10 Centuries-Old Predictions That Actually Came True

4. Submarines

When: 1869 Where: 'Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea' by Jules Verne Submarines had actually been used by the military five years before Jules Verne's classic, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea, was released in 1869. However, Verne did manage to predict the extent to which submarines could impact the world: "For some time past vessels had been met by "an enormous thing," a long object, spindle-shaped, occasionally phosphorescent, and infinitely larger and more rapid in its movements than a whale. The facts relating to this apparition (entered in various log-books) agreed in most respects as to the shape of the object or creature in question, the untiring rapidity of its movements, its surprising power of locomotion, and the peculiar life with which it seemed endowed. If it was a whale, it surpassed in size all those hitherto classified in science. Taking into consideration the mean of observations made at divers times €” rejecting the timid estimate of those who assigned to this object a length of two hundred feet, equally with the exaggerated opinions which set it down as a mile in width and three in length €” we might fairly conclude that this mysterious being surpassed greatly all dimensions admitted by the learned ones of the day, if it existed at all."