Did Jules Verne Predict Internet Shopping and the Decline of the High Street?

Jules Verne sets his novel in Birkenhead as a secret tribute to the town’s pioneering of the ‘Victorian Internet’.

In 1895 the ‘father of science fiction’ the writer Jules Verne (1828-1905) predicted that shoppers in the future would view pictures of retail products on personal video screens and place written orders on a ‘teleautograph’ to be transmitted internationally via submarine cables. Today some 95% of international internet traffic is carried ‘online’ by submarine fibre optic cables.

In his fantasy novel The Floating Island (1895) Jules Verne also correctly predicted that this entirely new method of shopping would lead to an almost deserted High Street.

You can find an illustration of Jules Verne’s ‘Phonotelephote’ here

The amazing new findings are published on a new website devoted to Jules Verne, called Jules Verne and the Heroes of Birkenhead which highlights the French author’s growing relationship with Birkenhead - a town lying opposite Liverpool, England.

The website is the brainchild of retired Liverpool Geography teacher John Lamb, who was born in Birkenhead and last month revealed that in Jules Verne’s novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1869) Captain Nemo commissions the hull of his fictional submarine the Nautilus from Birkenhead’s Lairds shipyard.

Mr Lamb’s latest findings have been included on the Société Jules Verne (Paris) Website.

The Floating Island (1895) is an early Science Fiction novel and involves the adventures of four musicians who are taken to ‘Standard Island’ off the Californian coast. The musicians do not realise that they are actually on a giant artificial island designed to take millionaire Americans on a permanent cruise around the Pacific. The island then proceeds to float off across the Pacific Ocean taking the unwitting quartet with it.

The population of Floating Island drive electric motor cars, the boulevards have moving pavements, the hotels are air conditioned and sprinklers keep the lawns verdant as the Pearl of the Pacific sails through the drier zones of the oceans.

The main town is called ‘Milliard’ and despite having ten thousand inhabitants, one of the four musicians is surprised to find no customers on the local High Street. Jules Verne explains why.

‘we commonly use the telautograph, an instrument which sends the written as the telephone sends the spoken word, without forgetting the kinetograph, which registers the movements; being for the eye what the phonograph is for the ear, and the telephote, which reproduces the images.”

Verne also explains that the whole system is connected to the United States via submarine cables.

But why the link with Birkenhead?

As well as building some of the nineteenth century’s finest ships, Birkenhead was at the forefront of developing and promoting submarine telegraph cable technology in the mid-19th Century – what has now become known as the ‘Victorian Internet’.

In a tribute to Birkenhead’s role in developing the ‘Victorian Internet’, Jules Verne gives obvious clues that the Floating Island is actually ‘Birkenhead in disguise’

Both Milliard City on Floating Island and the town of Birkenhead have…

Birkenhead Park is a world class park, the oldest public park in the world and the model for New York’s Central Park. Birkenhead’s tram system – the first in Europe, ran between Woodside Ferry terminal and Birkenhead Park. The tram system was inaugurated by George Francis Train – the first man ever to go around the world in eighty days.

In the novel The Floating Island there are also pictorial representations of Birkenhead Town Hall, the old Woodside Railway Station, Bidston Observatory and Lighthouse and Fort Perch Rock and Lighthouse in New Brighton.

Mr Lamb’s favourite comparison however is Jules Verne’s satire on the great American author Nathanial Hawthorne’s previous derogatory comments on Birkenhead Park.

Yesterday afternoon J and I went to Birkenhead Park. It so happened there was a large school spending its holiday there; a school of girls of the lower classes, to the number of a hundred and fifty.

It struck me, as it always has, to observe how the lower orders of this country indicate their birth and station by their aspect and features. In America there would be a good deal of grace and beauty among a hundred and fifty children and budding girls, belonging to whatever rank of life. But here they had most universally a plebian look, - stubbed, sturdy figures, round, coarse faces, snub-noses, - the most evident specimens of the brown bread of human nature.

Climate, no doubt, has much to do with diffusing a slender elegance over American young womanhood; but something perhaps is also due to the circumstances of classes not being kept apart as they are here.

However, Jules Verne satirises Hawthorne’s words when he describes the great park on his Floating Island.

At this time the park was crowded. The people were crowding in, grown men and young folks. Women and girls, most of them in pale straw-coloured dresses, the hue preferred in the torrid zone, leading little lap dogs in silk coats with chains laced with gold.

Farther off young gentlemen were playing tennis, and cricket, and golf, and also polo, mounted on spirited ponies.

Groups of children – American children of astonishing exuberance, among whom originality is so precocious, particularly in the case of the girls – were playing on the grass.

Great rejoicings took place in the park, where the sporting events were brought off with great enthusiasm. The different classes associated together.

The novel Floating Island is a testimony to the genius of Jules Verne, who not only predicted one of the ultimate benefits of submarine cables – that of shopping on the modern-day Internet, but also anticipated its very real effects on our local high streets.

The satire on Hawthorne is really the ‘Literature DNA’ which undoubtedly proves that Jules Verne based his 1895 Floating Island as a homage to the town of Birkenhead.

It also proves that Verne did a massive amount of research, both into the history, geography and culture of my hometown. In many ways the town of Birkenhead drives Jules Verne’s plotline – it is a masterclass in using the landscape and heritage of an area to stimulate the ultimate in creative writing.

There are however two secrets that Jules Verne hid on his Floating Island and these will be disclosed in future articles.

I believe that Jules Verne was able to come up with such successful scientific predictions as he had a much closer relationship with the scientists and thinkers of his day than has perhaps been realised. Verne had a luxury yacht and he could easily have held philosophical debates with scientists on the potential of cable technology and its impacts. As a former stockbroker, Jules Verne would surely have recommended buying shares in Amazon Prime!

Now the location of one fictional island has been discovered, next month the website will deal with another, and that is Jules Verne’s masterpiece The Mysterious Island (1875) – the sequel to Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and the novel that marks the reappearance of Captain Nemo and his Birkenhead built Nautilus.

Next month’s article is titled ‘The Return to Jules Verne’s Mysterious Island.

John Lamb’s website can be found at