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
The Fabulous World of Jules Verne in which its heroes directly acknowledged their fondness for reading Verne. The second of Zeman's Verne-based films was "Vynález zkázy"; the later ones were "The Stolen Airship", based on "Two Years' Vacation", and "On the Comet", based on "Hector Servadac". The main literary source material for "Vynález zkázy" was Verne's 1896 novel "Facing the Flag". However, rather than a straightforward literal adaptation of the novel, Zeman conceived the film as if the story were being retold by one of its characters, the young engineer Simon Hart. Moreover, since "Facing the Flag" included many memorable Vernian motifs—including submarines, volcanoes, mysterious figures