Literature/1914/Wells


 * http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/1059

Excerpts

 * The problem which was already being mooted by such scientific men as Ramsay, Rutherford, and Soddy, in the very beginning of the twentieth century, the problem of inducing radio-activity in the heavier elements and so tapping the internal energy of atoms, was solved by a wonderful combination of induction, intuition, and luck by Holsten so soon as the year 1933. (p. 30)
 * Never before in the history of warfare had there been a continuing explosive; indeed, up to the middle of the twentieth century the only explosives known were combustibles whose explosiveness was due entirely to their instantaneousness; and these atomic bombs which science burst upon the world that night were strange even to the men who used them. (p. 100)
 * Those used by the Allies were lumps of pure Carolinum, painted on the outside with unoxidised cydonator inducive enclosed hermetically in a case of membranium. A little celluloid stud between the handles by which the bomb was lifted was arranged so as to be easily torn off and admit air to the inducive, which at once became active and set up radio-activity in the outer layer of the Carolinum sphere. This liberated fresh inducive, and so in a few minutes the whole bomb was a blazing continual explosion. (pp. 100-101)
 * Certainly it seems now that nothing could have been more obvious to the people of the earlier twentieth century than the rapidity with which war was becoming impossible. And as certainly they did not see it. They did not see it until the atomic bombs burst in their fumbling hands [...]. All through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the amount of energy that men were able to command was continually increasing. Applied to warfare that meant that the power to inflict a blow, the power to destroy, was continually increasing [...]. There was no increase whatever in the ability to escape [...]. Destruction was becoming so facile that any little body of malcontents could use it [...]. Before the last war began it was a matter of common knowledge that a man could carry about in a handbag an amount of latent energy sufficient to wreck half a city. (pp. 103-104)
 * From the first they had to see the round globe as one problem; it was impossible any longer to deal with it piece by piece. They had to secure it universally from any fresh outbreak of atomic destruction, and they had to ensure a permanent and universal pacification. (p. 212)

Wikimedia

 * Vannevar Bush & Memex
 * Leo Szilard & Atomic bomb
 * Robert H. Goddard & Rocket
 * Aldous Huxley & The World State


 *  The War of the World (1898)
 *  A Modern Utopia (1905)
 *  The World Set Free (1914)
 *  Men Like Gods (1923)
 *  The Open Conspiracy (1928)
 *  The Shape of Things to Come (1933)
 *  World Brain (1938)

Chronology

 * cf. Vannevar Bush,  J. D. Bernal,  Eugene Garfield,  Manfred Kochen,  Jorge Luis Borges,  Michael Arbib,  Martin Gardner,  Mike Lesk,  Ben Shneiderman
 * cf. Paul Otlet
 * cf. Martin Gardner
 * cf. Leo Szilard,  Frederick Soddy
 * cf. Robert H. Goddard
 * cf. Vannevar Bush,  J. D. Bernal,  Eugene Garfield,  Manfred Kochen,  Jorge Luis Borges,  Michael Arbib,  Martin Gardner,  Mike Lesk,  Ben Shneiderman
 * cf. Paul Otlet
 * cf. Martin Gardner
 * cf. Leo Szilard,  Frederick Soddy
 * cf. Robert H. Goddard
 * cf. Martin Gardner
 * cf. Leo Szilard,  Frederick Soddy
 * cf. Robert H. Goddard
 * cf. Martin Gardner
 * cf. Leo Szilard,  Frederick Soddy
 * cf. Robert H. Goddard
 * cf. Leo Szilard,  Frederick Soddy
 * cf. Robert H. Goddard
 * cf. Robert H. Goddard
 * cf. Robert H. Goddard