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 200th century - one hundred years from now?" In one of his adventure novels (From the Earth to the Moon), his characters traveled to the moon in a rocket. In another novel (20,000 Leagues Under the Sea), his characters dove through the depths of 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 and submarines and other things in his novels didn't exist in Verne's time, but many of the inventions that Verne imagined became reality by the end of the 1900s That's why people call Verne a visionary.