This story originally appeared on The Public Domain Review, and is reproduced here under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license. In the late 1860s, Jules Verne’s fictional Captain Nemo cruised the ocean deep, discovering new underwater worlds and creatures. In the same decade, the non-fictional Eugen von Ransonnet-Villez pursued his fascination with zoology by developing the technology to produce the first underwater pictures: seascapes drawn as he sat beneath the waves in his diving bell. Ransonnet-Villez was born in 1838 into an aristocratic family in Vienna. Encouraged towards intellectual inquiry,…
