JF Ptak Science Books Post 2741
“Atomic Bomb” appeared in print for the first time thirty years before there was one. It appeared in H.G. Wells' The World Set Free, written in 1913 and published in 1914, evidently before the appearance of the guns of August later in that year. The “set free” part of the world in Wells' hands doesn't come without an atomic struggle, though, much of the novel being a stage-up for the last bit in which people realize that atomic-bombing everything everywhere is not the way to go.
There are other atomic-conjoined terms in this book besides “bomb”, and they are somewhat telling of the period. Wells does make a good strike with “atomic bomb”, “atomic ammunition”, and “atomic power”, and then goes on to describe the other bits that could benefit from this atomicity, including “atomic aeroplanes”, “atomic hay lorries”, “atomic traction engines”, “atomic riveters” (riveting at twice the pace of a human), and “atomic smelters”. So there are some weak spots here and there in his 57 mentions of “atomic-something”, and that's okay—he did some pretty good sightseeing into the future with the bomb.
And he was definitely the first to use “atomic bomb”, according to many sources and not the least of which is the OED (which also provides another interesting example of the word in use, quoting the Yale Review in 1917 “When you can drop just one atomic bomb and wipe out Paris or Berlin, war will have become monstrous and impossible”.) “Atomic-bombed”, “atomic bombing”, and “Atomic bomber” do not make their appearance in the English language until after August 6 in 1945.
The first view of the atomic bomb in Wells finds that there not one but three of them, all contained in a "coffin-shaped box", and even with a 2' diameter were small enough to be stored under a person's legs. The “essential element” in its construction was a substance named “Carolinum1”, which thus far had been “tested only in almost infinitesimal quantities within steel chambers embedded in lead”.
The great terror of the new weapon was that it “would continue to explode indefinitely”, which so far as I can tell was not actually the case in the novel.
The bomb was to be put into action against Berlin from an airplane, as it turns out. The bombardier (as it were) in the two-man crew armed the atomic bomb with his teeth before throwing it over the side onto the city:
“It was time to act. The broad avenues, the park, the palaces below rushed widening out nearer and nearer to them. ‘Ready!’ said the steersman." (I wonder if Capt. Deak Parsons or his assistant Dick Jeppson ever read this book before the far more involved procedure of arming "Little Boy
“...(W)ith both hands the bomb-thrower lifted the big atomic bomb from the box and steadied it against the side. It was a black sphere two feet in diameter. Between its handles was a little celluloid stud, and to this he bent his head until his lips touched it. Then he had to bite in order to let the air in upon the inducive. Sure of its accessibility, he craned his neck over the side of the aeroplane and judged his pace and distance. Then very quickly he bent forward, bit the stud, and hoisted the bomb over the side.”
And then came the explosions:
“The bomb flashed blinding scarlet in mid-air, and fell, a descending column of blaze eddying spirally in the midst of a whirlwind. Both the aeroplanes were tossed like shuttlecocks, hurled high and sideways and the steersman, with gleaming eyes and set teeth, fought in great banking curves for a balance...Then that bomb had exploded also, and steersman, thrower, and aeroplane were just flying rags and splinters of metal and drops of moisture in the air, and a third column of fire rushed eddying down upon the doomed buildings below...”
“Those [atomic bombs] 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. The Central European bombs were the same, except that they were larger and had a more complicated arrangement for animating the inducive.”What happened when the celluloid stud was opened was that the inducive oxidised and became active. Then the surface of the Carolinum began to degenerate. This degeneration passed only slowly into the substance of the bomb. A moment or so after its explosion began it was still mainly an inert sphere exploding superficially, a big, inanimate nucleus wrapped in flame and thunder. Those that were thrown from aeroplanes fell in this state, they reached the ground still mainly solid, and, melting soil and rock in their progress, bored into the earth. There, as more and more of the Carolinum became active, the bomb spread itself out into a monstrous cavern of fiery energy at the base of what became very speedily a miniature active volcano. The Carolinum, unable to disperse, freely drove into and mixed up with a boiling confusion of molten soil and superheated steam, and so remained spinning furiously and maintaining an eruption that lasted for years or months or weeks according to the size of the bomb employed and the chances of its dispersal. Once launched, the bomb was absolutely unapproachable and uncontrollable until its forces were nearly exhausted, and from the crater that burst open above it, puffs of heavy incandescent vapour and fragments of viciously punitive rock and mud, saturated with Carolinum, and each a centre of scorching and blistering energy, were flung high and far."
"Such was the crowning triumph of military science, the ultimate explosive that was to give the ‘decisive touch’ to war...."
“The atomic bombs had dwarfed the international issues to complete insignificance”, Wells wrote, and it is after the period of destruction that nations states seek to end the whole charade of war and form a new world government dedicated to keeping the peace. After a while, the idea works, atomic energy solves all manner of problems beset by whomever, and after a bit most people in the world don't need to work and become artists.
I'll finish this short post with a note on the beginning of The World Set Free, which is one of the few books to be dedicated to another book. The honor goes to Frederick Soddy's (Nobel Prize Chemistry, 1921) Interpretation of Radium, Wells' laudatory stating specifically where in the book his major inspiration was found:
"To Frederick Soddy's
Interpretation of Radium,
This Story, Which Owes Long Passages To The Eleventh Chapter Of That Book, Acknowledges And Inscribes Itself"
I can't think of another book with this sort of dedication, though I remember that Jack Keroac dedicated Visions of Cody “To America, Whatever that Is”, and that is as far as I ever got in that book. John Steinbeck dedicated East of Eden to "Pat", describing his book as a box to put stuff in—that is entirely different of course, but I thought to toss it in nevertheless, because it is odd, and lovely, and the book is excellent--and at least I read all of that one.
Notes:
- Carolinum, Cn, was thought to be one of two new elements of thorium, and was proposed by Charles Baskerville in his "On the Existence of a new Element associated with Thorium", Journal of the American Chemical Society. 23 (10): 761–764, 1901—his results were no reproducible.
It is interesting to note some similarities in the imagining of the atomic bomb and the experience of Leo Szilard thinking of it himself:
“In September 1933, while crossing Southampton Row in Bloomsbury, the
Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard had a eureka moment in which he saw how to
(as he put it) "set up a nuclear chain reaction, liberate energy on an
industrial scale, and construct atomic bombs": this startling insight
"became a sort of obsession with me". The year before, Szilard had read H.
G. Wells's novel The World Set Free (1914), in which a scientist working,
sure enough, in Bloomsbury in 1933, succeeds in "tapping the internal
energy of atoms". In this novel, Wells coined the phrase atomic bomb and
described a devastating war fought with the new superweapon. The
significance of this coincidence in time and space was not lost on
Szilard. Indeed, he regarded it as prophetic, and frequently referred to
it in relation to key moments in both his life and in the attempt to
harness atomic energy.”--P. D. Smith review in the Times Literary Supplement, April 13, 2018, of Peter Bowler's A History of the Future, Prophets of progress from H. G. Wells to Isaac Asimov, 287pp. Cambridge University Press.
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