's signature song, and its title has effectively become his lifelong nickname.

Standing nearly seven feet tall and missing an arm, Amos Moses roams the Louisiana swamps hunting alligators. Jerry Reed filled the song with colorful Southern expressions and exaggerated storytelling that make Amos feel like an authentic folk legend.

Although fictional, Amos embodies the larger-than-life heroes found throughout American tall tales. His adventures turned the song into one of Reed's biggest crossover hits and secured Amos a permanent place among country music's greatest characters.

Big Bad John hardly says a word, but he doesn't have to. The towering coal miner earns everyone's respect through quiet strength before sacrificing his own life to save fellow workers when a mine collapses.

Jimmy Dean's 1961 ballad became a smash hit, winning a Grammy and inspiring several sequel songs. More than sixty years later, Big Bad John still stands as one of country music's defining working-class heroes.