Jules Verne wrote of space travel before the first rocket was launched. He spoke of under water adventures before the first submarine was built. He was born in 1828 in France. His dream was to write a new kind of novel, which combined scientific fact with fiction. Verne eventually wrote 40 novels in his Voyages extraordinaires series. "What one man can imagine, another will someday be able to achieve." Is a quote from an article in the Encyclopedia Britannica that sums up Verne so well. In Five Weeks in a Balloon a scholar named Samuel Ferguson and his friend plan to travel across Africa in a hydrogen balloon. The book describes their adventure exploring the unknown regions of Africa.