Leyden ball Leyden ball A Leyden ball is a fictional bullet used in the nineteenth century Jules Verne science fiction novel, "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea". It contains a capacitance charge of electrical energy, which discharges instantaneously upon the bullet's impact. A similar, but more complex non-lethal electronic weapon, meant to disable people, has been developed for police use in the modern day. In his 1870 science fiction classic "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea", Jules Verne wrote about a hunting expedition using a very unusual form of bullet: the balls sent by this gun are not ordinary balls, but little
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea seas and charted all oceans. Verne would have known of Matthew Maury's international fame and perhaps Maury's French ancestry. References are made to other such Frenchmen as Jean-François de Galaup, comte de Lapérouse, a famous explorer who was lost while circumnavigating the globe; Dumont D'Urville, the explorer who found the remains of Lapérouse's ship; and Ferdinand Lesseps, builder of the Suez Canal and the nephew of the sole survivor of Lapérouse's expedition. The "Nautilus" seems to follow the footsteps of these men: she visits the waters where Lapérouse was lost; she sails to Antarctic waters and becomes stranded there, just