"Paris in the Twentieth Century" - updated

In 1989, Jules Verne’s great-grandson opened a disused family safe and found a forgotten manuscript. Composed in 1863, Paris in the Twentieth Century imagines the remote future of August 1960...

In Verne’s vision, the citizens of Paris use copiers, calculators, and fax machines; inhabit skyscrapers equipped with elevators and television; and execute their criminals in electric chairs. Twenty-six years before the Eiffel Tower was erected, Verne described “an electric lighthouse, no longer much used, [that] rose into the sky to a height of 152 meters...

Verne’s publisher had returned the manuscript because he found it too dark — in addition to the city’s technological wonders, it describes overcrowding, pollution, the dissolution of social institutions, and “machines advantageously replacing human hands.”

“No one today,” he had written, “will believe your prophecy.”

Requested from the library; should be interesting.  Text credit to Futility Closet.

Addendum:  I got the book from the library and read it yesterday.  Verne does describe fax machines ("photographic telegraphy") and other technological developments, but most of them were extrapolations of the technology of the time.  In his future world meals are still provided by servants and writing still done with quill pens; there is no army - wars have been eliminated because science provides everything people need ("...the day a war earns as much as an industrial investment, then there'll be wars.")  He clearly didn't foresee a military-industrial complex.

His future world is frankly dystopian, with little leisure and a quite Metropolis-like atmosphere.  His hero is a poetically-inclined young man doomed to failure and starvation.  The novel itself is frankly joyless and not in my view worth reading unless you want to read everything a famous author wrote.  It's not on my list of recommended books.