H. Wells - The World Set Free

atom, that once we thoughthard and impenetrable, and indivisible

and final and-lifeless-lifeless, is reallya reservoir of

immense energy. That is the most wonderful thing about all this

work. A little while ago we thoughtof the atoms as we thought

of bricks, as solid building material, as substantial matter, as

unit masses of lifeless stuff, and behold! these bricks are

boxes, treasure boxes, boxes full of the intensest force. This

little bottle contains about a pint of uranium oxide; that is to

say, about fourteen ounces of the element uranium. It is worth

about a pound. And in this bottle, ladies and gentlemen, in the

atoms in this bottle there slumbers at least as much energy as we

could get by burning a hundred and sixty tons of coal. If at a

word, in one instant I could suddenly release that energy here

and now it would blow us and everything about us to fragments; if

I could turn it into the machinery that lights this city, it

could keep Edinburgh brightly lit for a week. But at present no

man knows, no man has an inkling of how this little lump of stuff

can be made to hasten the release of its store. It does release

it, as a burn trickles. Slowly the uranium changes into radium,

the radium changes into a gas called the radium emanation, and

that again to what we call radium A, and so the process goes on,

giving out energy at every stage, until at last we reach the last

stage of all, which is, so far as we can tell at present, lead.

But we cannot hasten it.'

'I take ye, man,' whispered the chuckle-headed lad, with his red

hands tightening like a vice upon his knee. 'I take ye, man. Go

on! Oh, go on!'

The professor went on after a little pause. 'Why is the change

gradual?' he asked. 'Why does only a minute fraction of the

radium disintegrate in any particular second? Why does it dole

itself out so slowly and so exactly? Why does not all the

uranium change to radium and all the radium change to the next

lowest thing at once? Why this decay by driblets; why not a decay

en masse?… Suppose presently we find it is possible to

quicken that decay?'

The chuckle-headed lad nodded rapidly. The wonderful inevitable

idea was coming. He drew his knee up towards his chin and swayed

in his seat with excitement. 'Why not?' he echoed, 'why not?'

The professor lifted his forefinger.

'Given that knowledge,' he said, 'mark what we should be able to

do! We should not only be able to use this uranium and thorium;

not only should we have a source of power so potent that a man

might carry in his hand the energy to light a city for a year,

fight a fleet of battleships, or drive one of our giant liners

across the Atlantic; but we should also have a clue that would

enable us at last to quicken the process of disintegration in all

the other elements, where decay is still so slow as to escape our

finest measurements. Every scrap of solid matter in the world

would become an available reservoir of concentrated force. Do

you realise, ladies and gentlemen, what these things would mean

for us?'

The scrub head nodded. 'Oh! go on. Go on.'

'It would mean a change in human conditionsthat I can only

compare to the discovery of fire, that first discovery that

lifted man above the brute. We stand to-day towards

radio-activity as our ancestor stood towards fire before he had

learnt to make it. He knewit then only as a strange thing

utterly beyond his control, a flare on the crest of the volcano,

a red destruction that poured through the forest. So it is that

we knowradio-activity to-day. This-this is the dawn of a new

day in human living. At the climax of that civilisation which

had its beginning in the hammered flint and the fire-stick of the

savage, just when it is becoming apparent that our

ever-increasing needs cannot be borne indefinitely by our present

sources of energy, we discover suddenly the possibility of an

entirely new civilisation. The energy we need for our very

existence, and with which Nature supplies us still so grudgingly,

is in realitylocked up in inconceivable quantities all about us.

We cannot pick that lock at present, but--'

He paused. His voice sank so that everybody strained a little to

hearhim.

'--we will.'

He put up that lean finger again, his solitary gesture.

'And then,' he said…

'Then that perpetual struggle for existence, that perpetual

struggle to live on the bare surplus of Nature's energies will

ceaseto be the lot of Man. Man will step from the pinnacle of

this civilisation to the beginning of the next. I have no

eloquence, ladies and gentlemen, to express the vision of man's

material destiny that opens out before me. I seethe desert

continents transformed, the poles no longer wildernesses of ice,

the whole world once more Eden. I seethe power of man reach out

among the stars…'

He stopped abruptly with a catching of the breath that many an

actor or orator might have envied.

The lecture was over, the audience hung silent for a few seconds,

sighed, became audible, stirred, fluttered, prepared for

dispersal. More light was turned on and what had been a dim mass

of figures became a bright confusionof movement. Some of the

people signalled to friends, some crowded down towards the

platform to examine the lecturer's apparatus and make notes of

his diagrams. But the chuckle-headed lad with the scrub hair

wanted no such detailed frittering away of the thoughtsthat had

inspired him. He wanted to be alonewith them; he elbowed his way

out almost fiercely, he made himselfas angular and bony as a

cow, fearinglest some one should speak to him, lest some one

should invade his glowing sphere of enthusiasm.

He went through the streets with a rapt face, like a saint who

seesvisions. He had arms disproportionately long, and

ridiculous big feet.

He must get alone, get somewhere high out of all this crowding of

commonness, of everyday life.

He made his way to the top of Arthur's Seat, and there he sat for

a long time in the golden evening sunshine, still, except that

ever and again he whispered to himselfsome precious phrase that

had stuck in his mind.

'If,' he whispered, 'if only we could pick that lock…'

The sun was sinking over the distant hills. Already it was shorn

of its beams, a globe of ruddy gold, hanging over the great banks

of cloud that would presently engulf it.

'Eh!' said the youngster. 'Eh!'

He seemed to wakeup at last out of his entrancement, and the red

sun was there before his eyes. He stared at it, at first without

intelligence, and then with a gathering recognition. Into his

mindcame a strange echo of that ancestral fancy, that fancy of a

Stone Age savage, dead and scattered bones among the drift two

hundred thousand years ago.

'Ye auld thing,' he said-and his eyes were shining, and he made

a kind of grabbing gesture with his hand; 'ye auld red thing…

We'll have ye YET.'

Section I

The problem which was already beingmooted 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. From the first