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
Jules Verne Jules Verne Jules Gabriel Verne (; ; 8 February 1828 – 24 March 1905) was a French novelist, poet, and playwright. Jules Verne was born in the seaport of Nantes, he was trained to follow in his father's footsteps as a lawyer, but quit the profession early in life to write for magazines and the stage. His collaboration with the publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel led to the creation of the "Voyages extraordinaires", a widely popular series of scrupulously researched adventure novels including "Journey to the Center of the Earth" (1864), "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea" (1870), and "Around the World