Mysterious Island

Already in 1874, Jules Verne, in his novel The Mysterious Island, lets the engineer Cyrus Harding reply when asked what mankind will burn instead of coal, once it has been depleted ... 

In 1874, Jules Verne, a French novel writer, prophetically examined the potential use of hydrogen as a fuel in his popular work of fiction entitled The Mysterious Island and he had this extraordinary vision I believe that water will one day be employed as fuel, that hydrogen and oxygen which constitute it, used singly or together, will furnish an inexhaustible source of heat and light, of an intensity of which coal is not capable. ... 

The idea of hydrogen as the ultimate fuel, limitless and powerful, stoked the imagination of nineteenth-century fiction writers. In his 1874 book The Mysterious Island, the ever-prescient writer Jules Verne has his characters discuss what would happen to America s industrial and commercial movement when the world runs out of coal in hundreds of years. The engineer, Cyrus Harding, explains that the world will turn to another fuel, water decomposed into its primitive elements. . . doubtless by electricity, which will then have become a powerful and manageable force. Harding goes on to say ... 

Jules Verne appears to be one of the earliest people to recognize, or at least articulate, the idea of splitting water to produce hydrogen (H2) and oxygen (O2) in order to satisfy the energy requirements of society. As early as 1874 in The Mysterious Island, Jules Veme alluded to clean hydrogen fuels, writing ... 

McKibben s melancholy fin-de-siecle view of the world is, consciously or unconsciously, probably rather widely shared. But there is also an opposite view a new-century, can-do view, tempered by the insights and experiences of the world s Bill McKibbens, that says We can and will make the world a better place. This view has inspired and prodded thousands and thousands of activists, researchers, and others to work for a cleaner environment. It was expressed first and best by Jules Verne, in his 1874 novel The Mysterious Island ... 

Verne, J. (1875). The Mysterious Island. Available at www.online-literature.com. 

If we wish to start the stoiy where it began, we should travel back in time to an Ancient Age when soap-making was first discovered. What is soap If fats are boiled together with some aqueous alkali for a lengthy time, they will decompose. Chemically, they undergo alkaline hydrolysis (Fig. 2.6). Glycerol and soap are formed in this process soap is a mixture of the sodium (or potassium) salt of different fatly acids. In an ever-popular novel, The Mysterious Island L lle mysterieuse), French science-fiction writer Jules Verne very nicely described that soap could be made even on a deserted island (the movies supposedly based on this novel seldom make a point of this part). 

Jules Verne, "The Mysterious Island," Part 2, "Abandoned," Ch.ll... 

Jules Verne wrote in his book The Mysterious Island (1870) that electrolytic decomposition of water would be the final solution of the energy problems of the earth. 

Cyrus Smith (the engineer ) In Veme, J. The Mysterious Island, 1874. New translation by Jordan Stump, Random House New York, 2001, p. 327. 

The first vision of the energy system based on hydrogen was provided by science fiction writer Jules Verne in his novel The Mysterious Island [7j ... 

All scientific knowledge that we have of this world, or will ever have, is as an island in the sea of mystery. We live in our partial knowledge as the Dutch live on polders claimed from the sea. We dike and fill. We dredge up soil from the bed of mystery and build... 

Byth, S. 1980 Palm Island mystery disease. Med. J. Aust. 2 40-42. 

Peterson, Ivars. Islands of Truth, A Mathematical Mystery Cruise. New York W. H. Freeman, 1990. 

Some 200 tons of smallpox virus have been produced by the USSR as a weapon and inherited by Russia. Their fate is unclear. However, details of the development of smallpox as a weapon by the Soviets became available. A report was elicited from General Prof. Peter Burgasov, former Chief Sanitary Physician of the Soviet Army and a senior researcher within the BWP. Admitting that development of BW by the Soviets did take place, in the form of live field tests, he described a smallpox incident that happened in the 1970s, and was then hashed up On Vozrazhdenie Island in the Aral Sea, the strongest recipes of smallpox were tested. Suddenly I was informed that there were mysterious cases of mortalities in Aralsk. A research ship of the Aral fleet came 15 km away from the island (it was forbidden to come... 

Berzelius gave valuable assistance to workers in his laboratory who discovered lithium and vanadium. Joze Bonifacio de Andrada e Silva (Vila de Santos, nr. Rio de Janeiro, 13 June 1763-Niteroi (Bay of Rio de Janeiro), 6 August 1838), the famous Brazilian statesman, in a journey in Europe discovered in Sweden two minerals which he named petalite and spodumene." Petalite was rediscovered in the island of Uto by E. T. Svedenstjerna. Analyses of petalite and spodumene, which were supposed to be potash minerals, gave puzzling results, and although Hisinger in January 1818 had practically solved the mystery, it was cleared up by the discovery in Berzelius s laboratory of a new alkali metal by Arfvedson. ... 

For reviews concerning the toxicological activity see (a) D. J. Griffiths, M. L. Saker, Environ. Toxicol. 2003, 18, 78-93. The Pahn island mystery disease 20 years on a review of research on the cyanotoxin cylindrospermopsin. (b) S. Kinnear, Mar. Drugs 2010, 8, 542-564. Cylindrospermopsin a decade of progress on bioaccumulation research. 

Every one of us stumbles across mysteries in nature. Before Darwin, William Paley told a famous story of discovering a watch in the grass of an English meadow. Paley said finding life is like finding that watch. Here we have the same island and metaphor, but with very different implications. 

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