Who is Jules Verne

Journey to the Centre of the Earth (), also translated as A Journey to the Interior of the Earth, is a classic 1864 science fiction novel by Jules Verne. The story involves a German professor (Otto Lidenbrock in the original French,Project Gutenberg, Voyage au centre de la terre Professor Von Hardwigg in the most common English translationProject Gutenberg, Voyage au centre de la terre, English) who believes there are volcanic tubes going toward the center of the Earth. He, his nephew Axel, and their guide Hans encounter many adventures, including prehistoric animals and natural hazards, eventually coming to the surface again in southern Italy. The living organisms they meet reflect geological time; just as the rock layers become older and older the deeper they travel, the animals become more and more ancient the closer the characters approach the center. From a scientific point of view, this story has not aged quite as well as other Verne stories, since most of his ideas about what the interior of the Earth contains have since been proven wrong. However, a redeeming point to the story is Verne's own belief, told within the novel from the viewpoint of a character, that the inside of the Earth does indeed differ from that which the characters encounter. One of Verne's main ideas with his stories was also to educate the readers, and by placing the different extinct creatures the characters meet in their correct geological era, he is able to show how the world looked a long time ago, stretching from the ice age to the dinosaurs.

The book was inspired by Charles Lyell's Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man of 1863. By that time geologists had abandoned a literal biblical account of Earth's development and it was generally thought that the end of the last glacial period marked the first appearance of humanity, but Lyell drew on new findings to put the origin of human beings much further back in the deep geological past. Lyell's book also influenced Louis Figuier's 1867 second edition of La Terre avant le déluge which included dramatic illustrations of savage men and women wearing animal skins and wielding stone axes, in place of the Garden of Eden shown in the 1863 edition..

From the Earth to the Moon (, 1865) is a humorous science fantasy novel by Jules Verne and is one of the earliest entries in that genre. It tells the story of the president of a post-American Civil War gun club in Baltimore, his rival, a Philadelphia maker of armor, and a Frenchman, who build an enormous sky-facing columbiad and launch themselves in a projectile/spaceship from it to a Moon landing.

The story is also notable in that Verne attempted to do some rough calculations as to the requirements for the cannon and, considering the total lack of any data on the subject at the time, some of his figures are surprisingly close to reality. However, his scenario turned out to be impractical for safe manned space travel since a much longer muzzle would have been required to reach escape velocity while limiting acceleration to survivable limits for the passengers.

The story bears similarities to the real-life Apollo program:

*Verne's cannon was a type called a columbiad; the Apollo 11 command module was named Columbia.

*The spacecraft crew consisted of three persons in each case.

*The physical dimensions of the projectile are very close to the dimensions of the Apollo CSM.

*Verne's voyage blasted off from Florida, as did all Apollo missions. (Verne correctly states in the book that objects launch into space most easily if they are launched towards the zenith of a particular location, and that the zenith would better line up with the moon's orbit from near the Earth's equator. In the book Florida and Texas compete for the launch, with Florida winning.)

*The names of the crew, Ardan, Barbicane, and Nicholl, are vaguely similar to Bill Anders, Frank Borman, and Jim Lovell, the crew of Apollo 8, the first manned spacecraft to travel to the moon, although it didn't actually land.

The character of "Michel Ardan" in the novel was inspired by Nadar.

Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea () is a classic science fiction novel by French writer Jules Verne published in 1869. It tells the story of Captain Nemo and his submarine Nautilus as seen from the perspective of Professor Pierre Aronnax. The first illustrated edition (not the original edition which had no illustrations) was published by Hetzel and contains a number of illustrations by Alphonse de Neuville and Édouard Riou.

Category: File - :20000 Nemo South Pole flag.jpg|upright|thumb|Captain Nemo bids the Sun to go down over Antarctica, after claiming the South Pole in his name, in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.

Captain Nemo is a fictional character featured in Jules Verne's novels Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870) and The Mysterious Island (1874). Nemo, one of the most famous antiheroes in fiction, is a mysterious figure. He is a scientific genius who roams the depths of the sea in his submarine, the Nautilus, which he helped build on a deserted island. Nemo tries to project a stern, controlled confidence, but he is driven by a thirst for vengeance and wracked by remorse over the deaths of his crewmembers and even by the deaths of enemy sailors. In The Mysterious Island, a still mysterious but gentler Nemo secretly helps castaways off the island and in the end warns them that the island will be destroyed in a volcanic eruption. Nemo dies of a mysterious illness just before the eruption and is entombed in his ship which then sinks.

Around the World in Eighty Days () is a classic adventure novel by the French writer Jules Verne, first published in 1873. In the story, Phileas Fogg of London and his newly employed French valet Passepartout attempt to circumnavigate the world in 80 days on a £20,000 wager set by his friends at the Reform Club.