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 Diabolic Tenant" (1909). Zeman freely used details from Méliès's style as inspiration; for example, the piston-powered steam engine and submarine in "Vynález zkázy" are creatively adapted variants of those in "The Impossible Voyage". Other possible cinematic sources include Fritz Lang's 1927 film "Metropolis", Sergei Eisenstein's 1925 film "Battleship Potemkin", and possibly even Stuart Paton's 1916 version of "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea". The film has long been noted for its unique visual style, which faithfully recreates that of the Victorian line engravings (by Édouard Riou, Léon Benett, and others) featured in the original editions of Verne's novels. According to Karel