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Visionary, a fantastic imaginative or simply ahead of his time, Jules Gabriel Verne delighted his time with his stories about the future, and amazed future generations about the portray of the world of the future, to him and the world of the present, to us...one hundred years before it happened!

On the other corner, Herbert George Wells, also wrote about the future, his futuristic vision turned to be a horrifying fact in two of his books; Tono-Bungay, a satire in Edwardian advertising included radioactive decay. But in "The World Set Free" he includes what is surely hi biggest prophetic hit; Chain Reaction and the Atomic Bomb. So accurate in description that Leo Szilard, a Hungarian American physicist who conceived the nuclear chain reaction and worked on the Manhattan project; the development of the first Nuclear Weapon during WWII by the U.S., Canada and the U.K. stated it was Wells novel that inspired him to perform the experiments from the book.

Both, together with Hugo Gernback have been named "The Fathers of Science Fiction" but we have to remember that Wells was born on September 21st, 1866, while Verne was born in February 8th, 1828, thirty-eight years before. It was probably Verne's books that Wells read as a seven year old boy with a broken leg from an accident and bedridden for weeks.

Their biographical lives were opposing poles, and probably the only thing in common is the fact that in the order of children they were both the last child in their home, the little ones.

While Verne was born in upper middle class from a successful lawyer and a stay-home mom, Wells was born in middle lower class, from a father who was a domestic gardener who played cricket as a side job, and domestic servant mom, his limitations were tremendous, specially after his father broke his hip and could not play cricket any more, with one less income in the house, everybody had to go to work, he worked as an apprentice draper, as a chemist's assistant, a teacher assistant and failed terribly in all trades. But he was over compensated later as a writer.

Jules Verne had it made, his father wanted him to be an attorney like him, so he kept his son in college, but when he found out his son was writing instead of studying, he cut all help to force him to "come to his senses" But his senses were surely in the future. As a teenager, he would spend his summers in a country house, in the bansk of Loire River in France. He and his brother would rent a boat for a franc and spend hours

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