464 Patterns ofPrediction

Patterns of Prediction

JULES VERNE AND THE VISIONOF THE FUTURE

T. F. Clarke

In the March 1969 issue of FUTURES the first of a series of articles on theheritage of technological forecasting was published. Here the popularisingrole of Jules Verne is examined and the effect of this on attitudes towardsscience.

By the middle of the nineteenthcentury all the great technologicaldevelopments-railways, steamships,blast furnaces, and machine tools­had made it apparent that the newapplied sciences provided a strategyfor limitless progress. In an exultantleading article on the opening of theGreat Exhibition in 1851 the LondonIllustrated News told its readers that"the ball of improvement has rolledwith accelerated velocity, increasing itsimpetus as it went; and we mayreasonably anticipate that the nexttwenty years will afford us triumphsstill more substantial and more brilliantthan those which we already enjoy".

Improvement, progress, advance­these were the key words by whichmen learnt to comprehend a worldthat was - changing at a rate neverknown before. As population multipliedand the level of literacy rose steadily,a new race of communicators came

Professor Clarke is Head of the English StudiesDepartment, University of Strathclyde, UK.

into existence-writers who made ittheir business to explain the greatachievements of the new industrialsociety and (even more interesting)sought to describe the greater triumphsstill to come. Thus, the Scottish doctorturned author, Samuel Smiles made afortune with his Lives of the Engineers,because like the Victorians he sawthem as demi-gods who had conquerednature. "Our engineers", he wrote,"may be regarded in some measure asthe makers of modern civilisation."The American poet, \Valt Whitman,made the same point in more romanticlanguage when he wrote of the achieve­ments of nineteenth-century man:His daring foot is on land and sea everywhere,he colonises the Pacific, the archipelagos,\Vith the steamship, the electric telegraph,the newspaper, the wholesale engines of war,With these and the world-spreading factorieshe interlinks all geography, all lands.

It was left to the French author,Jules Verne, to direct attention towardsthe new frontiers of the future; forVerne was the first writer to make a

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Patterns ofPrediction 465

Figure 1. Space vehicle-or rather, the space projectile-arrives at the launching site in readinessto be fired off at the moon. The solid and deliberate technology of the nineteenth century can beseen in the design of a capsule that is meant to be an outsize projectile. From De fa Terre a faLune (1865).

FUTURES September 1969

466 Pat/ems cif Prediction

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Figure 2, A contemporary of Verne's was Albert Robida, a French engraver and designer, whoproduced a series of drawings between 1883and the First World War, These were all anticipations-half ironic and half serious-about the shape of life in the twentieth century. This is an accurateforecast of bacteriological warfare, The drawing first appeared in Robida's illustrated book,La Guerre au Vinglieme Siecle (1883).

FUTURES September t969

fortune by using science as materialfor fiction, and he shared with Shakes­peare the singular distinction that hisworks were read in translation fromTokyo and Hong Kong to Moscow andMadrid. More than any other writerof fiction in the last century he taughtmen what to expect by describingwhat lay ahead. He belonged to theheroic age of science, when it was stillnormal to expect that one man-s-Watt,Faraday, Bessemer---eould be respon­sible for an invention of unprecedentedimportance. In consequence, Verne'sbooks were a collective response to thenineteenth century sense of tech­nological achievement. They were exu­berant myths that celebrated thevigour, the knowledge and the world­changing powers of the Prometheantechnologist who conquers the lastbarriers ofair, ofocean, and ofspace.

Verne wrote at a time when menexpected invention and discovery tocontinue into a future that would bepredictably Victorian in habit andbehaviour. Because Verne shared thisfaith in the applied sciences his bookswere read wherever Western tech­nology had penetrated; for Vernecould interest readers anywhere by theway in which he turned technologyinto a subject for fiction. He was anoriginal in many ways. His heroes werean innovation in fiction. They wereengineers and scientists who had learnt .how to master the powers of nature;and their adventures · demonstratedman's new-found capacity for shapingthings to his will. And so, from thepublication of Five Weeks in a Balloonin 1863 to his death in 1903 this prolificFrench writer turned out a successionof books, some sixty in all, that madehim famous throughout the world. Hewas read by young and old; and heinterested men as different as PopeLeo XIII, Robert Louis .Stevenson,and the Emperor Meiji ofJapan.

Fame came rapidly for Jules Verne.His third book, From the Earth to theMoon, spread his reputation through-

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Patterns ofPrediction 4U7 ·

out the English-speaking world, andwith the publication of the classie,Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Seain 1870 he was established as theprophet of his time. The extent of hissuccess is to be seen in the prize theFrench Academy awarded him in 1872,and by the fact that in the followingyear his new story, Round the World inEighty Days, made his fiction head-linenews for the press. The Temps ran thestory as a serial, and as each partappeared the Paris correspondents offoreign newspapers cabled the instal­ments to their home offices. In nineyears Verne had seen his hopes cometrue for shortly after finishing FivefVeeks in a Balloon he wrote to a friend:"I have just written a novel in a newform, one that is entirely my own. Ifit succeeds, I will have stumbled upona gold mine".

Verne's success had come aboutbecause he had found a literary formthat was perfectly designed to exploitthe general delight in scientific achieve­ment and the pleasure of seeing theshape of things to come. In his storiesthe heroes are men who have out­distanced the greatest triumphs of theVictorians. They are inventors likeCaptain Nemo in Twenty ThousandLeagues under the Sea who has built avast submarine with which he achievesthe age-old dream of penetrating thedepths of ocean. They are like Roburin the Clipper of the Clouds who anti­cipates the future with his aeronef inwhich he flies round the world. Fromstart to finish that story is a truetechnological romance; for Verne beginsby reporting that Robur uses electricityto power his flying machine, "thatagent which will one day be the soulof the industrial world". And at theend, when the adventurers have re­turned to Philadelphia, Verne writes:"And now who is this Robur? Roburis the science of the future. Perhaps thescience of tomorrow. Certainly thescience that will come".

Verne is important because his

468 Letter to the Editor

stories mark the high tide of theEuropean delight in the possibilities ofscientific progress. He played a majorpart in developing the favourite nine­teenth century dialogue between todayand tomorrow, the advance from theevidence of past achievements to thevision of the even greater thingsremaining to be done. His stories wereworks of faith, a sustained testimony tothe rationality of science and to thecertainty of human progress. As hisfellow writer, H. G. Wells, said ofhim, " his work dealt almost alwayswith actual possibilities of inventionand discovery, and he made someremarkable forecasts. The interest heevoked was a practical one; he wrote.and believed and told that this thingor that thing could be done, whichwas not at that time done. He helped

his reader to imagine it done and torealise what fun, excitement or mis­chief would ensue".

For these reasons Verne comes mid­way in the short history of technologicalforecasting. He was the first worldfigure in the popularisation of futuredevelopments, and he did much tomake his contemporaries familiar withthe ideas and the images of tech­nological possibilities. For him theworld of the future was a simple anduncomplicated place. Men would con­tinue to invent mechanical marvels,and society would go on for everenjoying the benefits of an advancingtechnology. Like most of his con­temporaries he failed to foresee thatscience and society do not always gohand in hand. That lesson was to belearnt the hard way in World War I.

LETTER TO THE EDITOR

Optimum distance for prediction

break out. In a similar way militaryexperts have a false picture becausethey know the facts too well. Has thenany attempt been made to assess themost advantageous future predictingdistance?

Has the notion ofdistance from a fieldany predictive value for individuals? Itoccurs to me that one problem theexpert faces is being right on top of hissubject, and that in this way he is aslikely to come up with the false viewas the non-expert. I can hardly imaginethe man in the street feeling any degreeof confidence for the opinion of a sea­man on board an American or Russianwar ship in the Mediterranean as towhether a third World War is likely to

Chris Harding30 July 1969

26 Macaree Street,North Rockhamp­ton, 4701, Queens­land, Australia

FUTURES Sel)tember 1969