H. Wells - The World Set Free

cost, even of these earliest and clumsiest of atomic engines, is

compared with that of the power they superseded. Allowing for

lubrication the Dass-Tata engine, once it was started cost a

penny to run thirty-seven miles, and added only nine and quarter

pounds to the weight of the carriage it drove. It made the heavy

alcohol-driven automobile of the time ridiculous in appearance as

well as preposterously costly. For many years the price of coal

and every formof liquid fuel had been clambering to levels that

made even the revival of the draft horse seem a practicable

possibility, and now with the abrupt relaxation of this

stringency, the change in appearance of the traffic upon the

world's roads was instantaneous. In three years the frightful

armoured monsters that had hooted and smoked and thundered about

the world for four awful decades were swept away to the dealers

in old metal, and the highways thronged with light and clean and

shimmering shapes of silvered steel. At the same time a new

impetus was given to aviation by the relativelyenormous power

for weight of the atomic engine, it was at last possible to add

Redmayne's ingenious helicopter ascent and descent engine to the

vertical propeller that had hitherto been the sole driving force

of the aeroplane without overweighting the machine, and men found

themselvespossessed of an instrument of flight that could hover

or ascend or descend vertically and gently as well as rush wildly

through the air. The last dread of flying vanished. As the

journalists of the time phrased it, this was the epoch of the

Leap into the Air. The new atomic aeroplane became indeed a

mania; every one of means was frantic to possess a thing so

controllable, so secure and so free from the dust and danger of

the road, and in France alonein the year 1943 thirty thousand of

these new aeroplanes were manufactured and licensed, and soared

humming softly into the sky.

And with an equal speed atomic engines of various types invaded

industrialism. The railways paid enormous premiums for priority

in the delivery of atomic traction engines, atomic smelting was

embarked upon so eagerly as to lead to a number of disastrous

explosions due to inexperienced handling of the new power, and

the revolutionary cheapening of both materials and electricity

made the entire reconstruction of domestic buildings a matter

merely dependent upon a reorganisation of the methods of the

builder and the house-furnisher. Viewed from the side of the new

power and from the point of view of those who financed and

manufactured the new engines and material it required the age of

the Leap into the Air was one of astonishing prosperity.

Patent-holding companies were presently paying dividends of five

or six hundred per cent. and enormous fortunes were made and

fantastic wages earned by all who were concerned in the new

developments. This prosperity was not a little enhanced by the

fact that in both the Dass-Tata and Holsten-Roberts engines one

of the recoverable waste products was gold-the former

disintegrated dust of bismuth and the latter dust of lead-and

that this new supply of gold led quite naturally to a rise in

prices throughout the world.

This spectacle of feverish enterprise was productivity, this

crowding flight of happyand fortunate rich people-every great

city was as if a crawling ant-hill had suddenly taken wing-was

the bright side of the opening phase of the new epoch in human

history. Beneath that brightness was a gathering darkness, a

deepening dismay. If there was a vast development of production

there was also a huge destruction of values. These glaring

factories working night and day, these glittering new vehicles

swinging noiselessly along the roads, these flights of

dragon-flies that swooped and soared and circled in the air, were

indeed no more than the brightnesses of lamps and fires that

gleam out when the world sinks towards twilight and the night.

Between these high lights accumulated disaster, social

catastrophe. The coal mines were manifestly doomed to closure at

no very distant date, the vast amount of capital invested in oil

was becoming unsaleable, millions of coal miners, steel workers

upon the old lines, vast swarms of unskilled or under-skilled

labourers in innumerable occupations, were beingflung out of

employment by the superior efficiency of the new machinery, the

rapid fall in the cost of transit was destroying high land values

at every centre of population, the value of existinghouse

property had become problematical, gold was undergoing headlong

depreciation, all the securities upon which the credit of the

world restedwere slipping and sliding, banks were tottering, the

stock exchanges were scenes of feverish panic;-this was the

reverse of the spectacle, these were the black and monstrous

under-consequences of the Leap into the Air.

There is a story of a demented London stockbroker running out

into Threadneedle Street and tearing off his clothes as he ran.

'The Steel Trust is scrapping the whole of its plant,' he

shouted. 'The State Railways are going to scrap all their

engines. Everything's going to be scrapped-everything. Come and

scrap the mint, you fellows, come and scrap the mint!'

In the year 1955 the suicide rate for the United States of

America quadrupled any previous record. There was an enormous

increase also in violent crime throughout the world. The thing

had come upon an unprepared humanity; it seemed as though human

society was to be smashed by its own magnificent gains.

For there had been no foresightof these things. There had been

no attempt anywhere even to compute the probable dislocations

this flood of inexpensive energy would produce in human affairs.

The world in these days was not reallygoverned at all, in the

sense in which government came to be understoodin subsequent

years. Government was a treaty, not a design; it was forensic,

conservative, disputatious, unseeing, unthinking, uncreative;

throughout the world, except where the vestiges of absolutism

still sheltered the court favourite and the trusted servant, it

was in the hands of the predominant caste of lawyers, who had an

enormous advantage in beingthe only trained caste. Their

professional education and every circumstance in the manipulation

of the fantastically naive electoral methods by which they

clambered to power, conspired to keep them contemptuous of facts,

conscientiouslyunimaginative, alert to claim and seize

advantages and suspicious of every generosity. Government was an

obstructive business of energetic fractions, progress went on

outside of and in spite of public activities, and legislation was

the last crippling recognition of needs so clamorous and

imperative and facts so aggressively established as to invade

even the dingy seclusions of the judges and threaten the very

existenceof the otherwise inattentive political machine.

The world was so little governed that with the very coming of

plenty, in the full tide of an incalculable abundance, when

everything necessary to satisfyhuman needs and everything

necessary to realise such will and purpose as existedthen in

human hearts was already at hand, one has still to tell of

hardship, famine, anger, confusion, conflict, and incoherent

suffering. There was no scheme for the distribution of this vast