H. G. Wells as Gunsmith
"Land Armadillo" from the short story of the same name by HG Wells. Paper model by Ralph Curell
It still remains a mystery how the Martians could kill people so quickly and silently. Many are of the opinion that they bring the temperature to a very high degree in a closed chamber that conducts absolutely no heat. They direct this accumulated supply of heat by means of parallel beams to any object they designate, with the help of a polished parabolic mirror, like the light beam that propagates with a parabolic mirror in lighthouses. But no one has yet been able to prove the correctness of all these assumptions. Be that as it may, one thing was certain - that the essence of the matter was in the heat ray. Thermal energy, and, moreover, invisible, instead of visible light. Everything flammable burns at one touch of this beam. Lead liquefies, iron becomes soft, glass breaks and melts; and when such a beam hits water, it turns it into steam.
"War of the Worlds" HG Wells
"War of the Worlds" HG Wells
stories about weapons No, whatever you say, it's good to be the first in some area. The first can do everything in it, the rest get only crumbs from his table. So it was with the literary delights of Jules Verne, and a similar fate was prepared for the science fiction writer HG Wells. Another thing is that he was a more versatile writer than Vern. In addition to about 40 novels and, in addition, several volumes of short stories, he also wrote more than a dozen works of polemical content on philosophical problems and about the same number on the social reorganization of society, two books on the world stories, then about 30 volumes containing political and social forecasts, more than 30 pamphlets on the Fabian Society, of which he was a member, various weapons, nationalism, common prosperity and peace, as well as three more books for children and his own biography. A lot, isn't it? And all this for 50 years! And so he raised so much in his work that his epigones and followers, in general, had to rack their brains. Even Jules Verne himself was captivated by the images he created, writing the novel The Secret of Wilhelm Storitz, first published in 1910.
So such a weapon as the invisible heat ray invented by Wells will forever remain in the treasury of samples of fantastic weapons as exactly “his” development, and those authors who want to repeat it will have to try very hard to bring something new, different to its description from what Wells wrote.
It should be noted here that the English author has already consistently created new types of weapons for his novels, since he linked them with the plot of the work. Moreover, at the same time, he also, in fact, acted as their seer, as he wrote about what could quite possibly be created sooner or later. And so it was with many of the works of H. G. Wells.
Take, for example, his novel The Invisible Man (1897). It was proved during the author's lifetime that his invisible man would have been blind. But… today we are witnessing the appearance of invisible clothing, the whole focus of which is that it reproduces on its front surface what its back surface “sees”. Experienced capes already exist, and from the person who threw it on himself, only one face remains visible. The new unique Quantum Stealth material is produced by Hyperstealth Biotechnology in Canada, and, most likely, the time is not far off when the real invisible soldiers will go into battle, in which only their eyes will be visible!
The "War of the Worlds" (1898) gave mankind not only a description of a heat ray, but also a chemical weapon used by the Martians against earthlings - "black gas", which caused death by suffocation.
The aeropile is a heavier-than-air aircraft from H. G. Wells' novel When the Sleeper Wakes.
A year later, a new prediction of the future appeared - the novel When the Sleeper Wakes. In it, Wells pays a lot of attention to the promising energy of the future - giant wind turbines that generate electric current, and ... writes about new means of transportation and war: airplanes - huge transport airships carrying infantry, and small nimble airpiles *, on one of which the awakened Sleeper fights with the airplanes of the dictator Ostrog and shoots down two devices with a ramming blow. There are also fantastic small arms in the novel. A small and for some reason green-colored carbine, the bullets of which, when they hit the target, develop a high temperature, since the edges of the canvas clothes on the wounds of the dead burned. Well, the ramming itself in the air - the idea as a whole is very primitive, but for that time it was a revelation from revelations.
Drawing of a "land armadillo" from Strand Magazine
Wells' other important prediction was... Tanks! And it so happened that in 1903, in the December issue of Strand Magazine, his story “Land Armadillos” appeared, in which he described armored fighting vehicles 30 m long, on board of which were shooters with remote-controlled semi-automatic rifles, engineers and a captain. They move on eight pairs of large wheels about three meters in diameter. The wheels are arranged according to the principle of the wheels of British swamp tractors, that is, foot-wheels. Each such wheel is both a driving wheel and a steered one. Armor - twelve inches. The conning tower can be raised and lowered. The arrows are located around the entire perimeter of the "armadillo" and create a continuous field of fire around it. The story attracted attention, and subsequently helped establish Wells' reputation as a "prophet of the future", especially after real tanks went into battle on the Somme in 1916. However, "land predictions" seemed to him, apparently, not enough, and he turned his gaze to the heavens.
German airships from the novel "War in the Air"
In 1908, HG Wells published War in the Air. It contains new predictions about the coming world war and its possible consequences, and new weapons. Firstly, the main role in it is now played not by airplanes, although they are also present in the novel, but by huge airships. They are arranged somewhat differently than the “zeppelins” that had already appeared by that time. In particular, the gun on them was installed in the nose. Gliders suspended from airships are used as bombers, and the airships themselves at Wells are, in fact, aircraft carriers.
Airship from the novel "War in the Air". Inside view
To combat them, since the airship's shell contained flammable hydrogen, the novel uses rifles that fire explosive oxygen bullets. The design of this weapon is not described in detail, but it is obvious that it contains compressed gas and some kind of igniter. Thus, when a bullet pierces the shell of the airship and collapses, a local mixture of oxygen and hydrogen arises, which then undermines, causing ignition of the entire volume of this gas inside its body. And, of course, the airships themselves throw bombs from above.
Wells showed himself to be a visionary here too. Military airships were actively used in the First World War as strategic bombers, and during the Second World War they were used to guard convoys and fight submarines.
Cover of The World Set Free, published in 1914
However, all these predictions were overshadowed by the novel The World Set Free, written by him in 1913 and published in 1914. In it, the writer predicted the appearance of atomic weapons and the war with their use in 1956. Naturally, the device of the bomb he invented was absolutely fantastic, but its very name and principle of operation clearly allow us to see in it the prototype of a real-life weapon.
First of all, Wells came up with the “explosive” itself - a highly radioactive carolinium metal, a ball from which was in a vacuum inside a strong metal sphere with a diameter of 60 cm. The ball had two handles, like a sports weight, and a fuse in the form of a plastic cork. To use such a bomb on a target, the assistant pilot had to take it by the handles, bite through (!) the fuse and immediately drop it, because the air that got inside the sphere instantly caused a chain reaction, causing the bomb to fall to the ground like a fiery meteor. Interestingly, according to Wells, such a bomb did not explode, but released enormous energy gradually, turning the place of impact into a raging fiery crater. The half-life of carolinium was 17 days, and all this time the "atomic explosion" continued to act. True, the power of the “explosion” was halved every 17 days, but even when the carolinium completely burned out, this place turned out to be poisoned by “harmful radiation” for a long time.
So airplanes and atomic bombs - that, according to Wells, should eventually destroy the old world and open the way for humanity to create a new one - "liberated"! Well, it is clear that after such landmark discoveries made by science fiction writers at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, their new generation had a very difficult time, because they had to come up with something completely new.
To be continued ...
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