Nautilus (fictional submarine) Facts for Kids

"The Nautilus" redirects here. For other ships of the same name, see List of ships named Nautilus. For other uses, see Nautilus (disambiguation).

The Nautilus sailing on the surface

The Nautilus, as shown in The Mysterious Island

The Nautilus is a famous fictional submarine from the mind of Jules Verne. It belongs to the mysterious Captain Nemo. You can read about its adventures in Verne's classic novels, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas (published in 1870) and The Mysterious Island (published in 1875).

The Amazing Nautilus Submarine
Images for kids
See also

The Amazing Nautilus Submarine

The Nautilus is described by Jules Verne as a "masterpiece containing masterpieces." It was designed and commanded by the brilliant, yet mysterious, Captain Nemo. This incredible submarine was far ahead of its time, featuring advanced technology and luxurious living spaces.

How the Nautilus Was Built and Designed

The Nautilus was built with a special double hull and divided into many watertight sections. This made it very strong and safe. It could travel at a top speed of about 50 miles per hour (or 43 knots) underwater! Captain Nemo himself explained its size:

Here, Professor Aronnax, are the different dimensions of this boat now transporting you. It's a very long cylinder with conical ends. It noticeably takes the shape of a cigar... The length of this cylinder from end to end is exactly seventy meters, and its maximum breadth of beam is eight meters... Its surface area totals 1,011.45 square meters, its volume 1,507.2 cubic meters—which is tantamount to saying that when it's completely submerged, it displaces 1,500 cubic meters of water, or weighs 1,500 metric tons.

In simpler terms, the Nautilus was about 70 meters (230 feet) long and 8 meters (26 feet) wide. When fully underwater, it weighed about 1,500 metric tons, which is like the weight of 1,500 small cars!

Powering the Nautilus

The Nautilus ran on electricity. This power came from special electric batteries that used sodium and mercury. Captain Nemo got the sodium by taking it out of seawater. The energy needed for this process came from coal that his crew mined from the ocean floor.

Diving and Surfacing

To control its depth, the Nautilus used special tanks that could be filled with water to sink or emptied to rise. The pumps that pushed water out of these tanks were so powerful that they created huge jets of water when the submarine quickly came to the surface. Because of this, many people who first saw the Nautilus thought it was a giant marine mammal or a mysterious sea monster! To dive very quickly, the Nautilus would use a technique called "hydroplaning," where it would angle itself sharply downwards.

Life Aboard the Nautilus

Captain Nemo's crew gathered all their food from the sea. The Nautilus had a kitchen to prepare these meals. It also had a machine that could turn seawater into fresh drinking water using distillation. Since the submarine couldn't get fresh air underwater, Captain Nemo designed it to surface regularly, just like a whale, to exchange old air for new. This allowed the Nautilus to travel for long periods without needing to stop for supplies. It could stay underwater for about five days at a time.

Much of the submarine was decorated with amazing luxury, unlike any other ship of its time. It had a huge library with about twelve thousand books and collections of valuable ocean specimens. The library was also filled with expensive paintings and other artworks. The Nautilus even had a fancy dining room and a musical organ that Captain Nemo played in the evenings. Captain Nemo's own room was simpler, but it had copies of the bridge instruments so he could always know what the submarine was doing. These luxurious areas were mainly for Captain Nemo, Professor Aronnax, and his friends.

The world first thought the Nautilus was a sea monster because it attacked ships by ramming them below the waterline. Later, after the ship Abraham Lincoln was attacked and a harpoon hit the submarine's metal surface, people realized it was a powerful underwater vessel.

The parts for the Nautilus were secretly built by different companies across Europe and the United States. Captain Nemo ordered each part anonymously and had them sent to different addresses. Then, his crew assembled the entire submarine on a secret desert island. The Nautilus later returned to this island, where Captain Nemo helped some castaways in the novel The Mysterious Island. After Captain Nemo passed away on board, the volcanic island erupted, burying both the Captain and the Nautilus forever.

Real-Life Inspirations for the Nautilus

The Plongeur, a real submarine that inspired the Nautilus

Jules Verne named his fictional submarine after a real-life submarine called Nautilus (built in 1800) by Robert Fulton. For the design of his Nautilus, Verne was inspired by the French Navy submarine Plongeur. He saw a model of this submarine at a big exhibition in Paris in 1867, just three years before he wrote his famous novel.

Some experts also believe that the CSS Alabama might have inspired parts of Captain Nemo's Nautilus. The CSS Alabama was a warship secretly built in England for the Confederate States during the American Civil War. It was known for sinking many merchant ships. Jules Verne himself compared the CSS Alabama to the Nautilus in a letter he wrote in 1869.

The Nautilus in Other Stories

Besides its original appearances in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas and The Mysterious Island, the Nautilus and Captain Nemo have appeared in many other books, films, and comics.

In the 1954 film version of the first novel, and in The Return of Captain Nemo, it's suggested that the Nautilus is powered by nuclear energy.
The 1969 film Captain Nemo and the Underwater City shows the Nautilus and its sister ship, Nautilus II, looking like industrial stingrays.
In Kevin J. Anderson's book Captain Nemo: The Fantastic History of a Dark Genius, the Nautilus is shown as a real, cigar-shaped submarine built by Nemo for the Ottoman Empire.
In Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill's comic series The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, the Nautilus has a squid-like look in the graphic novel. In the film adaptation, it's a very tall submarine, and Captain Nemo calls it "the sword of the ocean."
The Nautilus also appears in Rick Riordan's 2021 novel Daughter of the Deep. This story continues the adventures from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea over a century later, featuring a descendant of Captain Nemo.

Other Submarines by Jules Verne

Jules Verne included submarines in some of his other stories too.

In the 1896 novel Facing the Flag, a pirate named Ker Karraje uses an unnamed submarine to pull his schooner and to ram other ships. This book also features a small Royal Navy experimental submarine, HMS Sword, which is sunk in a battle with the pirate submarine.
In the 1904 book The Master of the World, a character named Robur has a vehicle called Terror. It's a strange flying machine that can also work as a submarine, a car, and a speedboat. It briefly escapes naval forces by diving underwater in the Great Lakes.