6 Eerily Accurate Predictions

Made by a single author — in a book that was lost for 126 years

Image courtesy of the Boston Public Library via Flickr

In 1989, the great-grandson of a famous 19th-century author sold his ancestor’s house. While clearing out the place, he had to get rid of an old bronze safe, the keys to which had been lost, and which he believed to be empty anyways.

The great-grandson cracked the safe with a blowtorch and, to his surprise, found a stack of papers inside. Tucked beneath a few sheets of linen lay an unpublished manuscript — and it was time for the world to see it.

Jules Verne wrote Paris in the Twentieth Century in 1863. Even before his eerily accurate prediction of the Apollo moon landing in a later novel, he conceived a Paris in 1960 that could hardly have come any closer to the reality that followed. In the book…

• A circular metro train system takes people through the vastly spread-out city on separate tracks, using a mix of compressed air and magnetic levitation — like a modern subway or even a Hyperloop.
• Colleges host hundreds of thousands of students, mostly with the goal of them pursuing careers in science, business, and technology. The arts are somewhat forgotten.
• Street lanterns come on automatically at night, using electric light.