Jules Verne
The son of a Nantes lawyer, sent to Paris to study law and staying there to write plays and libretti. Meeting the publisher Hetzel settled matters: “Five Weeks in a Balloon” (1863) opened the “Extraordinary Voyages” — more than sixty novels in forty years. “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas”, “Around the World in Eighty Days”, “From the Earth to the Moon”, where a cannon fires at the Moon from Florida and the crew comes back down in the ocean. He did not invent his machinery out of air but read it up in the journals and pushed it to its limit, which is why he is read as a prophet. He died in 1905 at Amiens, one of the most translated writers in the world.
He was born in Nantes on 8 February 1828 at exactly noon, local mean time — France had no single time yet. The hour is written in the record of his birth.