Jules Verne et le paradoxe du circumnavigateur

“Jules Verne et le paradoxe du circumnavigateur” by Ronaldo Rogério de Freitas Mourão, Museu de Astronomia do Rio de Janeiro (Brésil)

The paradox of the circumnavigator:

Authors of geography, astronomy, mathematics, philosophy and navigation have written about the subject of the paradox of circumnavigation for centuries. Poets and writers of Fiction, especially Science Fiction, have as well. It comes as no surprise that my favorite author, Jules Verne, the Father of Science Fiction, famously utilizes the paradox of circumnavigation to conceive Le Tour du Monde en quatre-vingts jours (Around the World in Eighty Days, 1872). Of course he does! So, so fun.

In this story, Phileas Fogg of London and Passepartout, his French valet, attempt to circumnavigate the world in 80 days with a wager of 20,000 pounds. This wager was a result of the newly opened railway in India which made it now possible to travel around the world. Major railways and stations (Gares) had also just been completed in Paris and opened the French world to travel across their beautiful country and Europe! [see my Impressionism and Gare Saint Lazare post]

Fogg and Passepartout (think Passport!) depart from London by train at 8:45pm and must return by the same time on 21 December, 80 days later, to win the wager.

One of the most unique aspects of this story, for me, is the subject of les meridiens et la ligne de changement de date.

How did Jules Verne even know about this concept?

Verne wrote a unique article on the subject of the meridiens and lines where time changes in Les méridiens et le calendrier, published in the Bulletin de la Société de Géographie (1873).

According to Ronaldo Rogério in his article Jules Verne et le paradoxe du circumnavigateur, the first known text which explains time change as one circumnavigates the globe, gaining or losing a day according to the direction they are traveling, is the Taquin a al-Bulden written by Isma’il Abn’l-Fida  (1273-1331). Abn’l-Fida studied geography, astronomy and history. He examined the paradox of one traveling the globe eastward, one traveling the globe westward, and a third person remaining at the point of origin. There have been many other writers across the globe who have written about the paradoxes of circumnavigation including an American writer who explored the paradox of circumnavigation was Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) in Three Sundays in a Week. [I want to look further into Poe’s work in tandem with Verne’s—fun!]

When was Greenwich adopted as the Prime Meridian?

In 1873, twelve years before the conference in Washington which adopted Greenwich as the original Meridien and universal time based upon the hour in Greenwich, Verne published Around the World in Eighty days. This problem of universal time difference had already preoccupied geographers and travelers for years.

Edgar Allan Poe joins Jules Verne in the paradox of circumnavigation

The works of Poe and Verne brought this to the forefront. Verne was questioned by the Société of Géographie in Paris, April 4, 1873, on why the meridien can determine the passage from one day to another in the civil calendar. Verne’s Around the World had been published three months before Poe’s Three Sundays. Verne queried, “how can there be a week of three Sundays”? Poe poses three individuals. One leaves London and travels east for 24 hours. The second stays in London for 24 hours. The third leaves London and travels west for 24 hours. When the three meet up, for the first person, tomorrow will be Sunday; the second, today is Sunday; the third, yesterday was Sunday.

Verne states that the gain or loss of a day is real; so real that the naval administration releases an additional day of rations to its ships which leave from the Cape of Good Hope and on the contrary withholds one day of rations for those who cross Cape Horn at the Strait of Magellan. Therefore, sailors who go east are better fed than those who go west. Even though the three men have lived the exact number of minutes, some will have taken a breakfast, lunch, and dinner more than the others. They have worked an extra day, “ils auront une journée avantage”(89). This is really hard to wrap my little brain around, but here is !

Robert  Rogério de Freitas Mourão explains this concept

According to Mourão, a day gained or lost, depending on the direction chosen and consequently the changes in dates, can take place at any point on the earth’s surface. The big problem is knowing where. Generally, the days were counted according to which country had been discovered in the east or west. When Europeans arrived in unknown regions and encountered natives who did not care about the days of the week, the Europeans imposed their calendar, and everything was resolved. Thus, for centuries, the date in Canton took as its starting point the arrival of Marco Polo and, in the Philippines, the arrival of Magellan.

Until 1872, there was no exact scientific solution for the cirumnaviateurs’ paradox, as there was no natural dividing line or change of dates. And its establishment was entirely associated with the custom and convenience of each country. The accepted rule around the middle of the 17^th and 19^th centuries was that places located in the eastern longitudes were dated in relation to the Cape of Good Hope-those located in western longitudes, related to Cape Horn. This rule was practically suitable for the entire width of the Pacific Ocean. So, the captain of a ship had the habit of changing the date in his logbook by crossing the 180-degree meridian, by adding or subtracting a day depending on the direction it was moving. But the captain who did not cross the meridian and return, did not introduce any correction. When captains with shipboard records of different dates met, a curious situation was created, which was bound to happen from time to time (90).

This question, posed by Verne, allowed the Société to find the possible solution for the paradox of the circumnavigators. From a scientific point of view, the transition took place without problems, unconsciously, either in the deserts or in the oceans which separate inhabited countries. In the case where this meridian of change of date passed through a very inhabited region, people who spoke the same language could say “Today is Thursday noon, while on the other side, also at noon, we could pretend that it is Friday!”(90).

Le Tour du Monde en quatre-vingts jours

On October 8, a Wednesday, Phileas Fogg, Verne’s protagonist whom he named after a weather phenomenon and his unpredictable behavior, made a bet that he would circumnavigate the world in 80 days: “I will return to London […], le Samedi 21 decembre, a huit heurs quarante-cinq du soir, (Saturday, December 21 at 8:45pm). Verne borrowed “Phileas” from a Greek geographer from 5 BC who completed a tour of the Mediterranean Sea which was unknown at that time to the civilized world. [I love this about Verne, he never misses an opportunity to pay homage to adventurers from our past who opened the world to us]

Phileas Fogg, without suspecting it, gained a day on his itinerary, and that only because he had traveled around the world going east, and he would, on the contrary, have lost this day by going in the opposite direction, towards the west.

Ok, now this gets complicated: By walking east, Fogg went to meet the sun, and, consequently, the days diminished for him by as many times four minutes as he crossed degrees in this direction. Now, there are 360 degrees on the earth’s circumference, and these 360 degrees, multiplied by four minutes, give precisely twenty-four hours-that is to say, unconsciously gained. In other words, while Fogg, walking east, saw the sun pass the meridian eighty times, his colleagues remaining in London only saw it pass seventy-nine times. His nemesis, Passepartout, had his watch set to London time for the whole race and therefore, did not observe this same time difference, and lost the race.

Jules Verne’s objective was to show the extension of the British Empire and also le méridien de reference, even if it was not yet approved by Congress in 1844, was justified, by the very fact that Jules Verne begins his world tour starting from England.

The itinerary of the contest includes both rail and steamer travel to:

London, Egypt, India, Hong Kong, Japan, San Francisco, New York, and then back to London (eastward!)

Conclusion

Mourão concludes in his essay that the universal time currently used as a reference not only by astronomers around the world, but also by all corporations, was not yet approved by an international convention when Jules Verne used it. Indeed, from the most remote times, until the middle of the 19^th century, each town or village had its own system for calculating time, time defined from sundials. Imagine, then, with the advent of railways, the disorder that arose in railway stations during connections because train arrivals and departures did not coincide (92).

Thank you, Jules Verne, for another incredible adventure from your brilliant mind!

Work Cited

Jules Verne. Around the World in Eighty Days. (1873). Pierre-Jules Hetzel publisher, Paris, France.

Jules Verne: Science, Crises et utopies. (22-23 novembre 2012). École Centrale-Nantes. [translation of article from French to English by Robyn Lowrie]