Nuclear submarine nuclear-powered submarine was first proposed in the United States Navy by the Naval Research Laboratory's Ross Gunn in 1939. Construction of the world's first nuclear powered submarine was made possible by the successful development of a nuclear propulsion plant by a group of scientists and engineers at the Naval Reactors Branch of the Bureau of Ships and the Atomic Energy Commission. In July 1951 the U.S. Congress authorized construction of the first nuclear-powered submarine, "Nautilus", under the leadership of Captain Hyman G. Rickover, USN (sharing names with Captain Nemo's fictional submarine in Jules Verne's "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea",
Cultural influence of Jules Verne Long have both written that the parallels between "The Hobbit" and "Journey to the Center of the Earth" are likely too extensive to have arisen simply by chance (both include a hidden runic message and a celestial alignment directing the adventurers to their goal, among other parallels), and the Verne scholar William Butcher has noted similar narrative parallels between "The Lord of the Rings" and "The Adventures of Captain Hatteras". In an introduction to a biography of Verne, Arthur C. Clarke wrote: "Jules Verne had already been dead for a dozen years when I was born. Yet I feel strongly