The Futuristic Predictions of H.G. Wells (#155)

Herbert George Wells, or H. G. Wells as he is better known, was an English writer. Prolific in many genres, he wrote more than fifty novels and dozens of short stories. Whilst his non-fiction output includes works of social commentary, politics, history, popular science, satire, biography and autobiography, Wells is now best remembered for his science fiction novels and has been called the ‘The Father of Modern Science Fiction’ (not to be confused with The Mother of Science Fiction, which of course we all know to be Mary Shelley, the author of ‘Frankenstein’)

In addition to his fame as a writer, he was considered to be a futurist (people whose specialty or interest is futurology or the attempt to systematically explore predictions and possibilities about the future and how they can emerge from the present, whether that of human society in particular, or of life on Earth in general) as he wrote a number of utopian works and foresaw the advent of aircraft, tanks, space travel, nuclear weapons, satellite television and something resembling the World Wide Web. His science fiction imagined time travel, alien invasion, invisibility, and biological engineering before these subjects were common in the genre.

But before we get into more details about his strangely prophetic predictions throughout his famous works, let’s go back and learn a little more about the man behind the mystery.

Herbert George Wells was born at Atlas House, 162 High Street in Bromley, Kent, on 21 September 1866. Called "Bertie" by his family, he was the fourth and last child of Joseph Wells, a former domestic gardener, and at the time a shopkeeper and professional cricketer and Sarah Neal, a former domestic servant. 

A defining incident of young Wells's life was an accident in 1874 that left him bedridden with a broken leg. To pass the time he began to read books from the local library, brought to him by his father. He soon became devoted to the other worlds and lives to which books gave him access; they also stimulated his desire to write. Later that year he entered into private school, Thomas Morley's Commercial Academy, until 1880. Three years earlier, his father, Joseph Wells, fractured his thigh which effectively put an end to Joseph's career as a cricketer, and his subsequent earnings as a shopkeeper were not enough to compensate for the loss of the primary source of family income. 

No longer able to support themselves financially, the family instead sought to place their sons as apprentices in various occupations, so from 1880 to 1883, Wells had an unhappy apprenticeship as a draper at Hyde's Drapery Emporium in Southsea. His experiences at Hyde's, where he worked a thirteen-hour day and slept in a dormitory with other apprentices, later inspired his novels The Wheels of Chance, The History of Mr Polly, and Kipps, which portray the life of a draper's apprentice as well as providing a critique of society's distribution of wealth. 

Wells's parents had a turbulent marriage, so when his mother returned to work as a lady's maid one of the conditions of work was that she would not be permitted to have living space for her husband and children. Thereafter, she and Joseph lived separate lives, though they never divorced and remained faithful to each other. As a consequence, Herbert's personal troubles increased as he subsequently failed as a draper and also, later, as a chemist's assistant. However, Uppark had a magnificent library in which he immersed himself, reading many classic works.

After bouncing around between being a teacher and several unhappy apprenticeships, eventually Wells won a scholarship to the Normal School of Science (later the Royal College of Science in South Kensington, which is now part of Imperial College London) studying biology under Thomas Henry Huxley (who, fun fact, was an English biologist and anthropologist who become known as "Darwin's Bulldog" for his advocacy of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution). Wells studied in his new school until 1887, with a weekly allowance of 21 shillings (a guinea) thanks to his scholarship. This ought to have been a comfortable sum of money (at the time many working class families had "round about a pound a week" as their entire household income), yet Wells speaks of constantly being hungry, and indeed photographs of him at the time show a youth who is very thin and malnourished. 

Upon leaving the Normal School of Science, Wells was left without a source of income. His aunt Mary invited him to stay with her for a while, during which he grew increasingly interested in her daughter, Isabel, whom he later courted. To earn money, he began writing short humorous articles for journals such as The Pall Mall Gazette. His success with these shorter pieces encouraged him to write book-length work, and he published his first novel, The Time Machine, in 1895. 

In 1891, Wells married his cousinIsabel Mary Wells, though the couple agreed to separate in 1894, when he had fallen in love with one of his students, Amy Catherine Robbins (another fun fact, one of Well’s more famous students was none other than A.A. Milne!) with whom he moved to Woking, Surrey, in May 1895. They lived in a rented house in the town centre for just under 18 months and married at St Pancras register office in October 1895. His short period in Woking was perhaps the most creative and productive of his whole writing career, for while there he planned and wrote The War of the Worlds and The Time Machine, completed The Island of Doctor Moreau, wrote and published The Wonderful Visit and The Wheels of Chance, and began writing two other early books, When the Sleeper Wakes and Love and Mr Lewisham. 

In late summer 1896, Wells and Jane moved to a larger house in Worcester Park, near Kingston upon Thames, for two years; this lasted until his poor health took them to Sandgate, near Folkestone, where he constructed a large family home, Spade House, in 1901. He had two sons with Jane: George (known as "Gip") and Frank (grandfather of film director Simon Wells who directed ‘The Prince of Egypt’ and consulted on the future scenes in Back to the Future Part II). Jane died on 6 October 1927, in Dunmow, at the age of 55, which left Wells devastated… but then proceeded to have numerous affairs, marriages and father kids with a significant number of women between her death and his!

Some of his early novels, dubbed "scientific romances", established many of the basic ideas that Science Fiction writers use to this day, like The Time Machine(as mentioned earlier), The Island of Doctor Moreau (which you might recognise if you are a fan of Orphan Black!) The Invisible Man, The War of the Worlds, When the Sleeper Wakes, and The First Men in the Moon. The War of the Worlds, for example, presents the first credible invasion by aliens from outer space; The Food of the Gods, in which humans and beasts alike assume gigantic proportions, has been reincarnated in countless cheap monster flicks of recent years; Things to Come, his first attempt at a screenplay, depicted the impending ravages of W.W. II in horrifying detail.

He also wrote realistic novels that received critical acclaim, including Kipps and a critique of English culture during the Edwardian period, Tono-Bungay. Wells also wrote dozens of short stories and novellas, including, "The Flowering of the Strange Orchid", which helped bring the full impact of Darwin's revolutionary botanical ideas to a wider public (clearly that time spent with Darwins Bulldog had an impact), and was followed by many later successes such as "The Country of the Blind".

One of Wells's major contributions to the science fiction genre was considered to be his approach to making the story as credible as possible, even if both the writer and the reader know certain elements are impossible, allowing the reader to accept the ideas as something that could really happen. Today this is referred to as "the plausible impossible" or "suspension of disbelief". For example, while neither invisibility nor time travel was considered new in speculative fiction, Wells added a sense of realism to the concepts which the readers were not familiar with. He conceived the idea of using a vehicle that allows an operator to travel purposely and selectively forwards or backwards in time. The term "time machine", coined by Wells, is now almost universally used to refer to such a vehicle. He explained that while writing The Time Machine, Wells realized that "the more impossible the story I had to tell, the more ordinary must be the setting, and the circumstances in which I now set the Time Traveller were all that I could imagine of solid upper-class comforts." What is now known as "Wells's Law", a science fiction story should contain only a single extraordinary assumption. Therefore, as justifications for the impossible, he employed scientific ideas and theories.

And here I think is a good point to examine some of the most jaw-dropping predictions found in his writings:

Tanks

More than a dozen years before tanks were first used on battlefields, Wells described similar armored fighting vehicles called ironclads in the 1903 story The Land of the Ironclads:

“They were essentially long, narrow, and very strong steel frameworks carrying the engines, and borne upon eight pairs of big pedrail wheels, each about ten feet in diameter, each a driving wheel and set upon long axles free to swivel round a common axis. This arrangement gave them the maximum of adaptability to the contours of the ground. They crawled level along the ground with one foot high upon a hillock and another deep in a depression, and they could hold themselves erect and steady sideways upon even a steep hillside. The engineers directed the engines under the command of the captain, who had look-out points at small ports all round the upper edge of the adjustable skirt of twelve-inch iron-plating which protected the whole affair, and could also raise or depress a conning-tower set about the portholes through the center of the iron top cover. The riflemen each occupied a small cabin of peculiar construction and these cabins were slung along the sides of and before and behind the great main framework, in a manner suggestive of the slinging of the seats of an Irish jaunting-car. Their rifles, however, were very different pieces of apparatus from the simple mechanisms in the hands of their adversaries.” 

In 1903, 13 years before tanks made their first appearance among the trenches of WWII, Wells was already describing tank warfare in his short story The Land Ironclads.

"In that flickering pallor it had the effect of a large and clumsy black insect, an insect the size of an ironclad cruiser, crawling obliquely to the first line of trenches and firing shots out of portholes in its side."

Air warfare

Four years before the Italians first used them in war, and nine years before their widespread use during World World 1, Wells foresaw the deadly use of powered aircrafts against enemy nations.

Written in 1907, the military science-fiction novel The War in the Air depicts a global war with frighteningly close similarities to the real one that would begin in 1914.

The following excerpt comes from a German character planning an aerial strike on the United States:

“War is perhaps already declared. We go–to America. Our fleet will descend out of ze air upon ze United States–it is a country quite unprepared for war eferywhere–eferywhere. Zey have always relied on ze Atlantic. And their navy. We have selected a certain point–it is at present ze secret of our commanders–which we shall seize, and zen we shall establish a depot–a sort of inland Gibraltar. It will be–what will it be?–an eagle’s nest. Zere our airships will gazzer and repair, and thence they will fly to and fro ofer ze United States, terrorising cities, dominating Washington, levying what is necessary, until ze terms we dictate are accepted. You follow me?”

Lasers

Theodore Maiman invented the laser in 1960. Yet Wells envisioned them more than 60 years earlier in the famed 1898 novel The War of the Worlds. In the book, Martians brandishing Heat Rays, which are weapons that can obliterate humans in a silent flash:

“In some way they are able to generate an intense heat in a chamber of practically absolute non-conductivity. This intense heat they project in a parallel beam against any object they choose, by means of a polished parabolic mirror of unknown composition, much as the parabolic mirror of a lighthouse projects a beam of light… it is certain that a beam of heat is the essence of the matter. Heat, and invisible, instead of visible, light. Whatever is combustible flashes into flame at its touch, lead runs like water, it softens iron, cracks and melts glass, and when it falls upon water, incontinently that explodes into steam.”

The atomic bomb

Too bad humanity didn’t take stronger heed of Wells’s 1914 book The World Set Free, published nearly 30 years before The Manhattan Project. Or maybe they did and that is the problem. In the novel, Wells details the use of nuclear weapons, namely the atomic bomb, the inflict unimaginable destruction:

“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.”

Written in 1913, nearly 30 years before the Manhattan Project started, Wells' The World Set Free describes cities around the world being devastated by what he called "atomic bombs." Wells predicted not only the mushroom cloud we associate with atomic bombs, but their lasting radiation as well.

"Few who adventured into these areas of destruction and survived attempted any repetition of their experiences. There are stories of puffs of luminous, radio-active vapour drifting sometimes scores of miles from the bomb centre and killing and scorching all they overtook."

Even in 1933 'The Shape of Things to Come', Wells spoke of global conflict, world superpowers, bombing raids and gas attacks.

Wireless communications

On a lighter note, Wells also revealed foresight regarding wireless communication methods. In the 1923 novel Men Like Gods, he describes technologies that sound similar to voicemail and email:

“For in Utopia, except by previous arrangement, people do not talk together on the telephone. A message is sent to the station of the district in which the recipient is known to be, and there it waits until he chooses to tap his accumulated messages. And any that one wishes to repeat can be repeated. Then he talks back to the senders and dispatches any other messages he wishes. The transmission is wireless.”

Cell Phones

He may not have called them cellular phones, but Wells definitely predicted them. He described wireless communication devices in his 1933 novel The Shape of Things to Come. He even created something very similar to modern email and voice mail in his 1923 book Men Like Gods:

"A message is sent to the station of the district in which the recipient is known to be, and there it waits until he chooses to tap his accumulated messages. And any that one wishes to repeat can be repeated. Then he talks back to the senders and dispatches any other messages he wishes."

Other successful predictions from The Shape of Things to Come were:

WWII begins in 1940, involving all the major countries of the world, Air raids by enemy craft on England, Dogfights between British and enemy aircraft, Gas warfare, Air conditioning, Commercial television, Videotape recording and Televised broadcasts sent simultaneously to all parts of the world.

Future Predictions are:

Reconstruction of the world continues through utopia, when enlightened humans have done away with the instruments of death and destruction, Electric guns project unmanned satellites around the Moon, A special kind of wall television screen produces animated images on large surfaces, Citizens of the future are required by the government to wear personal communication devices on their sleeves and Disease has been completely eradicated… all by 2054. Fingers crossed!

Virtual assistants

Similar to Google Home and other voice-activated virtual assistants like Alexa that can also read you the news, the General Intelligence Machine carried out a similar function in the 1899 novel When the Sleeper Wakes.

“This was the General Intelligence Machine. For a space it seemed to be gathering breath, and a regular throbbing from its cylindrical body was audible. Then it trumpeted ‘Galloop, Galloop,’ and broke out again.

‘Paris is now pacified. All resistance is over. Galloop! The black police hold every position of importance in the city. They fought with great bravery, singing songs written in praise of their ancestors by the poet Kipling. Once or twice they got out of hand, and tortured and mutilated wounded and captured insurgents, men and women. Moral — don’t go rebelling. Haha! Galloop, Galloop! They are lively fellows. Lively brave fellows. Let this be a lesson to the disorderly banderlog of this city. Yah! Banderlog! Filth of the earth! Galloop, Galloop!’

The voice ceased.”

Other successful predictions from When The Sleeper Awakes are:

Liquid all-purpose foods, Automatic doors, Portable television sets, Air conditioning, Video recordings, Light globes that change night into day, Propeller airplanes, Mechanized agriculture, Wheeled trucks, War between armed aircraft and Aerial bombings.

Future Predictions are:

Automatic clothes-making machines (they measure and produce on the spot), Moving conveyor roadways, Special pleasure cities to placate the masses, Printed books have been replaced by video cassettes which tell stories, All of Earth's population is concentrated in the great supercities (London, for example, has over 33 million inhabitants).

Moon landing

Almost 70 years before the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969, Wells’ characters traveled to the planetary satellite via the Cavorite Sphere anti-gravity spaceship in the 1901 story The First Men in the Moon:

“What is this spirit in man that urges him forever to depart from happiness and security, to toil, to place himself in danger, even to risk a reasonable certainty of death? It dawned upon me up there in the moon as a thing I ought always to have known, that man is not made simply to go about being safe and comfortable and well fed and amused. Against his interest, against his happiness he is constantly being driven to do unreasonable things. Some force not himself impels him and go he must.”

In 'The First Men in the Moon' (1901), Wells imagined a lunar adventure of two characters.

This is said to have anticipated the 1969 Apollo 11 Moon landing.

In Wells' 'When the Sleeper Wakes', he also mentioned Martian tripods, moving walkways and aircrafts.

In 'Anticipations' (1900), Wells predicted the 'abolition of distance' by real-life technologies such as the railway, by stressing on the now-true fact that since the inhabitants of different nations can travel towards each other more quickly and easily, they should do it peacefully.

Genetic engineering

In the unsettling 1896 novel The Island of Dr. Moreau, Wells painted a world in which an arguably mad scientist performs vivisection experiments on animals. Slowing transforming and augmenting the creatures to take on human attributes, Wells’ writing reveals parallels to early practices of genetic engineering and cloning.

“It is not simply the outward form of an animal which I can change. The physiology, the chemical rhythm of the creature, may also be made to undergo an enduring modification,—of which vaccination and other methods of inoculation with living or dead matter are examples that will, no doubt, be familiar to you.” – Dr. Moreau speaking in The Island of Dr. Moreau

Wells made several other stunning predictions. However, these alone give the feeling that he didn’t just popularize the concept of time travel—he could have skipped through time himself.

A central theme in 1896's The Island of Doctor Moreau is genetic engineering, specifically animal modification and vivisection, creating human-animal hybrids, surgical transplants and blood transfusions -- things that are now routinely conceived for medical research-- presaged the age of genetic engineering.

In addition to that, it is also concluded that the novel was the first prediction of the now-real concept of humans playing God by controlling nature.

"I began with a sheep, and killed it after a day and a half by a slip of the scalpel. I took another sheep, and made a thing of pain and fear and left it bound up to heal. It looked quite human to me when I had finished it; but when I went to it I was discontented with it."

Wells envisioned actually sewing parts of creatures together to make a new whole. In reality, genetic science works in a more exacting way and given us everything from herbicide tolerant crops to glow-in-the-dark cats.

Heat Rays

The Martian invaders in Wells' 1898 War of the Worlds relied on a heat ray as their primary weapon. "Slowly a humped shape rose out of the pit, and the ghost of a beam of light seemed to flicker out from it. Forthwith flashes of actual flame, a bright glare leaping from one to another, sprang from the scattered group of men. It was as if some invisible jet impinged upon them and flashed into white flame. It was as if each man were suddenly and momentarily turned to fire."

The U.S. military has developed its own heat ray weapon. The Active Denial System, designed to be a non-lethal weapon against enemy troops, projects a wavelength that causes an intense burning sensation without leaving permanent damage. The U.S. Marines demonstrated the weapons maritime uses just last week.

Automatic Doors

"[I]nstead of going through the archway as he expected, walked straight to the dead wall of the apartment opposite the archway. A long strip of this apparently solid wall rolled up with a snap, hung over the two retreating men and fell again."

The first automatic door wasn't installed until 1960, but Wells described one in 1899's The Sleeper Awakes. Now you can even get automatic sliding doors on your vehicle.

Invisibility

One of Wells best known works is 1897's The Invisible Man. For those that haven't read it (which you definitely should), it essentially tells the story of a former medical student that tests his invisibility medicine on himself, is unable to reverse the condition and becomes very unstable. "I went over the heads of the things a man reckons desirable. No doubt invisibility made it possible to get them, but it made it impossible to enjoy them when they are got."

True invisibility is still a ways off but scientists are getting there. Using everything from cameras to nanotechnology to good old fashioned mirrors, science is inching closer and closer to allowing us to disappear like Wells' protagonist. Let's just hope when invisibility cloaks get mass produced we don't all go crazy violent like in the novel.

The World Wide Web/Wikipedia

In 1937, novelist and writer H.G Wells laid out a vision for something truly utopian. He called it the "Permanent World Encyclopaedia."

"A great number of workers would be engaged perpetually in perfecting this index of human knowledge and keeping it up to date," he wrote in an essay for the Encyclopédie Française, later published in the book World Brain. "[It] will be made accessible to every individual...It need not be concentrated in any one single place...It can be reproduced exactly and fully, in Peru, China, Iceland, Central Africa."

78 years later, Wells' prediction has basically come true. He called it the "Permanent World Encyclopaedia"; we call it Wikipedia. (Alternately, you could also just consider his idea to be manifest in the internet as a whole.)

Sure, it's far from a perfect representation of human knowledge (among other things, Wikipedia articles dramatically over-represent Europe and North America and under-represent the rest of the world). But Wikipedia is still a perpetually-updated, remarkably comprehensive encyclopedia that's been built by volunteers, is free for anyone to use, and can be accessed by anyone with an internet connection.

For someone to have predicted it in the 1930s — before the invention of the microprocessor — is, by any measure, astounding.

When it comes to the particulars, though, Wells' vision was somewhat less accurate. Absent computers and the internet, he thought all this information would be stored and replicated over and over on the then-novel medium of microfilm, and studied in projection rooms in libraries around the world.

In 1937, the writer laid out a vision for something he called the 'Permanent World Encyclopaedia,' which was published as an essay and later in the book World Brain.

"A great number of workers would be engaged perpetually in perfecting this index of human knowledgeand keeping it up to date," he wrote in the essay.

Further, he added that "[It] will be made accessible to every individual...It need not be concentrated in any one single place...It can be reproduced exactly and fully, in Peru, China, Iceland, Central Africa."

In case you haven't already guessed, the living example of this 'World Wide Web' prediction of Wells' is what we call Wikipedia, Google, or the internet as a whole.

And last, but not necessarily least… Freedom in the true sense

It was Wells who envisioned a Utopia-like government ruling nation states which would give every person the right to be as well-educated as possible (especially in the field of science), have work which satisfies them, and the freedom to enjoy their personal life with privacy.

Along with that, he visualized trade and property for every man and woman on Earth, and 'freedom from any sort of mutilation or sterilisation' and from torture.

The rights he spoke of now have legal force in nations (as can be seen in the United Nations 1948 Declaration of Universal Human Rights) if not universal existence, so can still be called an aim he has passed on to generations.

Wells had diabetes, and was a co-founder in 1934 of The Diabetic Association (now Diabetes UK, the leading charity for people with diabetes in the UK). 

Wells died of unspecified causes on 13 August 1946, aged 79, at his home in London. In his preface to the 1941 edition of The War in the Air, Wells had stated that his epitaph should be: "I told you so. You damned fools". His ashes were subsequently scattered into the English Channel at Old Harry Rocks, Dorset.