The novel Paris in the Twentieth Century was written by Jules Verne in  the City of Light in 1860 and was published in the Twentieth Century (1994) in French, as it had remained hidden for more than one hundred and thirty years, as a posthumous work by Jules Verne.

The manuscript on which the novel was based was completed that same year and then forgotten in a safe until it was discovered in 1989 by Jean Verne, Jules Verne’s great-grandson.

It is set in 1960, and the author’s ability to predict the technological advances of our time is astonishing. For example, the existence of a panthelégraph “(…) which made it possible to send anywhere the facsimile of a deed, autograph or drawing and to sign bills of exchange or contracts ten thousand miles away” (Chapter V).

Jules Verne clarifies that this telegraph had been invented in the previous century (i.e., the nineteenth) by Professor Giovanni Caselli of Florence.

And, indeed, in Verne’s time there was this telegraph of Caselli, also called the panthelégraph.