In 1863, the most-read novelist in France finished a short novel imagining Paris in the year 1960. He showed it to his publisher. The publisher told him no one would believe his prophecies. The novelist put it in a safe. It stayed there for one hundred and thirty-one years.

His name was Jules Verne. He was thirty-five, French, and famous. He had just published Five Weeks in a Balloon. Journey to the Centre of the Earth was a year away. He delivered the new manuscript to his publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel. The title was Paris in the Twentieth Century. It described a young poet trying to live in a Paris of stone-clad cast-iron skyscrapers, gas-powered automobiles, electric streetlights, calculating machines, and a global telegraphic network. Hetzel sent it back with handwritten notes in the margin. No one would believe his prophecies. It would be a disaster for his reputation. He should put it away.

Verne put it in the safe. He went on to write Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Around the World in Eighty Days, and The Mysterious Island. He died in 1905. The manuscript stayed in the safe. In 1989, his great-grandson Jean Verne was clearing out the family country house at Chantenay-sur-Loire when he found a small locked iron strongbox in the attic. He had it cut open. Inside was the bundled handwritten manuscript dated 1863. The Verne scholar Piero Gondolo della Riva authenticated it that year. Hachette published it in 1994.

Paris in the Twentieth Century opens with a young poet riding in a gas-powered cab down a Boulevard Haussmann lit by electric arc-lamps. The Paris in the book has skyscrapers of stone-clad cast iron. The economy is dominated by enormous engineering and banking corporations. The poet is mocked by his uncle for not understanding stockbroking. Other predictions in the manuscript: a global system of telegraph stations carrying messages around the world in minutes. Music sent down wires to private homes. A device for calculating with figures that resembled a punched-card computer. An electric chair as the modern instrument of execution. Hetzel had been right in 1863. No one would have believed it. He had not foreseen that the manuscript would survive him by ninety years.

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