Nautilus (Verne) Nautilus (Verne) Nautilus is the fictional submarine captained by Nemo featured in Jules Verne's novels "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea" (1870) and "The Mysterious Island" (1874). Verne named the "Nautilus" after Robert Fulton's real-life submarine "Nautilus" (1800). For the design of the "Nautilus" Verne was inspired by the French Navy submarine "Plongeur", a model of which he had seen at the 1867 Exposition Universelle, three years before writing his novel. "Nautilus" is described by Verne as "a masterpiece containing masterpieces". It is designed and commanded by Captain Nemo. Electricity provided by sodium/mercury batteries (with the sodium provided by extraction
Cultural influence of Jules Verne elaborate flying machines. Igor Sikorsky often quoted Verne and cited his "Robur the Conqueror" as the inspiration for his invention of the first successful helicopter. The rocketry innovators Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, Robert Goddard, and Hermann Oberth are all known to have taken their inspiration from Verne's "From the Earth to the Moon". Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and William Anders, the astronauts on the Apollo 8 mission, were similarly inspired, with Borman commenting "In a very real sense, Jules Verne is one of the pioneers of the space age". When cosmonaut Georgi Grechko was orbiting Earth with Yuri Romanenko on the "Salyut