Underwater explorers like me owe a lot to the novelist Jules Verne, who was born 183 years ago. Google honored him with one of their “doodles,” but in that doodle is a clue to Verne’s greatness – it’s an image that reminds you of the electric submarine, the Nautilus, from Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.
When Verne’s words were published in 1869, electric submarines didn’t exist – they were just something out of his imagination. As National Geographic wrote, Verne also predicted that news wouldn’t just come from newspapers, but would be “spoken to subscribers,” in the way that radio and television news happens today. He thought of that in a story that was published nearly thirty years before the first radio broadcast.
The Verne list of firsts goes on. In 1865, in From the Earth the Moon, he thought there could be such a thing as a solar-powered spacecraft, and of course he wrote about traveling to the moon long before the first astronaut got there. He even thought of skywriting, videoconferencing, the Taser, and landing a spaceship in the ocean for a “splashdown.”
The mention of water brings us back to the ocean, and the visionary thoughts of Verne make it possible for me to do what I do today – explore the hidden depths and the distant lands that I want to share with you. Verne didn’t have any engineering training at all, just a lot of imagination. That’s all you need to come along on an adventure with me. My polar bear expedition to the high arctic has an April 17 departure and there are just two spaces left. Will you join me?
[If you would like to Join Amos on one of his Big Animal adventures, you can send Dive Mom a note or contact Amos directly. Be sure to tell him that you read about his trips here.]
Eric Keibler says
As a kid growing up in West Texas far away from the water, I found Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea fascenating and exciting. The detailed descriptions of the ocean floor and the creatures was spell binding. Little did I know at the time, that Jules Vern had never seen any of the things he had written about. In fact, some of what he wrote was fiction at that time but is reality today.
It often makes me think where will diving and the ocean explorers be in the future. I recently heard Sylvia Earl speak and she reiterated the fact that we know more about space travel than we do about our own oceans. This is why diving is so exciting right now — there are unknown places to explore, fish and other creatures to find and amazing things left to discover.
I guess this is why the phrase – “discover the explorer” in you is so true and why I am glad I have the priviledge to do what I do!
Thank you Jules Vern for helping me to discover what the waves hide…