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 counted Verne as a main influence on his own fiction as well as on literature and science the world over, saying "We are all, in one way or another, the children of Jules Verne." Other literary figures known to have been influenced by Verne include Paul Claudel, François Mauriac, Blaise Cendrars, Jean-Paul Sartre, Marcel Aymé, René Barjavel, Claude Roy, Michel Butor, and Roland Barthes. Verne is also often cited as a major influence of the science fiction genre steampunk, though Verne's works themselves are not of the genre. Cultural influence of Jules Verne Jules Verne (1828–1905), the French writer best