Jules Verne (February 8, 1828 to March 24, 1905) in extraordinary ways seemed to predict the next century, the 20th. His fame need not be documented. Our cat reference is from Around the World in Eighty Days. This is the book where Verne outlines a world of tourism in which the entire globe is encompassed with orderly schedules.
Phileas Fogg, the intrepid and obtuse traveler in Around the World in Eighty Days.(1875) is in Bombary served cat instead of the rabbit he ordered off the menu. In his protest he points out that "in India cats were once held to be sacred animals. Those were happy days."
One thing Verne did not predict was a world in which quotations were copied without giving the sources. This is because when books were your main source, nobody appeared scholarly without the tools of research. Without citations you appeared like a charlatan. Now, with the web, so much is available to so many, that, drowiing in facts already, the presumption of accuracy is accorded loosely. And so I hate to mention Verne's supposed phrase, that a cat could walk on a cloud without fallling through. If Jules Verne said this I cannot find the source. Though he is everywhere cited as the author, the attribution feels phony.
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