by P. D. Smith
Newton’s dream is to go far beyond what Röntgen achieved: ‘I would not rest until the physician should be able to see and examine any part of the human organism… as if he had the eye of the Creator.’ Like Mary Shelley’s Dr Frankenstein, Newton has Promethean ambitions: he dreams of ‘snatching from Nature the secret of life itself’. Newton becomes obsessed with this quest, shutting himself away from his family night and day in his laboratory, until finally the ultimate prize is within his grasp.36
H. G. Wells’s classic ‘scientific romance’ The Invisible Man was published the following year. Griffin, the archetypal mad scientist, denies that his discovery depends on ‘these Röntgen vibrations’. Nevertheless, in order to make objects transparent by lowering their ‘refractive index’, he exposes them to ‘two radiating centres of a sort of ethereal vibration’. In a period obsessed with mysterious rays, some form of radiation had to be involved in Wells’s fantastic scientific experiment. The chilling description of Griffin watching his body gradually disappear is imaginable only in an age of X-ray photography. Griffin briefly becomes a living X-ray photograph, before vanishing altogether.37
In ‘Röntgen’s Curse’, Newton exploits X-rays in an altogether different way. His great discovery is to invent a chemical that when dropped into the eye makes X-rays visible: ‘I was satisfied that I had made one of the most wonderful discoveries of modern times… I had in my grasp a talisman that would unlock for me the secrets of the universe. The fruit of the tree of knowledge hung within my reach. Ambition, desire, curiosity, tempted me. I must eat of it, even if the penalty were death, or worse.’38
But the moment Newton gazes on the world with X-ray vision he realizes that to see everything as if ‘with the Divine eye’ is truly terrible. Whatever he looks at, except metal, is now transparent to his gaze: ‘It was a ghastly and sickening sight to look down at my legs and body and see the bare bones of my own skeleton…’ But there is worse to come. As he sits down with his family for breakfast, the sight of them stripped of flesh threatens to drive him insane:
I was not ill, I was not mad. It was childish and foolish to be thus upset by the sight of the human frame. I reasoned with myself, and tried to conquer and overcome my disgust, but it was impossible. It was not merely that I saw my family in the form of skeletons sitting around me. The horror lay in the life of the skeletons. They were not like the dry bones in a museum of anatomy or in the valley of death. They looked fresh and clammy, and the skulls wagged and mouthed at me in a manner that made my skin creep with disgust to see them eating or pretending to eat, lifting the bony fingers to the gumless jaws, which they moved in the act of chewing.39
This delightfully farcical moment brings the reality and horror of modern science into the genteel Victorian dining room. The chilling memento mori of the X-ray intrudes into the heart of that most sacred nineteenth-century institution, the family. Having made the discovery of the century, Newton realizes that he cannot even tell his wife what he has achieved lest she feels ‘outraged and offended that I should see her thus’. The advance of science is nothing compared to the sense of propriety of a Victorian lady.40
Unable to reveal his triumph, Newton creeps dejectedly to his bed where gradually the effects of the chemical wear off. The scientist is forced to confront the result of his hubris. He has succeeded in making a real scientific discovery, but, unlike his illustrious namesake, Newton finds that he is not made of the ‘stuff of which the pioneers and heroes of science are made’. When, after several days, he recovers enough to leave his bed, Newton is almost relieved to find that his wife has cleared out his laboratory and converted it into a billiard room.41
At the end of the nineteenth century, writers and scientists alike dreamed of the godlike power that nature’s secrets would give them. But X-rays reminded people of their own mortality: they were not gods after all, but mere flesh and bone. ‘Röntgen’s Curse’ exposes the flip side of science. Newton is appalled by the remarkable power he discovers; he even gives his secret discovery away. Wells’s invisible man also finds his discovery has unexpected and tragic consequences: Griffin is corrupted by the desire for scientific power and dreams of a rule of terror over his fellow man. Ultimately, invisibility brings him nothing but an early and violent death.
Stories of scientists obsessed by the desire for knowledge, heedless of house and home, were not new. They begin with tales of medieval alchemists, the first searchers for forbidden natural knowledge. Chaucer’s Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale (1387) is one of the earliest. Chaucer’s alchemist is, we learn, ‘to wys, in feith, as I bileeve… For whan a man hath over-greet a wit, / Ful oft hym happeth to mys-usen it.’ This moral has travelled down the centuries, being found in the many versions of the story of Dr Faustus, a real sixteenth-century necromancer and all-round rogue, as well as in Mary Shelley’s classic study of scientific arrogance, Frankenstein (1818). Knowledge reveals many wonders, but, as Herbert Newton and Wells’s Invisible Man found to their cost, it is a fickle genie, one who can turn on his master without warning.
Like ‘Röntgen’s Curse’, Honoré de Balzac’s novel of extreme chemistry, Quest for the Absolute (1834), cautioned its bourgeois readers that the secrets of nature can be gained only at a high cost to the individual scientist. By the end of the century, H. G. Wells’s Island of Dr Moreau suggested that the price of such knowledge might be the scientist’s very humanity. As we shall see, from Dr Moreau to Dr Strangelove is but a small step.
The readers of popular magazines at the beginning of the twentieth century were enthralled by scientific stories such as ‘Röntgen’s Curse’. This appetite for scientific romances was encouraged first by the immensely popular adventures of Jules Verne and then by Wells’s short stories and novels, fictions which broadened the childhood horizons of Edward Teller, Leo Szilard and many others. In the pages of these journals, fact and fiction rubbed shoulders. Stories by Wells about fictional scientists might be printed in the same issue as a factual article about the miracle of X-ray photography or the next great scientific wonder. A public which had little scientific education was thrilled by tales of Promethean struggles in the laboratory, whether they were imagined or true. Science was hot news, and Röntgen and other scientists were heroes, modern-day wizards who held their audiences spellbound with the wonders of nature and who promised to conjure them a brave new technological future. Science was going to change the world.
4
Nature’s Secrets
The All-Master sealed a symbol of His might
Within a stone, and to a woman’s eye
Revealed the wonder. Lo, infinity
Wrapped in an atom – molecules of light
Outshining centuries! No mortal sight
May fathom in this grain the galaxy
Of suns, moons, planets, hurled unceasingly
Out of their glowing system into the night.
John Hall Ingham, ‘Radium’ (1904)
As the new century dawned, forecasters confidently predicted that an age of ‘universal progress’ was about to begin, with science and technology in the vanguard.1 The illustrated monthly magazines, which had revolutionized the reading habits of millions of ordinary people in Britain and America, were the heralds of this new age. The nineteenth century had been, to quote the populist Strand Magazine, ‘the century of Science writ largest’. Science had fathered inventions which had utterly transformed society: ‘railways and steamships, telegraphs and telephones, electric lighting and traction, the phonograph and the motor-car, Röntgen’s rays and Marconi’s messages’. No one could doubt that the twentieth century would more than match this ‘record of the marvellous’.2
Of course, not everyone was happy with this brave new world. In 1907 one American commentator complained bitterly that ‘the scientific spirit seems now to dominate everything. The world in future is to be governed from the laboratory.’3 But this was a minority view. W. J. Wintle, writing in the Harmsworth Magazine, asked: ‘Will the world be better and
happier in the new century?’ His answer was ‘unquestionably in the affirmative’ because ‘[s]cientific progress tends to moral advancement’.4 The mechanized slaughter of World War I would show just how little progress had been made in the field of morality. But thirteen years before this war to end wars broke out, the Harmsworth could still beguile its readers with the technological wonders of tomorrow’s world.
Mr Wintle thought that by ‘the end of the twentieth century the man in the street’ would look back on 1901 and ‘wonder how his ancestors could have existed with such a lack of the conveniences to which he himself is accustomed’. Wintle confidently predicted that wireless pocket telegraphy would mean that businessmen were never out of touch with the office, even when in the restaurant. The ‘electroscope’ would enable people ‘to watch a scene at a distance of hundreds of miles’. It scarcely needed to be said that this invention would be must-have technology for ‘busy men, who cannot attend the races’. In the field of war, Wintle anticipated that electric machine guns firing bullets at a rate of 3,000 a minute and mines detonated remotely by ‘Hertzian waves’ would revolutionize combat.5 Mobile phones, television, and radio-controlled bombs – Wintle’s predictions were not so far off the mark.
Whereas steam had driven the industrialized nineteenth century, it was clear by 1901 that electricity would be the energy of the twentieth. As Wintle put it, ‘electricity is the secret of progress’.6 Electric light was still something of a novelty. Albert Einstein was born in 1879, the year the incandescent light bulb was independently invented by Edison and Joseph Swan. In 1901, when a reporter visited Swan, he observed enviously that ‘electricity was much in evidence in Mr Swan’s own house; everywhere electric lights and bells’.7
The Einstein family business, run by the young physicist’s father and uncle, was in the vanguard of the energy revolution, designing electricity supply systems and other electro-technologies. Based as they were in Munich, their firm had the honour of supplying the first electric lighting to that great Bavarian cultural event, the Oktoberfest, though Einstein himself took a dim view of beer-drinking. The Einsteins were not alone in trying to exploit the potential of this new power. More than five hundred inventions a week were registered at the British Patent Office in the first year of the new century.
Illustration for W. J. Wintle’s 1901 article ‘Life in Our New Century’. The caption read: ‘The coming of the airship will necessitate roof stations. This is our artist’s suggestion for one at the Mansion House Corner, London.’
H. G. Wells’s story ‘Lord of the Dynamos’ (1895) depicts electricity as the power behind the modern mechanized metropolis. The electric dynamos in the story were futuristic gods whose power could be used for good or evil, like all scientific advances. In 1900 the historian Henry Adams toured the Exposition Universelle in Paris. For Adams, born in 1838, the dynamo was as mysterious as religion, an ‘occult mechanism’ beyond his comprehension. The connection between ‘steam and the electric current’ was no more graspable to him than that between the ‘Cross and the cathedral’. The forty-foot-high dynamos on show at this world fair in the French capital were the embodiment of ‘silent and infinite force’: ‘Among the thousand symbols of ultimate energy, the dynamo was not so human as some, but it was the most expressive.’8
The English aristocrat and novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton was equally enthralled by electricity. In his 1871 Darwinist fantasy, The Coming Race, an American engineer stumbles across a subterranean civilization while exploring a deep mine. The beautiful yet ruthless people he discovers have created an aristocratic utopia using the power of an inexhaustible energy called vril. This energy flows through all matter and combines the properties of electricity and magnetism as well as mental energy. The people are called Vril-ya after their miraculous energy. It even gives them the ability to read minds and control inanimate matter at will.
The Vril-ya use this energy to give life to humanoid machines – robots. With their mechanical, vril-powered wings, these tall, sphinxlike beings are unmistakably angelic. This utopian society has abolished war, crime and envy. Yet, true to evolutionary principles, the Vril-ya are merciless towards neighbouring, less advanced peoples. They regard our surface-dwelling species as uncivilized and believe it is their destiny to eliminate us and take control of the earth.
Vril is a truly awe-inspiring energy source, and humans would have stood no chance on the battlefield, at least in the 1870s. The narrator describes ‘tubes’ of vril that could be fired at any object up to six hundred miles away. These missiles could, says the narrator, ‘reduce to ashes within a space of time too short for me to venture to specify it, a capital twice as vast as London’. The ‘terrible force of vril’ can also be directed using a ‘Vril Staff’ in the form of an energy beam. Its power reduces bodies to ‘a blackened, charred, smouldering mass… rapidly crumbling into dust and ashes’.9
The overwhelming power of vril brings ‘the art of destruction to such perfection’ that no army can stand against it and win. For this reason, the ‘age of war’ has ended for the Vril-ya, who realized that a war between two armies equipped with this force could result only in mutual annihilation. The force of the Vril Staff could also be modified, ‘so that by one process it destroys, by another it heals’. The ‘life-giving’ force of vril has enabled these people to live well beyond a human lifespan and to banish disease.10
Bulwer-Lytton’s popular novel raised an immensely influential idea that was to take hold in the following century: that the discovery of an inexhaustible energy source would transform society into a utopia. The super-energy would produce superweapons so destructive that war would be redundant. Economic prosperity, social harmony, long life, good health and peace – all would flow from the new energy source. For Bulwer-Lytton, writing in the shadow of Darwin, it was an evolutionary step that would lead to the emergence of a super-race.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton was inspired by electricity to dream up vril. Its miraculous properties would be attributed first to radium and later to atomic energy. From its medical benefits to its destructive power, radium was soon heralded as the energy source that would transform society. Indeed, some even claimed that Bulwer-Lytton had predicted its discovery.11 Today the name vril still lives on, although not in quite the way Bulwer-Lytton might have wanted. It was hijacked by John Lawson Johnston, from Scotland, who wanted a catchy name for his new invention, ‘fluid beef’, which he decided to call Bovril.
These days, scarcely a week passes without a news story about a new application of genetics that promises to save lives. Similarly, at the turn of the century, reports about scientific advances that would lead to cheap and limitless energy beguiled readers many of whose homes were still lit by gaslight. One report told how the ‘worldrenowned’ French chemist Marcelin Berthelot had pinned his hopes for ‘limitless energy’ on exploiting the heat at the centre of the earth: ‘We shall find in this heat the support of all life and all industry.’12 In 1899, one of the strangest of such schemes, based on the novel qualities of ‘liquid air’, was hailed by the press as a revolution. New York inventor Charles E. Tripler astounded a reporter from McClure’s by reducing ‘the air of his laboratory to a clear, sparkling liquid that boils on ice, freezes pure alcohol, and burns steel like tissue paper’.
Air forms a liquid at 196°C, and its constituent gases begin to boil at temperatures just above this. With his patented machine for producing large quantities of liquid air, Tripler claimed to be able to run an engine on nothing but thin air. The initially sceptical reporter watched as Tripler poured his liquid air into the engine. His eyes widened as within seconds the piston began to pump vigorously, driving the flywheel: ‘the little engine stood there in the middle of the room running apparently without motive power, making no noise and giving out no heat or smoke, and producing no ashes’.13
It was indeed an ‘almost inconceivable marvel’, and Tripler confidently predicted that coal and wood would soon be redundant as fuels. As he reasonably poin
ted out, ‘air is the cheapest material in the world’. Still more revolutionary was his claim to be able to create more liquid air with his machine than it took to power the engine. That meant he had discovered the holy grail of energy: a way of generating free power.
Charles Tripler’s vision of boilerless ocean liners and locomotives running on nothing but air had investors and eternal optimists flocking to his door. A stock company valued at $20 million was soon formed to put the discovery to commercial use. Utopia was just around the corner, or so they thought. Of course, Tripler never managed to create free energy, and his idea joined all the other perpetual motion machines on the scrapheap of science.14
At the same time as Tripler was beguiling American investors with an energy source that defied the laws of thermodynamics, another, rather more promising discovery was being made in Paris: the mysteriously glowing element radium. Sir William Crookes, inventor of the tube that led to the discovery of X-rays, was not one to be taken in by outlandish tales of perpetual motion. But even he was willing to admit in 1901 that radium was a whole new ballgame. The dapper Sir William, sporting an immaculately trimmed white goatee and finely twirled mustachios, told a journalist that ‘as an example of seemingly continuous energy – something of which we had previously no conception – who can tell of what fresh achievement it may be the forerunner?’15
