Verne’s concept of a submarine was prophetic. Today, onboard the NAUTILUS (memorial museum) is a first edition of the novel it was also onboard during the submarine’s historic North Pole run. The British edition of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea followed two years later. In 1871, Jules Verne published the French edition of Vingt Mille Lieues Sous Les Mers -the classic adventure of Captain Nemo’s Nautilus submarine. The Royal Navy had eight sailing ships, a destroyer and a submarine named NAUTILUS but that’s another story. All in all, she made fourteen war patrols. Due to her large size, she was outfitted as an undersea troop carrier, landing Marines in the Gilbert Islands in August 1942 and again in November 1943 and putting scouts ashore on Attu in the Aleutians in May 1943. USS NAUTILUS (SS-168),a Narwhal-class diesel boat, saw WWII action in the Battle of Midway.

There was USS NAUTILUS II (SP-559), a motor patrol boat, commissioned in 1917 for WWI service and there was an old diesel-electric boat, the decommissioned O-12 (SS-73), that was converted for use by the ill-fated 1931 Wilkins-Ellsworth Trans-Arctic Expedition and renamed Nautilus in honor of Jules Verne. There was a Holland-class submarine prototype originally named NAUTILUS at keel-laying that became USS H-2 (SS-29) in 1911. Two were sailing ships, a 12-gun schooner, commissioned in 1803, and another schooner, commissioned in 1847 for service in the Mexican-American War. Before USS NAUTILUS, there were five U.S. His prototype had a collapsible mast and sail for surface propulsion and a hand-turned propeller for underwater propulsion. His submarine design was patented in France in 1798. Jenks, USN, Ret., Navigator, USS NAUTILUS (SSN-571) - North Pole Transit, 1958 NAUTILUS Lineageįrom the Greek word nautilos, meaning mariner,many vessels shared the name Nautilus, some long before the fictional Nautilus surfaced in Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. “It was the skipper’s intention to surface at the North Pole, but there was no break in the ice.” “What one man can conceive, another man can achieve.” - Jules Verne, 1873

Movie about nautilus submarine