Dr. Ox's Experiment

"Dr. Ox's Experiment" (French: Une fantaisie du docteur Ox, "A Fantasy of Doctor Ox")^[1] is a short story by the French writer and pioneer of science-fiction, Jules Verne, published in 1872. It describes an experiment by one Dr. Ox and his assistant Gedeon Ygene. A prosperous scientist Dr. Ox offers to build a novel gas lighting system to an unusually stuffy Flemish town of Quiquendone. As the town bore no charges, the offer is gladly accepted. The hidden interest of Dr. Ox is however not lighting, but large scale experiment on effect of oxygen on plants, animals and humans. He uses electrolysis to separate water into hydrogen and oxygen. The latter is being pumped to the city causing accelerated growth of plants, excitement and aggressiveness in animals and humans. The story ends up by destruction of the oxygen factory of Dr. Ox – by accident, oxygen and hydrogen got mixed causing a major explosion. Jules Verne acknowledges in the epilogue that the described effect of oxygen is a pure fiction invented by him.

The text was re-published in a Verne short-story anthology, Doctor Ox, in 1874.

Operas

The story was adapted by Jacques Offenbach as Le docteur Ox, an opéra-bouffe in three acts and six tableaux, premiered on 26 January 1877 with a libretto by Arnold Mortier, Philippe Gille and Verne himself. Annibale Bizzelli composed another version, il Dottor Oss.

It was also adapted by Gavin Bryars as Doctor Ox's Experiment, an opera in two acts with a libretto by Blake Morrison, first performed on 15 June 1998.

References

↑ A Fantasy of Dr Ox, Jules Verne, trans. Andrew Browne, Hesperus Press, 2003

External links

Dr. Ox's Experiment (Translation from 1874)

Dr. Ox's experiment, and other stories, Internet Archive

E-book at University of Adelaide
Doctor Ox's Experiment public domain audiobook at LibriVox

Works by Jules Verne

Voyages
extraordinaires

Five Weeks in a Balloon (1863)
Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864)
From the Earth to the Moon (1865)
The Adventures of Captain Hatteras (1866)
In Search of the Castaways (1867–68)
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1869–70)
Around the Moon (1870)
A Floating City (1871)
The Adventures of Three Englishmen and Three Russians in South Africa (1872)
The Fur Country (1873)
Around the World in Eighty Days (1873)
The Mysterious Island (1874–75)
The Survivors of the Chancellor (1875)
Michael Strogoff (1876)
Off on a Comet (1877)
The Child of the Cavern (1877)
Dick Sand, A Captain at Fifteen (1878)
The Begum's Fortune (1879)
Tribulations of a Chinaman in China (1879)
The Steam House (1880)
Eight Hundred Leagues on the Amazon (1881)
Godfrey Morgan (1882)
The Green Ray (1882)
Kéraban the Inflexible (1883)
The Vanished Diamond (1884)
The Archipelago on Fire (1884)
Mathias Sandorf (1885)
The Waif of the Cynthia (1885)
The Lottery Ticket (1886)
Robur the Conqueror (1886)
North Against South (1887)
The Flight to France (1887)
Two Years' Vacation (1888)
Family Without a Name (1889)
The Purchase of the North Pole (1889)
César Cascabel (1890)
Mistress Branican (1891)
The Carpathian Castle (1892)
Claudius Bombarnac (1892)
Foundling Mick (1893)
Captain Antifer (1894)
Propeller Island (1895)
Facing the Flag (1896)
Clovis Dardentor (1896)
An Antarctic Mystery (1897)
The Mighty Orinoco (1898)
The Will of an Eccentric (1899)
The Castaways of the Flag (1900)
The Village in the Treetops (1901)
The Sea Serpent (1901)
The Kip Brothers (1902)
Travel Scholarships (1903)
A Drama in Livonia (1904)
Master of the World (1904)
Invasion of the Sea (1905)

Other works

Novels	The Waif of the Cynthia (1885) The Lighthouse at the End of the World (1905) The Golden Volcano (1906) The Chase of the Golden Meteor (1908) The Danube Pilot (1908) The Survivors of the "Jonathan" (1909) The Secret of Wilhelm Storitz (1910) The Barsac Mission (1919) Backwards to Britain (1989, written 1859) Paris in the Twentieth Century (1994, written 1863)

Collections	Doctor Ox (1874) Yesterday and Tomorrow (1910)

Short stories	"A Drama in Mexico" (1851) "A Drama in the Air" (1851) "Martin Paz" (1852) "Master Zacharius" (1854) "A Winter amid the Ice" (1855) "The Count of Chanteleine" (1864) "The Blockade Runners" (1865) "Dr. Ox's Experiment" (1872) "An Ideal City" (1875) "The Mutineers of the Bounty" (1879) "Ten Hours Hunting" (1881) "Frritt-Flacc" (1884) "Gil Braltar" (1887) "In the Year 2889" (1889) "Adventures of the Rat Family" (1891) "Mr. Ray Sharp and Miss Me Flat" (1893) "The Eternal Adam" (1910)

Plays	The Broken Straws (1850) Mona Lisa (1852) Blind Man's Buff (1853) The Adoptive Son (1853 Knights of the Daffodil (1855) Mr. Chimpanzee (1858) The Inn in the Ardennes (1860) Eleven Days' Siege (1861) A Nephew from America (1873) Around the World in 80 Days (1874) The Children of Captain Grant (1878) Michael Strogoff (1880) Journey Through the Impossible (1882) Kéraban the Pigheaded (1883)

Related	The Thompson Travel Agency by Michel Verne (1907)

Universe

Characters	Aouda Tom Ayrton David Farragut Phileas Fogg Lord Glenarvan Captain Nemo Jacques Paganel Jean Passepartout Cyrus Smith

Universe	Leyden ball Nautilus HMS Sword

Book
Category

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