In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle reads Morgan Robertson’s prophetic novel The Wreck of the Titan
What connects the invention of the periscope to the sinking of the Titanic? Nothing specifically technical or naval: it’s a literary link, of sorts. The man who claimed to have invented the periscope also wrote a short novel which uncannily predicted the sinking of the Titanic some fourteen years before that ship’s ill-fated voyage.
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle celebrates one of the great science-fiction achievements of the 1960s
What’s the most prophetic book you can name? Nostradamus’ notebooks? In my book The Secret Library: A Book-Lovers’ Journey Through Curiosities of History
By Spencer Blohm
Jules Verne is one of the most influential and celebrated writers in the history of science fiction. But his novels contain more than just entertainment. His wild imagination and propensity for thorough research led not only to enthralling adventure stories, but some eerily accurate predictions in the realm of scientific advancement.
In the 1870 classic novel 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Verne describes the Nautilus, an underwater vessel capable of traversing the ocean’s depths. A ship of this concept had never been seen by the protagonists of the novel, or by its readers at the time. While primitive submarines existed at the time, electric powered subs like the Nautilus wouldn’t come about until the early 1900s.