The story was based on the travels of an eccentric man from Boston, called George Frances Tain, who set out to do exactly what the title suggested. His most famous story, Around the World in Eighty Days, is more realistic than much of his work as it's set in a real rather than a possible world. History has shown that he had an incredible sense of what was possible - his imagined inventions have often turned out to be close to later real inventions. He did lots of research for his books but occasionally made up a scientific 'fact' if it suited the story. His stories were of fantastic adventures with a degree of realism in the descriptions of events and scientific content - he was a pioneer of science fiction. In the early 1860s, a magazine manager liked one of his adventure stories and gave him a contract to write similar stories for the next twenty years! The collected stories became known as Verne's Voyages Extraordinaires. He returned home and promised his mother that in future he would imagine travelling - this proved to be a prophetic remark. When he was eleven years old he tried, unsuccessfully, to run away to sea. Jules Verne (1828 - 1905) lived and died in France but developed an early passion for travel.

Verne is often referred to as the 'Father of science fiction' because he wrote about space, air and underwater travel before aeroplanes, spacecrafts and submarines were invented. He is best known for his novels A Journey to the Centre of the Earth, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, The Mysterious Island and Around the World in Eighty Days. Jules Verne was born on February 8, 1828, in the city of Nantes, France.

The Mysterious Island by Jules Verne