When Jules Verne wrote "Journey to the Center of the Earth" in 1870, there was no systematic geological knowledge of the Earth, and even a simple fact such as the age of the Earth was not known to mankind at that time.
Yossi Mart
When Jules Verne wrote "Journey to the Center of the Earth" in 1870, there was no systematic geological knowledge of the Earth, and even a simple fact such as the age of the Earth was not known to mankind at that time. Lord Calvin believed that the age of the earth was 50 million years. When the geologists criticized him, Lord Calvin became angry and said that geology was a profession for gentlemen who had no better occupation, just like stamp collecting.
In other words, the physicists and chemists, who were considered the serious scientists of the time, looked down on the geologists. Although there were known fields in geology, such as the minerals, the fossils and also the order of the geological layers and also the order of appearance of the animals in the different layers, but the processes that shaped the earth were unknown.
The geologists did not know what was happening inside the earth, even though Newton calculated the average mass of the earth back in the 17th century. This mass seemed very low to the researchers and there were two geological schools of thought in the second half of the 19th century: the one that believed the core of the earth is hot, and the evidence for this is the reality of the volcanoes and the volcanic activity that takes place in them; And the second one believed that the earth cooled completely, it has large cavities and the activity of the volcanoes is the result of chemical reactions that occur on the surface when certain substances come into contact with water.
It was only in the thirties of the twentieth century that Prof. Haim Pekris proved that the center of the earth is a hot metallic substance and its radius is about 3400 kilometers.
The background for "Journey to the Center of the Earth" is the dichotomy between these two scientific theories. Vern made the wrong bet, simply because he didn't have the right data. The heroes of his book enter the center of the earth in Iceland at the Sanfels volcano, and exit at Stromboli north of Sicily, crossing maritime areas of ancient ages, which seems quite plausible according to one of the models of the earth as it resembled humanity in the second half of the 19th century.
Sometimes his bets were more successful, as for example in the descriptions of the submarines in "20 thousand miles below the sea", or in the book "The Conquering Rover" in which the hero flies in an airship. But, in "Journey to the bowels of the earth" his bet was wrong.
This does not harm Verne's ability as a narrator, who treated his books as novels and not as science fiction books. His books are also combined with an ironic look at the society of his time, and the character of Professor Lindenbrook in "Journey to the Bow of the Earth" is a good example of Verne's somewhat satirical attitude towards academia.
Prof. Yossi Mart, Marine Geologist, University of Haifa
