Jules Verne! Inventors! Inventions!

Explorers, Mad Scientists… Where it all got started

“20,000 Leagues Under the Sea” (1954) starring Kirk Douglas and James Mason, Walt Disney Pictures.

Children’s nonfiction is full of biographies of Thomas Edison and his incandescent light, Ben Franklin and his electrical kite, and Leonardo Da Vinci and his screwy war-machines. Kids curious about how-things-came-to-be can also read books about the invention of such things as the pencil and the trampoline. But when it comes to fiction about inventors and inventions, there is only one giant: Jules Verne.

In his first book and later in his better known Around the World in Eighty Days (1873), Verne featured the hot-air balloon as a novel means of transportation; Frank Baum took note and subsequently sent the Wizard of Oz (a character full of hot air) up in his own gas bag. While in this book Phileas Fogg circumnavigates the globe, in other stories Verne sent his characters to the Moon and to the antipodes of Antarctica.

Captain Nemo from “The Mysterious Island,” illustrated by N.C. Wyeth. Scribners’ Illustrated Classics series, Atheneum, $20 (hardback)

With Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), however, this Frenchman plunged not upwards and outwards but downwards and inwards. Following that same vector, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870) featured the new device of the steam-driven submarine, in this…