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
Cultural influence of Jules Verne Childhood". Perec once commented: "When Jules Verne lists all the names of fish over four pages in "Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Seas", I feel as though I am reading a poem." The Swiss traveler and writer Nicolas Bouvier cited Verne as his initiation into geography, and named Mathias Sandorf and Phileas Fogg among his childhood heroes. The British traveler and filmmaker Graham Hughes has similarly identified Fogg as one of his inspirations. According to scholarly hypothesis, J.R.R. Tolkien was inspired by Verne during the writing of his Legendarium narratives. The Tolkien scholar Mark T. Hooker and the philosopher Roderick