JF Ptak Science Books Post 2779
I found another unexpected source for the initiation of nuclear energy—this one coming in Anton Lubke's 1927 book, Technik und Mensch im Jahre 2000. The book is thick (372pp) and well-illustrated, and has what seems to be a mostly/somewhat progressive look into the future judging what I can cobble together....or from what I can tell, it was at least not terribly negative, though I haven't been able to determine if the writer gets political, or not. Given the times Lubke (b. 1890) can't but help to wonder what warfare might look like, and supplies us with one set of possibilities involving vast aircraft (pictured at left) attacking cities with poison gas and electricity. The idea of urban bombing was still pretty new in 1927, as was the idea of attacking cities that weren't necessarily military targets. Both of the weapons used by Lubke's aircraft seem as though they would be devastating, and indiscriminate. (Politicians would pull away from the idea of attacking civilian areas and sign treaties to that effect—that all went away with the invasion of China by Japan, and the attack upon cities by Nazi forces in WWII--the Allies followed suit almost immediately thereafter.) Lubke's image (which appears in the section titled “Der Zukunftskrieg und die Technik”) must have seemed terrifying to his readers of 1927, though they are at least spared the image of the effects on the population in the imagery of the attack. (The Illustrated London News doesn't hold back from its readers in an issue from 12 November 1932, which shares an exceptionally graphic artist's interpretation of a poison gas attack on London, right on the front cover.)
This is only 16 years removed from what seems to be the first aerial bombing attack of a civilian population on 1 November 1911, when Lt. Giulio Cavotti dropped the first bomb from a plane on oasis-encamped Libyan troops at Tripoli. Of course things rapidly in the few years following that, so that by the end of WWI people got a good taste of what it meant to controlling pieces of property without actually occupying them, raining chaos and destruction from above. 20+ years later, in the early 1930's bombing became more sophisticated, including a new arsenal of poison gas weapons. The threat from this weapon was agonizing and palpable–the results of gas attacks upon armed combatants in WWI and the gassing of civilians in the 1920's and early 1930's made a hard strike into the social fabric, an enormous gaping new hole to be filled in the heart of fear.
There were a number of interwar aerial bombings that took place that kept the issue of mass destruction alive and well. For example, Britain used its air arm very convincingly in Iraq, bombing many places including Bagdhad in 1923; the Spanish bombed civilians into submission in Morocco, near Tetuan, in 1925, and the French crippled and destroyed their opponents--both military and civilian, it made no difference--in Damascus, Syria, also in 1925.
Fiction also harnessed the possibilities of air war, not the least of which included Armageddon-like scenarios for the semi-End of Days through the use of poison gas and “atomic” weapons. For example, deadly gas used in Anderson Graham’s The Collapse of Homo Sapiens (1923) and Neil Bell’s Valiant Clay (where the poison gas kills 1.5 billion) and Dalton’s Black Death (1934), while Reginald Glossop’s The Orphan of Space (1926) created an alien atomic spaceship which delivered holocaustal death to Soviets and Chinese and Communists in general. There were many more stories like this, not the least of which were the non-fiction strategy works, like Giulio Douhet, author of Dominion of the Skies (1921), legitimizer of the “strategic” bombing of civilian populations (in spite of the Hague Conference of 1907*), and JFC Fuller’s The Reformation of War (1923) which emphsized the new importance of air war and power and which also allocated the use of gas, justifying that morality because it could cause less harm than a conventional attack.
Back to Lubke: it seems an interesting book, and from what I can see in a very light review there is space devoted to different energy sources than those of 1927: he wrote on solar, wind, tidal, and nuclear (“Atomzertrümmerung”) energy. He also addressed some sort of perpetual motion-something, electrical farming (“Düngung durch Elektrokultur”), and trips to the Moon with the “Mondrakete” (though this adventure into space was already being a well-established part of images of the future in the 1920's).
There's also this terrific image of a vast rocket plane, the description of which mentions Max Valier, the rocket pioneer, Oberth-popularizer, and founder in 1927 of the (German) Society for Space Travel. An aircraft/space vehicle like this it is noted could make the Berlin-NYC flight in about 1.5 hours. (Valier was also the first to lose his life in a failed experiment using liquid oxygen, establishing him in a very unfortunate category of "firsts", becoming probably the first person to lose their lives in rocket flight; this is a similar category to Thomas Selfridge, who became the first person killed in an airplane crash, a 1908 test flight for the army with the pilot Orville Wright.)
There's not that much else I can drag out of the Lubke book given my references, though I have just ordered a copy. I'll get back to this when I've had a better look at it.
[Image at left from bookseller Versandantiquariat Hans-Jürgen Lange, here:
https://www.booklooker.de/B%C3%BCcher/Anton-L%C3%BCbke+Technik-und-Mensch-im-Jahre-2000-Erstausg/id/A028NHxY01ZZi]
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