20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1916 film) 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1916 film) 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea is a 1916 American silent film directed by Stuart Paton. The film's storyline is based on the novel "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea" by Jules Verne. It also incorporates elements from Verne's "The Mysterious Island". This was the first motion picture filmed underwater. Actual underwater cameras were not used, but a system of watertight tubes and mirrors allowed the camera to shoot reflected images of underwater scenes staged in shallow sunlit waters. The film was made by The Universal Film Manufacturing Company (now Universal Pictures), not then
Science fiction accuracy, especially "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea" (1870) which predicted the modern nuclear submarine. In 1887 the novel "El anacronópete" by Spanish author Enrique Gaspar y Rimbau introduced the first time machine. Many critics consider H. G. Wells one of science fiction's most important authors, or even "the Shakespeare of science fiction”. His most notable science fiction works include "The Time Machine" (1895), "The Island of Doctor Moreau" (1896), "The Invisible Man" (1897), and "The War of the Worlds" (1898). His science fiction imagined time travel, alien invasion, invisibility, and biological engineering. In his non-fiction futurologist works he predicted