Jules Verne

(1828 - 1905)

Jules Verne as a boy in the 1830s liked to gaze at the ships in the harbor of his hometown of Nantes and the machines at a factory near his country house in Chantenay. “I have still as much pleasure in watching a steam engine or a fine locomotive at work,” he reflected later in life, “as I have in contemplating a picture by Raphael or Correggio.” As part of his Extraordinary Voyages series, Verne wrote, among some sixty works, Journey to the Center of the Earth and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.