Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea as an inhabitant of British Colonial India, "is an inhabitant of an oppressed country". Verne took the name "Nautilus" from one of the earliest successful submarines, built in 1800 by Robert Fulton, who later invented the first commercially successful steamboat. Fulton's submarine was named after the paper nautilus because it had a sail. Three years before writing his novel, Jules Verne also studied a model of the newly developed French Navy submarine "Plongeur" at the 1867 Exposition Universelle, which inspired him for his definition of the "Nautilus". The breathing apparatus used by "Nautilus" divers is depicted as an untethered version
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea public-domain translation, which is available from a number of sources, notably a recent edition with the title "Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Seas" (). In 2010 Walter released a fully revised, newly researched translation with the title "20,000 Leagues Under the Seas" — part of an omnibus of five of his Verne translations titled "Amazing Journeys: Five Visionary Classics" and published by State University of New York Press. In 1998 William Butcher issued a new, annotated translation from the French original, published by Oxford University Press, , with the title "Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Seas". He includes detailed notes,