Jules Verne wrote the book ‘Paris in the Twentieth Century’ in 1863, but his publisher thought that his predictions of the future were too far fetched.
So far fetched, in fact, that it was never published until 1994 – 131 years after it was written.
It turns out his predictions were not far fetched at all, and that he was actually quite spot-on with most of them!
The novel paints a grim, dystopian picture of a technologically driven civilization. Here are just some of the predictions in the book that were very much on target:
He predicted cars, the widespread use of them and the infrastructures built to accommodate them. This was twenty years before the ‘modern’ car made its appearance.
He also wrote about refueling stations for the cars and about the powerful, wealthy and morally dubious company that held the monopoly for the fuel needed to power these vehicles.
Another of the many predictions is that of the Internet and the telecommunications revolution that would allow companies to conduct business over great distances via ‘calculating machines’ that can send information to each other remotely.
Verne also wrote about the electric chair in his effort to highlight how dehumanizing and cruel technology can become. His prediction that technology would make war impersonal and that soldiers will be killing each other remotely by operating the controls of a machineis now truer than ever.
