Google is pretty cool today

Jules Verne's birthday! :applause:

http://www.google.com/

And when you click on it, you get all the Google references to Jules Verne!

Happy Birthday to Jules!

:toast:

Way cool!

:hi:

I don't think it beats the Pacman one, though... they had the Google logo as a playable Pacman level on the last anniversary of its creation

I'm totally awestruck instead! Thank you for sharing this. I had fun playing with my little bathysphere.

:D

In 1885, James Gordon Bennett, Jr., owner of the New York Herald (the same man who sent Stanley to Africa to find Livingstone) asked Jules Verne to write a short story about life in the United States a thousand years hence. Ironically, the resulting tale was not printed until 1889--and not in the New York Herald.
It is an unusual work in every way. Verne wrote few short stories, and no others first published in English. In contrast to his conservative, plodding SF novels, "In the Year 2889" dashes wildly from one fanciful extrapolation to another. Experts believe Jules' son Michel may have authored part of the story.

Many of the predictions for the year 2889 have already come true. Verne's dystopian concept of one man brought to vast power and wealth through widely distributed intellectual property brings to mind names like Samuel Newhouse and Bill Gates. There are also glimmerings of later science fiction themes, including suspended animation and turning the moon around a la Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End (1953).

Of course Verne also made mistakes, and some of his predictions simply have not come to pass. But give them time: there are nearly nine centuries left before the year 2889.


You can read this short story here online a be amazed at his predictions back then...

http://www.wondersmith.com/scifi/2889.htm

It really doesn't take a long time to read it and its worth it.