The French writer Jules Verne wrote several books in the late 1800s. in them, he wrote about the future. He asked, “What will life be like at the end of the twentieth century---one hundred years now!” In one of his adventure novels, his characters traveled to the moon in a rocket. In another, his characters dove in the ocean in a submarine in the shape of a whale. In a novel titled Paris in the Twentieth Century, Verne described a city with skyscrapers of glass and steel, high – speed trains, gas powered automobiles, and a global communications network. Space rockets, submarines, and the other objects didn’t exist in Verne’s time, but many of the inventions in his novels became reality by the end of the 1900s. That’s why people call Verne a visionary.