To Frederick Soddy’s Interpretation of Radium this story which owes long passages to his eleventh chapter acknowledges and inscribes itself...

The World Set Free was written in 1913 and published early in 1914, and it is the latest of a series of three fantasias of possibility, stories which all turn on the possible developments in the futur...

The history of mankind is the history of the attainment of external power. Man is the tool-using, fire-making animal. From the outset of his terrestrial career we find him supplementing the natural st...

The history of mankind is the history of the attainment of external power. Man is the tool-using, fire-making animal. From the outset of his terrestrial career we find him supplementing the natural st...

That dream was but a moment in a man’s life, whose proper business it seemed was to get food and kill his fellows and beget after the manner of all that belongs to the fellowship of the beasts. About ...

Such a man was that Leonardo da Vinci, who went about the court of Sforza in Milan in a state of dignified abstraction. His commonplace books are full of prophetic subtlety and ingenious anticipations...

The latent energy of coal and the power of steam waited long on the verge of discovery, before they began to influence human lives. There were no doubt many such devices as Hero’s toys, devised and fo...

Electricity, though it was perhaps the earlier of the two to be studied, invaded the common life of men a few decades after the exploitation of steam. To electricity also, in spite of its provocative ...

And there was an extraordinary mental resistance to discovery and invention for at least a hundred years after the scientific revolution had begun. Each new thing made its way into practice against a ...

At the close of the nineteenth century as a multitude of passages in the literature of that time witness, it was thought that the fact that man had at last had successful and profitable dealings with ...

And while the boy Holsten was mooning over his fireflies at Fiesole, a certain professor of physics named Rufus was giving a course of afternoon lectures upon Radium and Radioactivity in Edinburgh. Th...

The problem which was already being mooted by such scientific men as Ramsay, Rutherford, and Soddy, in the very beginning of the twentieth century, the problem of inducing radioactivity in the heavier...

The problem which was already being mooted by such scientific men as Ramsay, Rutherford, and Soddy, in the very beginning of the twentieth century, the problem of inducing radioactivity in the heavier...

In the evening Holsten went out again. He walked to Saint Paul’s Cathedral, and stood for a time near the door listening to the evening service. The candles upon the altar reminded him in some odd way...

Holsten, before he died, was destined to see atomic energy dominating every other source of power, but for some years yet a vast network of difficulties in detail and application kept the new discover...

There was a certain truth in Holsten’s assertion that the law was “hundreds of years old.” It was, in relation to current thought and widely accepted ideas, an archaic thing. While almost all the mate...

Frederick Barnet’s Wander Jahre is one of those autobiographical novels that were popular throughout the third and fourth decades of the twentieth century. It was published in 1970, and one must under...

Barnet welcomed the appearance of the atomic engine with the zest of masculine youth in all fresh machinery, and it is evident that for some time he failed to connect the rush of wonderful new possibi...

And then the story tells, with an engaging simplicity, of his descent from this ecstatic vision of reality. “Presently I found myself again, and I was beginning to feel cold and a little hungry.” He b...

A day or so later⁠—and again his freedom to go as he pleased upon the roads may be taken as a mark of increasing social disorganisation and police embarrassment⁠—he wandered out into the open country....

Viewed from the standpoint of a sane and ambitious social order, it is difficult to understand, and it would be tedious to follow, the motives that plunged mankind into the war that fills the historie...

Viewed from the standpoint of a sane and ambitious social order, it is difficult to understand, and it would be tedious to follow, the motives that plunged mankind into the war that fills the historie...

The plan of campaign of the allies assigned the defence of the lower Meuse to the English, and the troop-trains were run direct from the various British depots to the points in the Ardennes where they...

When the rather brutish young aviator with the bullet head and the black hair cropped “en brosse” who was in charge of the French special scientific corps, heard presently of this disaster to the War ...

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 ...

A recent historical writer has described the world of that time as one that “believed in established words and was invincibly blind to the obvious in things.” Certainly it seems now that nothing could...

But let us return to Frederick Barnet’s Wander Jahre and its account of the experiences of a common man during the war time. While these terrific disclosures of scientific possibility were happening i...

But as yet Barnet had seen no more than the mildest beginnings of modern warfare. So far he had taken part only in a little shooting. The bayonet attack by which the advanced line was broken was made ...

“We had cursed our luck,” says Barnet, “that we could not get to our quarters at Alkmaar that night. There, we were told, were provisions, tobacco, and everything for which we craved. But the main can...

Morning found Barnet still afloat. The bows of his barge had been badly strained, and his men were pumping or baling in relays. He had got about a dozen half-drowned people aboard whose boat had capsi...

But now our history must part company with Frederick Barnet and his barge-load of hungry and starving men. For a time in western Europe at least it was indeed as if civilisation had come to a final co...

On the mountainside above the town of Brissago and commanding two long stretches of Lake Maggiore, looking eastward to Bellinzona, and southward to Luino, there is a shelf of grass meadows which is ve...

On the mountainside above the town of Brissago and commanding two long stretches of Lake Maggiore, looking eastward to Bellinzona, and southward to Luino, there is a shelf of grass meadows which is ve...

And one at least of those who were called to this conference of governments came to it on foot. This was King Egbert, the young king of the most venerable kingdom in Europe. He was a rebel, and had al...

That conference upon the Brissago meadows was one of the most heterogeneous collections of prominent people that has ever met together. Principalities and powers, stripped and shattered until all thei...

So it was King Egbert talked at Brissago after they had proclaimed the unity of the world. Every evening after that the assembly dined together and talked at their ease and grew accustomed to each oth...

The establishment of the new order that was thus so humanly begun, was, if one measures it by the standard of any preceding age, a rapid progress. The fighting spirit of the world was exhausted. Only ...

One single monarch held out against the general acquiescence in the new rule, and that was that strange survival of medievalism, the “Slavic Fox,” the King of the Balkans. He debated and delayed his s...

The Slavic fox stood upon a metal balcony in his picturesque Art Nouveau palace that gave upon the precipice that overhung his bright little capital, and beside him stood Pestovitch, grizzled and cunn...

It was still quite dark when his valet and Firmin came together and told the ex-king Egbert that the business was settled. He started up into a sitting position on the side of his bed. “Did he go out?...

The task that lay before the Assembly of Brissago, viewed as we may view it now from the clarifying standpoint of things accomplished, was in its broad issues a simple one. Essentially it was to place...

The task that lay before the Assembly of Brissago, viewed as we may view it now from the clarifying standpoint of things accomplished, was in its broad issues a simple one. Essentially it was to place...

This assembly was no leap of exceptional minds and super-intelligences into the control of affairs. It was teachable, its members trailed ideas with them to the gathering, but these were the consequen...

The state of mind of the dispossessed urban population which swarmed and perished so abundantly over the countryside during the dark days of the autumnal months that followed the Last War, was one of ...

This effect of chill dismay, of a doom as yet imperfectly apprehended deepens as Barnet’s record passes on to tell of the approach of winter. It was too much for the great mass of those unwilling and ...

From the first the new government handled affairs with a certain greatness of spirit. Indeed, it was inevitable that they should act greatly. From the first they had to see the round globe as one prob...

It is characteristic of the manner in which large enterprises forced themselves upon the Brissago council, that it was not until the end of the first year of their administration and then only with ex...

As the Brissago council came to realise that what it had supposed to be temporary camps of refugees were rapidly developing into great towns of a new type and that it was remoulding the world in spite...

The early years of the World Republic witnessed a certain recrudescence of political adventure. There was, it is rather curious to note, no revival of separatism after the face of King Ferdinand Charl...

It is doubtful if we shall ever see again a phase of human existence in which “politics,” that is to say a partisan interference with the ruling sanities of the world, will be the dominant interest am...

Now all this phase of gigantic change in the contours and appearances of human life which is going on about us, a change as rapid and as wonderful as the swift ripening of adolescence to manhood after...

As things round themselves off and accomplish themselves, one begins for the first time to see them clearly. From the perspectives of a new age one can look back upon the great and widening stream of ...

The second operation upon Marcus Karenin was performed at the new station for surgical work at Paran, high in the Himalayas above the Sutlej gorge, where it comes down out of Tibet. It is a place of s...

The second operation upon Marcus Karenin was performed at the new station for surgical work at Paran, high in the Himalayas above the Sutlej gorge, where it comes down out of Tibet. It is a place of s...

Karenin lay on the bed with a soft white rug about him, and Fowler who was to be his surgeon sat on the edge of the bed and talked to him. An assistant was seated quietly in the shadow behind the bed....

The next morning Karenin got up early and watched the sun rise over the mountains, and breakfasted lightly, and then young Gardener, his secretary, came to consult him upon the spending of his day. Wo...

Presently, in accordance with his wish, people came to talk to him, and he could forget himself again. Rachel Borken sat for a long time with him and talked chiefly of women in the world, and with her...

“And yet it may be I am unjust to Bismarck,” said Karenin, following his own thoughts. “You see, men belong to their own age; we stand upon a common stock of thought, and we fancy we stand upon the gr...

About eleven Karenin had his midday meal, and afterwards he slept among his artificial furs and pillows for two hours. Then he awoke and some tea was brought to him, and he attended to a small difficu...

For a time Karenin said very little, and Kahn, the popular poet, talked of passionate love. He said that passionate, personal love had been the abiding desire of humanity since ever humanity had begun...

“These questions are the next questions to which research will bring us answers,” said Karenin. “While we sit here and talk idly and inexactly of what is needed and what may be, there are hundreds of ...

As the evening drew on Karenin and those who were about him went up upon the roof of the buildings, so that they might the better watch the sunset and the flushing of the mountains and the coming of t...

Karenin desired that he might dream alone for a little while before he returned to the cell in which he was to sleep. He was given relief for a pain that began to trouble him and wrapped warmly about ...