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Jules Verne's "The Mysterious Island" was how I got interested in tech around the age of 6. I devoured all of his books that I could find after that and it was my introduction to geology ("Journey to the Center of the Earth"), geography ("In search of the castaways", "Around the world in eighty days"), oceanology ("Twenty thousand leagues under the sea"), Astronautics ("From the Earth to the Moon", "Around the moon"), dystopian/utopian world building ("The Begum's fortune") and so on and so forth.

EDIT: fixed the name of the book, thank you bradyd.

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For me it was the old Tom Swift books that I found at my grandparent's house. Tom Swift and His Flying Lab, Tom Swift and His Atomic Earth Blaster, Tom Swift and His Diving Seacopter, Tom Swift in the Caves of Nuclear Fire, Tom Swift in the Race to the Moon, etc.

https://www.orderofbooks.com/characters/tom-swift/

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/search/?query=tom+swift

Unrelated fact: Tom Swift is why tasers are called tasers. Their inventor, Jack Cover (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Cover), named them by acronymizing "Thomas A. Swift's Electric Rifle" (TASER).

That's a ridiculously cool fact.

For me it was Tom Swift and... Danny Dunn! Can't believe that series is so hard to track down, it's been out of print for ages.

Case in point: Danny discovers the pros and cons of invisibility, by learning how to pilot the professor's telepresence suit that drives a small insect-sized drone. This was in 1974.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danny_Dunn,_Invisible_Boy

Danny Dunn and the homework machine was what got me interested in computers! I keep a copy of that and "geometry and the imagination" together on my side table.

Gosh yes!! The big reveal (he'd actually be learning all along while figuring out how to program the machine) has stuck with me forever. :)

The Tom Swift Jr. (First Series) books (the ones you mentioned above) were a core part of my childhood too - they inspired my father to become an engineer, and the very same books did the same for me. They're certainly a product of their time, with clearly-allegorical "Brungarian" antagonists and somewhat dated gender roles. But they were incredibly imaginative, adventurous, and clever.

Looking back, the concept that a person could love what they do so much, that they would want a "cot in the lab," probably drove me to the startup space long before that was a thing!

Mine too. Tom Swift and the Bookmobile that brought them changed my life. It also had a few of the "new" Tom Swift adventures and I later learned there was an "old" series that start with Tom Swift and his Wireless Message and Tom Swift and his Electronic Rifle.

Wow, same here. My family happened to find a big set of that same Tom Swift series at a yard sale when I was about 12. They were constantly my most-read books through middle and high school, and may well have had something to do with going into tech as a career.

Me too! I loved those books when I was young. I'd forgotten about them.

Elon Musk is the real life Tom Swift:

1. Elon Musk and his Reusable Space Rocket

2. Elon Musk and his Electric Car

3. Elon Musk and his Tunnel Boring Machine

4. Elon Musk and his Flamethrower

5. Elon Musk and his Self Driving Car

> 3. Elon Musk and his Tunnel Boring Machine

We've had these for ages and Elon has not made any advances in tunneling technology despite hundreds of millions of dollars and however-many years invested.

> 4. Elon Musk and his Flamethrower

Elon Musk and his $500 roofing torch.

> Elon Musk and his Self Driving Car

Elon Musk and his moving goalposts...

Of course, there is also "Elon Musk and his Cult of Personality", which is how he can slap a brand-name on a roofing torch and get people to run around calling it a "flamethrower", and how he can get away with calling a system that still requires human supervision "feature-complete full self driving".

This also contributes to his being able to get away with publicly calling an international hero a pedophile, just because they had the gall to question "Elon Musk and his Cave Rescue Submarine".

I give Elon a lot of respect for what he has done with 1 and 2, but I think his visions would be better served by less hero-worship and more serious people holding him to account.

The guy insulted musk and got insulted back. He didn't really "question" the usefulness in a benign way. Generally speaking in life, if you're an asshole people are going to be assholes back. You can be a hero and an asshole at the same time, there's no need to promote the diver to sainthood.

Musk was an asshole too, but he didn't start it.

The divers spent days risking their lives to save the kids, and some Silicon Valley fucker with zero field knowledge pretends he's going to save the day with some high-tech gizmo. You can understand the guys were a bit upset and told him to shove his gadget up his ass. Also calling someone a pedophile is a heavy and potentially dangerous accusation. Like is or not, Musk was the bad guy here.

That's a ridiculous outlook. Musk might be misguided, but its not like he swooped in and took control of the rescue operation and put kids' lives in danger and forced a sovereign nation to use his submarine. He made a thing that may or may not work and brought it to a place and said they could use it.

The diver doing that is like winning the world cup and then during your post-game interview you use that time to talk about how bad your teammates that sat on the bench are. Maybe he's technically correct about Musk's submarine not working, but he's still classless and an asshole. Its hard to imagine that Musk would be upset if there was some good PR for Tesla as a result of this but its also not hard to imagine that a part of him legitimately wanted to do something that he thought would help.

Pedophile in that context was not intended as a serious allegation that the diver sexually assaulted kids. It was a generic insult that just plays off of the stereotype that western expats that live in Thailand are going there primarily for underage prostitutes.

Its also ridiculous because the divers were immediately praised and applauded by the entire world. Why would they even give a shit if other people showed up to help and they (the divers) were the ones that got to run the operation? It was a pretty positive event where some people saved some children from certain death and in the aftermath 2 grown men decided to turn a positive thing into a petty argument.

A single person should not be referred to as “divers” and “guys”.

I may be rude, but Elon Musk is just a 22nd century snake oil salesman.

He's good at promotion and raising capital, and has real products that function... but I can't believe he's only a salesman.

OTOH how would you go about assessing his engineering ability? He was accepted into a Stanford PhD program. An ex-employee of spacex was amazed how he absorbed a textbook of rocket science.

Unlike Eistein, he hasn't written any papers himself (AFAIK), so we can't assess his work directly. I would guess his primary role is being a technically and business-aware coach for engineers who actually do the work - like Steve Jobs. But maybe he is a genuine engineering genius himself - but how could we tell?

A simple talentless salesman, who with his humble head did more than a conglomeration of well-trained programmer employees that just follow orders.

Virtue is somewhere in the middle.

What does Elon Musk have to do with this? He is just someone who takes existing working things and tries to produce them in some slavery sweat shop conditions for cheap. There is essentially zero innovation involved here, even less so any "sci-fi".

> essentially zero innovation

The innovation is in bringing these products to market and keeping multiple companies viable while doing so. NO ONE else has done the things he has. Put up or shut up. Edit: I'm not a fanboy and there are a lot of things about him I dislike, but the casual dismissals just irk me. If he's so unoriginal, you go do what he did.

> If he's so unoriginal, you go do what he did

That's nonsense. Most people weren't lucky enough to sell a company for several hundreds of millions of dollars in the dot-com boom.

There are lots of centa-millionaires. None have done what Musk did.

Musk got his start with Zip2, programming it himself. Any competent programmer could have done that (but didn't). Each success he used to launch a much more ambitious enterprise.

When someone does that multiple times, it isn't luck. It's being good at it.

Or to have parents to seed said company. Not sure why you got downvoted.

It’s easier to say “Go do what JK Rowling did” than to say “Go do what Elon did” lmao. I can write a fantasy series with $0. The same can’t be said necessarily for building companies.

Musk's first company he founded with his brother got $28,000 investment from his father. It's not an outlandish amount - less than the cost of a car.

It’s still more than most people have and during a specific time in history. What you said doesn’t negate my point.

There’s more involved to starting a company than money. Such as your network. Your support system. Even your race and geographic location could play a factor. Luck, etc.

“You go be a 7-ft basketball player if you think it’s so easy!!!”

> It’s still more than most people have and during a specific time in history.

The freeways around here are gridlocked with cars costing more than $28,000.

> Such as your network. Your support system. Even your race and geographic location could play a factor. Luck, etc.

Oh phooey. I started my company with nothing more than an IBM PC. Nobody knew my race or location - it was mail order. Want to network? Use the internet. The D development community is all over the world.

On HN I regularly see extreme negativity and often outright hostility to all the opportunities all around us. What I enjoy about Musk is he likes to do things everyone else says can't be done.

Can't help but think about the Yorkshiremen. :)

> The freeways around here are gridlocked with cars costing more than $28,000.

Yea, financed with debt over what is now typically 7-10 years. 28k of capital to invest is out of the reach of the majority of Americans. Please don't pretend that's a small amount of money anyone can come up with.

> anyone

Somehow "most" morphed into "anyone".

BTW, if you can finance $28,000 over 7-10 years, you can buy a perfectly fine $3,000 car, save up what your payment would have been, and have those funds to invest.

My daily driver, for example, is 31 years old now, and is worth maybe $500. I invest the money I save (taxes, insurance, and repairs are pretty cheap for the thing, too).

My not-so-humble opinion is that if you have to finance a car, you should buy a cheaper used one you can pay cash for. Financing an expensive car is a great way to never have any spare funds available.

Oh I agree with you on the car, but this assumes you know enough about them to get a decent one for 3k; people go for newer used ones because it's a black box to them and they want something they "feel" is reliable and they don't feel that about older cars. They're wrong, but that's the nature of not understanding a thing. 28k is still out of the reach of most.

And even that investment has been disputed - by Elon himself - as per the zip2 wiki page.

I got the figure from his biography. Regardless, given the shoestring conditions the company operated on, it could hardly have been a lot of money.

I am no expert, but the wiki mentions the biography and that he disputes the claim made there. You are right it is inconsequential either way.

While Musk should be rightly criticised for the ethically-questionable practices, we can at least be thankful that SOMEONE has both the drive (okay, sure, the ego) and passion for technological progress that results in the societal change we've seen so far.

Are there ANY other players at his level of household-name and wealth that are pushing as hard as he is, in as many directions? Gates has done fantastic work for decades but only using conventional methods, and basically everyone else is only doing R&D for their own purposes.

He's not some Tony-Stark/Tom-Swift type, but neither is he just another capitalist dick.

He's simply a Howard Hughes type: every generation since Hughes has had one, and they're all backed by the military industrial complex and spooks. He'd have gone broke by now otherwise. None of his companies make money.

EDIT2: Basically any government that wants to improve investment into STEM should start by including those and similar books into the school reading program.

You're right. Compare that to the random classics in which you have no interest on which you have to write a report.

Might not those become a subject to tedious report writing and become disliked by young children as well? I bet there are people who like those current classics, too – people who were not exposed to them in school, or who overcame their association with the drudgery of schoolwork.

As a kid when I learned to read I soon devoured trough books in children section basically reading all books from one author, then moving to the next.

First Edgar Rice Burroughs's Tarzan and Mars series. Then all Jules Verne books available. Verne is technically very detailed. They were great reading experiences. I can still remember where the books were placed in the library.

It's funny, kids don't get to experience the magic of libraries like we did. I'm a 71 model and I think those that came after the 70s pretty much didn't get to experience it.

'84 model, and dude, I basically lived at the library - both school and public. It was a ~16km bike ride from my parents farm to the library.

Only one of my ~6 nephews/nieces show interest in libraries, but honestly? That's a pretty good hit-rate. They're not for everyone, and never were.

Glad to hear we weren't the last of the library kids

I'm from '91 and I basically read a book a week during my teens.

There are still great public libraries in many parts of the world (and certainly all over the USA). Why wouldn’t kids get to experience them?

The magic of libraries was discovering a new section of the dewey decimal system, figuring out that other books you liked might be next to the book you looked up in the card catalog, and escaping to worlds you could never see if not for your imagination and the printed word. Now you just google it, find pictures, read everything about it on the wikis, look at a live cam or webcam of the place, use google earth to wander around, read about all the negative things about the hero you just discovered etc. It's not that the libraries aren't there - it's that the lack of other things made them magical.

Plus..and this is true in Hawaii but not positive about other libraries - when I was a kid there weren't homeless people spending all day sleeping in the library and occupying all the available seats. The main people in the libraries around us are homeless using the internet, homeless using the air conditioning, and homeless using the bathrooms. I'm not going to send my kid to hang out in the library for hours without supervision.

Depends on the parents. My kids biggest complaint about the library is that they are only allowed to checkout 100 books at a time.

Out of curiosity, what's the scenario in which one would hit that limit? When I was a kid, the limit was something like five books, and we'd just go to the library often.

When we go to the library (about once a week), the kids haul out at least that many books. They are all voracious readers and can go through 100 books in the blink of an eye.

I did the same. I got sidetracked with Tolkien and the Jim Kjelgaard Big Red books as well.

I believe you actually mean "The Mysterious Island". I read this book last year and was amazed by the level of technical detail.

Same impact of "Mysterious Island" on me. It's the original "competence/achievement" book.

Though I've never fully recovered from the reality check than a real engineer isn't as broadly competent and knowledgeable as Cyrus Smith. (even American ones ;) )

Don't forget an introduction to Chemistry in Mysterious Island as well. Fun fact, The Mysterious Island was the basis of the series LOST.

Interesting, I haven't been able to find any acknowledged connections between the two. Do you have any references you could share?

The two works were linked in my mind back when I was watching Lost, and my impressions of them were very similar -- in both The Mysterious Island and Lost, there were fascinating mysteries built up in the beginning, but the eventually revealed explanations could not live up to those expectations.

I wrote my undergrad thesis back in 08 about how Lost was breaking barriers between real world and fiction - part of that was interviewing cast, crew, and writers. On my interview with Cuse and Abrams it came up as the starting point - castaways, mysterious cave, submarine, etc etc. I'll see if I can dig it up.

There was no way they could live up to the expectations - part of the problem was that they kept trying to tease the fans with the future and the fans kept guessing right so they kept trying to change things to stay ahead and as a result - painted themselves in a corner.

They did some amazingly interesting things though - creating events, products, and fake companies in the real world to enhance the story telling in the fictional one. Ground breaking.

A big part of my thesis was how a shared interest in the show was creating real world friendships from online fanboards - something that sounds 'so what?' now, but that was mind blowing back then. People would meet on the boards and then travel to Hawaii, meet up, go to the set locations, even stay together - based on a passion for the 'mysteries' the show created.

I decided to become an engineer after reading the mysterious island. Although I was somewhat older, probably 10-12. Journey to the centre of the earth was actually the first book that I read when I was probably 7, and I really enjoyed it.

Probably my favorite book as a child, I probably read that thing 100 times.

Same here. I've read that book probably at least 20 times in my life, and I expect I'll read it at least a couple more if I live long enough.

Ditto, but I think it would be good to accompany the book with some testimonies by/about people who got hurt/killed by chemicals. I remember getting quite giddy about the possibility to get some nitroglycerin, nitric acid, etc. from reading The Mysterious Island; and I was lucky to lack the resourcefulness needed to actually obtain the nasty stuff.

If the young reader could get a good chemistry teacher as a tutor, though; the possibilities turn from grim to great.

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