High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! The Nautilus is the fictional submarine featured in Jules Verne`s novels Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870) and The Mysterious Island (1874). Verne named the Nautilus after Robert Fulton`s real-life submarine Nautilus (1800). Three years before writing his novel, Jules Verne also studied a model of the newly developed French Navy submarine Plongeur at the 1867 Exposition Universelle, which inspired him for his definition of the Nautilus.