Jules Verne Comes Through Again

I’m having a great time with Jules Verne’s The Mysterious Island! I’ve reread several of Verne’s fantastic voyage adventures in recent years trying to relive adolescent joys. But I didn’t read this one when I was a teenager, and yet it occurs to me that a fresh book may be the truest way to recapture the old experience: Journey to the Center of the Earth was different the second time, and I had to keep thinking about what the first encounter was like, but Mysterious Island is entertaining me with all the power of a new discovery just as if I had first met it when I was fourteen. (Side note: I highly recommend the fairly recent translation by Jordan Stump.)

But my enjoyment of the book is certainly not a 1970s experience. My overriding thought is, “This book should definitely be made into a video game!” I love playing Factorio, a game in which a marooned astronaut has to chop wood and dig up iron and copper and coal and make machines that make bigger machines that make rocket parts so he can send up a signal to get rescued. The castaways on the Mysterious Island have to make shelter and fire, fashion bows and arrows, and hunt game in order to survive, and they also dig up iron like the marooned astronaut. But they were created by Jules Verne, so they won’t be satisfied until, through the scientific knowledge of the engineer in the party, they recreate the marvelous, optimistic, technological nineteenth-century civilization they left behind. And to this end, they make bricks to make kilns to purify the iron, they use the iron to make tools and simple machines, they use the tools to extract other chemical ores, they use the extracted minerals to synthesize sulfuric acid, they use the sulfuric acid to make nitroglycerine, and they use the nitroglycerine to reshape a cave. From pyrite, they make iron sulfate. From saltpeter they make nitric acid. If I were to make this video game, I would definitely have to learn much more chemistry than I remember from tenth grade!

Would I be able to learn this chemistry from Verne himself? Perhaps not. Here’s another way my current experience is different from what it was fifty years ago: I catch a lot of Verne’s mistakes now. To measure the height of a cliff, engineer Cyrus Smith places a six-foot stick (measured by comparing it against his own well-known height) in the ground, lies in front of it, and places his eye at the point on the ground at which the top of the stick and the top of the cliff line up. I recognize this very problem from ninth-grade geometry, and sure enough Smith starts explaining about similar triangles. But then he makes a blunder by saying that the distance from his eye to the stick forms a ratio with the distance between the stick and the cliff’s base that equals the ratio of the stick’s height and the cliff’s height. Of course the italicized phrase should be “the distance between his eye and the cliff’s base” since the two similar triangles share the eye as a vertex.

The slight difference in the answer the castaways calculate means nothing in the end: all the “known” distances are only estimated after all, and there’s no real practical difference to them between a 300-foot cliff and, say, a 320-foot cliff. But if Verne didn’t know geometry any better than that, he probably didn’t know chemistry all that well, either. His place in our culture, though, is not that of a technical writer who has taught science and math to generations of young people but that of an imaginative writer who has inspired and thrilled those generations of young people by his scientific vision. He certainly thrills this young person.