In a century that gave rise to so many inventions, French author Jules Verne (1828-1905) pioneered a writing style that's known today as science fiction.

The most translated author in the world and the writer of over 200 stories, Verne became the "Father of Science Fiction."

His insights, backed by those times' extensive scientific research, gave the world a glimpse of what it would look like today.

The 19th-century visionary was also one of the most mistranslated and censored authors in the world. Editors and translators often rewrote, distorted or omitted political undertones in his original content.

From an early age, Verne was fascinated with foreign travel.

He was born in Nantes, a major Atlantic seaport at the mouth of the Loire River in France. Young Verne lived with his family on an island, Ile Feydeau, in the river.

Verne would often join his parents and brother on trips to the mainland where he would go to the docks and watch ships in the harbor.

In his imagination, he would travel to exotic ports beyond the Brittany coast he knew. He also fancied places where no one had ever been: the depths of the sea, the moon, the inside of Earth and the distant future.

Some of his best-selling works later sprouted from those ideas.

While traveling through his dreams, Verne delved into science and literature. At 5, he asked for a toy version of the newly invented telegraph. He was intrigued by a story about his schoolteacher's husband who sailed off and never returned. He would one day write his own version of that.

Verne became an avid reader and always carried a notepad to sketch his thoughts and drawings.

His desire to travel was so strong, he ran off to be a cabin boy on a merchant ship. But he was caught and returned to his parents. He promised that henceforth he would visit far-off places only in his imagination.

Verne's father was not too keen on his pursuing his creative ambition. He rather envisioned his son joining his growing law firm. Accordingly, Verne started studying law at 16.

That didn't stop him from working on his stories at night. Besides that, he attended evening literary society meetings in Nantes, reading his work out loud to the group and performing the plays he wrote.

He read novels by Alexandre Dumas and Victor Hugo and became a big fan of Edgar Allan Poe.

Several trips to Paris during his law studies gave Verne the opening he was looking for. In 1848, after he finished his studies, he decided to stay in Paris and write full time.

He told his father: "I may become a good writer, but I would never be anything but a poor lawyer."

In the French capital, he joined social circles, which gave the young writer a chance to meet two of his favorite authors: Hugo and Dumas.

Verne integrated scientific fact and fiction into his stories. Dumas liked his work and encouraged him in that direction.

Verne's first history of real-life balloonists introduced elements of how balloons could be used in the future. His manuscript got rejected by 15 publishers, but he didn't give up. The very next publishing house, named after its owner, Pierre-Jules Hetzel, liked his work.

Hetzel, who also wrote children's stories under the name of P.J. Stahl, asked him to rewrite the book as a fact-based fiction.

Verne was about to take off.

"Five Weeks in a Balloon" was published in 1863 and rose fast. The story involves three men traveling across Africa in a hot-air balloon.

"Verne incorporated all of the latest information on balloons and imagined a workable variation based on what was known," wrote William Schoell in his biography "Remarkable Journeys: The Story of Jules Verne."

"This act of using scientific knowledge as a springboard for the writer's imagination is the core of science fiction. The airship Victoria could go places and do things that no real balloon could at the time."

The book sold 1.6 million copies of his French edition by 1904 and more after his death.

The success of the novel led Hetzel to offer Verne a lifelong contract.

Verne was on a high — able to quit his day job and move his family to a nice house in the Parisian suburbs.

Verne's next offering was "Paris in the Twentieth Century." The story depicts Paris where technology mocks art. Escalators, fax machines and brightly lit department stores dominate everyday life.

In the novel, the city bustles with gas cabs, driverless trains, electric door buttons, and office copiers and calculators. Verne added overpopulation, pollution and lack of available housing — a few of examples of how far his vision stretched.

Hetzel found the story too pessimistic and refused to publish it.

Verne's prediction of modern-day Paris finally hit the presses nearly a century later. His great-grandson discovered the manuscript, and the book became a hit in 1994.

The novel "teems with prodigies that were hard to imagine a hundred years before," Eugen Weber wrote in the book's introduction.

After Hetzel's rejection, Verne wrote full steam ahead. In "A Journey to the Center of the Earth," he saw people descending into caves inside Earth and encountering an underground sea filled with prehistoric animals.

In his "From the Earth to the Moon," Verne envisioned man's space flight. His rocket launched from Florida, amazing prescience, since that's where Apollo 11 would take off for Neil Armstrong's giant step in 1969.

Verne always researched his stories heavily. He started new stories by making a draft. "I never begin without knowing what the beginning, middle and end will be," Verne told an interviewer.

Verne rewrote whole chapters and made as many as 10 revisions to his stories.

In "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea," Verne had a submarine called Nautilus reach the sunken city of Atlantis.

He had the submarine electrically run, decades before that became reality. The U.S. Navy's inaugural atomic submarine was the first to resemble Verne's creation and went to sea as the Nautilus in 1955.

"Imagination is the capacity to rearrange available data or to extrapolate from them," noted Weber, "and Verne was a masterful extrapolator."