The Underground City: How one Frenchmen dreamt of a drowned city under Glasgow's Loch Katrine

Nearly 200 years ago, one of Europe’s earliest Science Fiction writers, a now-famous French novelist visited Glasgow looking for inspiration.

Jules Verne visited the city in 1859 while stuck for ideas for his latest novel - about a decade into his writing career, he had yet to see much success in his Avant-Garde novels, poetry and playwriting - nothing compared to what was to come anyway.

While Verne would go on to write Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1864), Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas (1870), and Around the World in Eighty Days (1872) by 1859 he was a struggling writer struggling to write a breakthrough novel, though he did enjoy limited small scale success writing plays for theatres in Paris.

What the young Frenchmen really wanted to write was a new kind of prose, a "Roman de la Science" as he called it - or as we’d know it; a science fiction novel.

While he was a contemporary of the likes of H. G. Wells and Hugo Gernsback - often called the fathers of Science Fiction alongside Verne - they inhabited very different parts of the world from him, and there was no evidence they were in any kind of communication.

He wanted to write in a way that would incorporate modern science and factual information, which would lead to him envisioning how science and technology would operate in the future.

To write these novels, he first needed to experience the world. Verne had never left France, so embarked on a journey between 1858 and 1859 to see more of Europe.

He journeyed from Bordeaux to Liverpool before finally arriving in Scotland - where he made sure to stop in Glasgow.

These travels left a major impression on the young writer - who would report them in a semi-autobiographical novel, Backwards to Britain.

In this novel he wrote of his time in Glasgow, reporting his experience with “an unusual steam-operated machine” he encountered in a butcher’s shop.

He writes: "It was very ingenious. A live pig was placed at one end and it came out the other in the form of appetising sausages.

"'What a people. What genius to apply steam to a charcouterie. No wonder the British are the masters of the world.

"After such a discovery, it was time to leave Glasgow."

Leading on from Glasgow he made his way to Loch Lomond and the Trossachs - where he was awe-struck. Living in France he had never seen terrain like it, gigantic towering mountains and low steep valleys leading to the striking blue loch.

Verne had found his inspiration, between the steam-powered Victorian technology of Glasgow and the beautiful verdant valleys of the Trossachs, he knew exactly what he was going to write.

Jules Verne immediately got to work on his new book, The Underground City, arguably one of the worlds first science fiction novels.

The Underground City, also known as The Children of the Cavern and Les Indes Noires (The Black Indies) at time of publication, went by the name New Aberfoyle in the book, and was buried underneath Loch Katrine. It was an incredibly unique idea for the time.

It also predicted some technologies which were deemed preposterous in his day - flying machines, submarines, and man landing on the moon.