Jules Verne is a French author whose writings laid much of the foundation of modern science fiction.Jules Verne was born in 1828 in Nantes, France. Young Jules was interested in machinery, sailing and writing. He and his brother Paul explored the river near their home in an old sailboat. Verne’s father wanted him to be a lawyer, so he was sent to Paris to study law. In Paris Verne studied law but afterward chose to follow his interest in literature. From 1848 until 1863 Jules wrote opera librettos and plays. He joined the club of scientific writers, who were interested in balloons and soon Jules wrote an adventure story called “Five Weeks in a Balloon”. Its success encouraged Verne to write other tales of adventure in distant lands. He served as secretary at the Theatre Lyrique (1852-54) and later turned stockbroker but continued writing comedies, librettos, and stories. In 1863 he published in Jules Hetzel's Magasin the first of his Voyages extraordinaires - Five Weeks in a Balloon, 1869. The great success of the tale encouraged him to produce others in the same vein of romantic adventure, with increasingly deft depictions of fantastic but nonetheless carefully conceived imaginary scientific wonders. The Voyages continued with A Journey to the Centre of the Earth, 1874, From the Earth to the Moon, 1873, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, 1873, and The Mysterious Island, 1875, in which he foresaw a number of scientific devices and developments, including the submarine, the aqualung, television, and space travel. Verne's novels were enormously popular throughout the world; one in particular, the grippingly realistic Around the World in Eighty Days, 1873, generated great excitement during its serial publication in Le Temps and remained one of his most popular works. From 1872 he lived in Amiens. In 1892 he was made an officer of the Lйgion d'Honneur. A number of successful motion pictures have been made from Verne novels, starting in 1916 with Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (remade in 1954 by Walt Disney), The Mysterious Island (1929 and 1961), From the Earth to the Moon (1958), Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959), and, perhaps the most popular, Around the World in Eighty Days (1956). In 1905, Verne died at his home.