Cavorite Sphere Versus Martian Gun

[Bayne]

[glow=red,2,300]In The First Men In The Moon, Wells takes a very different approach to space travel. Was he trying to avoid comparison with Verne? If so, why have the Martians using a big gun for space travel?[/glow]

[Omega2064]

Perhaps he was trying not to repeat or over-use a concept. Used once, and only in a brief mention, the martian gun is fine. And a "cavorite" means to get the Martians to earth might have easily made them look too "magical" instead of technological. Aside from the heat ray, most of the Martian powers were at least semi re-creatable with the technology of the time.

And having the cylinders come down like meteors allowes for a slow build of suspense and curiosity whereas a cavorite sphere would have produced a more UFO/Day the Earth Stood Still type sensation.

I do think he was trying to avoid comparison to Verne too. It would have looked bad to ape another author, especially when trying to write serious books and trying to build a reputation for oneself.

Omega2064

[David Faltskog]

Those Cavorite sphere's would have made an imo excellent way for victorian man to reek his vengance on those pesky martians.

Perhaps they could be used in a follow-up sequel to the War of the Worlds,like the Time Ships novel by stephen baxter.

"Across the Globe,on every Continent as the hands of the clock struck twelve,the mighty armada of Cavorite Spheres rose as one into the sky...Their mission to destroy the martian threat of another invasion of earth forever".

Ahem...B-B.

[Geis]

> Aside from the heat ray, most of the Martian powers were > at least semi re-creatable with the technology of the time.

At the time, Nicola Tesla was vaporizing metals with high frequency currents in what was called a "carbon-button lamp." Some of his other high-energy projects were producing focused radio waves, x-rays and directional microwaves. I seem to recall him doing a presentation before the Royal Academy at the turn of the Century which involved coherent light. "But this is just a toy", he said "this is what I really wanted to show you" and then went on to present his work on the wireless transmission of electricity.

Had he the funding and inclination to follow up on his coherent light toy, he might have invented the laser or microwave cannon by the start of the First World War.

[kingofthemorlocks]

Ahhh, good ol' Tesla...every time I see wireless Internet advertised, or cell phones, I think of him.

[Gnorn]

It would be impossible for a 'zuzzooing' scientist to single-handly build a gun as big as Verne's. Also, Verne's novels are very scientific, describing painstakingly every bit of detail. Wells' science was used to propel the story. The First Men in the Moon, wasn't so much about the sphere and it's technology, as it was a novel about the Victorians coming into contact with the Selenites. He just needed a 'simple' mode of transportation to get in the moon. Anywho, that's my opinion.

-Gnorn

[Geis]

> It would be impossible for a 'zuzzooing' scientist to single-handly build a gun as big as Verne's.

Maybe not one 'zuzzooing' scientist but the Gun Club of Baltimore, MD built the Columbiad in "From the Earth to the Moon" Pretty impressive for a bunch of bored artillerists looking for something to blow up after the end of the Civil War put them out of work.

"From the Earth to the Moon" by Jules Verne (1865)
vesuvius.jsc.nasa.gov/er/seh/index1.htm

[mekanik89]

The book is about a cavorite for one reason only:

Wells was a narator of Current events. he wrote the war of the worlds becasue Earth was in allignment with mars.

He wrote about cavorite becasue Hydrogen, a lighter than air substance had just been discovered.

Oliver

[Topaz]

Cavorite also allows the plot device of Cavor working largely alone. The Moon is lost forever to Bedford once Cavor and the sphere are lost.

If it'd had been a gun, it would've required a large group - as in Verne's book - and would have allowed us to go back.

[Zoe]

mekanik89 said:

The book is about a cavorite for one reason only:

Wells was a narator of Current events. he wrote the war of the worlds becasue Earth was in allignment with mars.

He wrote about cavorite becasue Hydrogen, a lighter than air substance had just been discovered.

Oliver

I'll stand corrected but I think you probably meant to say 'Helium' rather than Hydrogen.... which I believe was discovered by Henry Cavendish in 1766 or thereabouts.... Helium was discovered about a hundred years later and would be a topic of discussion in most scientific circles around the time Wells was writing his book..... I seem to remember Helium featured in TFMITM as an ingredient of Cavorite and the final stage of the process involved a stream of Helium - something that had not yet been achieved I believe because the actual production of Helium in any quantity was not achieved until the twentieth century.

I'm not sure that I really believe your connection with a lighter than air gas as hydrogen balloons and airships had been around for years.... decades Wells himself wrote about airships..... As did Verne, somewhat scathingly. I think 'lighter than air' was thought of as old-fashioned and out of date..... Hardly the thing to connect with space flight.....

Jules Verne ranted about Cavorite "I get my voyagers to the Moon with gun cotten - something you can buy in any store and Mr Wells uses a totally mythical substance! Pah! Where is this Cavorite! Let him produce it!"

Cavorite violates the principle of conservation of energy of course..... Also later SF writers including Asimov and Clark have shown how even if it had worked the cavorite sphere would not just have flown to the moon..... it would have punched a hole through it at the speed of light..... and vaourised Cavor and Bedford in the same instant!

For me, Cavorite is simply a magical substance..... like the philosopher's stone or Flubber.... You know it wouldn't work.... I know it wouldn't work..... HG Wells knew it wouldn't work but hey! It was just a McGuffin to get them to the moon.

The obvious reason for NOT using a gun to fire the dynamic duo to the moon is that he had to get them back! So what else could they use?

Another constraint on Wells as a writer was that the way to get to the moon had to be a secret that could be lost. A gun or even a rocket could be duplicated. Wells wanted to avoid anyone else being able to go to the moon because the plot called for Cavor to be left behind and for the Selenites to keep him there because they did not want the secret of Cavorite to be rediscovered. First and foremost Wells was a writer of social comment. Science served only as a kind of magic to move on the story. In this way he was little different from previous satirical writers such as Lucian or Cyrano De Bergerac or Swift - or Utopian writers such as Bacon or Thomas Moore or Plato . The centrepiece of TFMITM was description of the lunar society and the comparison with Earth - to our detriment. Wells knew only too well that if Cavor had communicated the secret of his invention that squadrons of Cavorite spheres would have followed - not only to rescue Cavor but to colonise the moon too.

Wells was writing against Imperialism in both TWOTW and TFMITM. In the first the Martians are like the British stamping their footprint all over the earth with no regard for those they perceive as inferior. In the second he shows that it is not just large corporations and governments that are responsible for such attrocities. Cavor, a naive scientist and Bedford a bankcrupt opportunist have as if by magic a means to exploit the moon and proceed to do so. Even Cavor is talking about the mineral resources they will find there. It would be inevitable that had they exploited the invention of Cavorite then they would have got rich raping the moon just as mankind was even then raping the earth. It is not really a 'scientific' story at all. It is a similar theme as The Man Who Could Work Miracles. Wells's message is that if any one of was given a magical powers - the power to work miracles, invisibility, or a 'Cavorite' like substance we would probably behave just as abominably as Clive of India or Sadam Hussein or even Adolf Hitler not because we have the power but because we can't help ourselves, we are human, it's our job.

Zoe

[Xav]

Zoe....a splendid contribution...but as a Guest? Surely you must rank as a "Senior'...but, hopefully, never a Moderator.
Wells was a wonderful social commentator. He was left, egalitarian, Modern State, an irritant and thoroughly humanistic.
Although he wrapped up his social comment in fantasy, i am sure he revelled in doing so. Some of his stories were so tongue in cheek....like 'The Stolen Bacillus' others, such as the 'War of the Worlds' were very very different and had little comment about the world other than to point out that 'To them and not to us is the future ordained'.
I suppose that is comment enough.

[Lensman]

Zoe had some good points, but I think the most important reason Wells didn't use something like Cavorite to get his Martians to Earth was the point of view of the novel. The First Men in the Moon is written from a viewpoint which allows the author to convey to the reader the method, the invention which allowed space flight. OTOH in WotW it's the Martians who have the superior technology, and there was no communication between the Martians and humans. Therefore there was no convenient way for the author to say "this is what they invented for space travel, and this is how it works." The method the Martians used had to be something the Narrator and/or the reader could figure out from observation.

Imagine, if you will, TFMitM written from the viewpoint of a Selenite. He'd have to say "Well one day these strange creatures from Earth showed up in this strange sphere, and we don't know how it got here." The reader would be a bit teed off at the author for not explaining anything, now wouldn't he?

[Bayne]

[glow=red,2,300]In the film version of Things to Come (Haven't read the orig. yet) the Space Gun is described as being a series of guns, set inide each other, that fire sequentially..
[/glow]

[mctoddridesagain]

Bayne said:

[glow=red,2,300]In the film version of Things to Come (Haven't read the orig. yet) the Space Gun is described as being a series of guns, set inside each other, that fire sequentially..
[/glow]

The Space Gun does not appear in any form whatsoever in ‘The Shape of Things to Come’, only in the film (and the treatment of the film). I discovered that directly as a kid when I’d seen stills from the film (the film having not been shown on TV, and this being the early days of video when a copy of TTC cost £35! Probably equivalent to £100 or so now), and got the book (or, rather, TSOTTC) to read about the Space Gun – ploughed the whole way through and found there was feck-all Space Gun shenanigans!

Although the script, and subsequent treatment, by Wells describes the ‘nested gun’ (I think it’s even described as such by the old man to his little granddaughter in the scene showing future widescreen TV as the old boy reminisces about how cack the old days were) the actual gun as it appears does not operate in such a way. The barrel is one huge, thick-walled mass (with a Colt revolver-style sighting nodule at the muzzle!) with a fairly bog-standard projectile being loaded at the muzzle (cue dramatic music as the huge crane sloooooowly lowers the projectile into the barrel).

I think the nested barrels was Wells’s way to try to make the gun seem more practicable, just a bit of flim-flammery, as even in the mid 1930s people knew the idea of a Space Gun in the Jules Verne mould was nonsense. As it was, upon release the BIS derided the gun. They missed the point which is that Wells deliberately wanted to use a gun metaphorically. After all those scenes of war, with shot after shot of AA guns pointing straight up into the sky blasting away, how better to show swords being beaten into ploughshares than with a whacking great gun pointing straight up into the sky, but this time, for peaceful exploration of the cosmos?

[mctoddridesagain]

Gnorn said:

It would be impossible for a 'zuzzooing' scientist to single-handly build a gun as big as Verne's. Also, Verne's novels are very scientific, describing painstakingly every bit of detail. Wells' science was used to propel the story. The First Men in the Moon, wasn't so much about the sphere and it's technology, as it was a novel about the Victorians coming into contact with the Selenites. He just needed a 'simple' mode of transportation to get in the moon. Anywho, that's my opinion.-Gnorn

You’ve hit the nail on the head there, Gnorn. Wells’s purposes in each novel are entirely different. In WotW (written, don’t forget, some time before FMITM, in 1896) Wells wanted realism, documentary-style, to convey the horror and irony of the Martian invasion. In 1896 no-one was thinking about rockets for space travel (apart from Tsiolkovsky, and he was just a school teacher in Russia, no-one had heard of him yet) so the gun, which is suitably vague, was the most technologically realistic way of getting the Martians here.

By 1901, and the First Men in the Moon, Wells’s agenda was completely different. He was solely interested in describing the Selenite society, as by this stage his interests had shifted entirely to the sociological and political. Cavorite is merely a literary device to get his protagonists to the moon. Of course, Wells being Wells, he wrote about it beautifully, and made it seem half-plausible, but he didn’t take it seriously. Jules Verne himself completely missed the point in an interview shortly before his death. When asked about Wells, Verne professed to admire him, but also criticised the Englishman for impossible inventions like cavorite: “Where is this gravity-repelling metal? Let him show it to me.”

[Lensman]

McToddRidesAgain said:

In 1896 no-one was thinking about rockets for space travel (apart from Tsiolkovsky, and he was just a school teacher in Russia, no-one had heard of him yet) so the gun, which is suitably vague, was the most technologically realistic way of getting the Martians here.

Certainly the idea of using rockets for interplanetary travel wasn't widespread at the time, but John Munro's A Trip to Venus (1897) used multi-stage, liquid fuel rockets.

Konstantin Tsiolkovsky published the idea of space ships operating by jet propulsion as early as 1883 in the chapbook "Free Space," altho his classic treatment "The Probing of Space by Means of Jet Devices," specifying multi-stage liquid fuel rockets, wasn't published until 1903. (All preceding info per The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction by Clute & Nicholls.)

Wells can hardly be blamed for not being aware of the idea. Even if he had been, I question that he would have used it. Since the idea wasn't widespread, he would have had to spend some time explaining it to his readers. Verne's From the Earth to the Moon had been around long enuff, and was well enuff known, that it was reasonable to expect his readers to be familiar with that means of space travel.

[mctoddridesagain]

True, Wells can be forgiven for his space gun for those reasons.

But I quibble about Tsiolkovsky and Munro. Tsiolkovsky, for some years, was an obscure Russian school teacher, and I doubt that any work of his was published in English before 1896. As for Munro, his book appeared in 1897, but Wells was writing WotW in 1896 (and even if Wells had read it before the novelisation was published in 1898, why should he have used an idea from only one of many Victorian hacks?). In any case, Jess Nevins (who is fanatical about 19th century science fiction), states:

A Trip to Venus isn't particularly notable or memorable for its literary qualities, but it does contain some discussion of multistage rockets, space stations, the use of parachutes in planetary landings, and multigeneration space travel, although none of these concepts are used in the plot itself.

The ship Munro actually describes, and which his heroes use, is a submarine-like vessel propelled by that hoary old Victorian standby, the 'mysterious new force'.

In any case, if one wishes to ponder the widespread, or otherwise, knowledge of multistage rockets, one has only to remember that Congreve, early in the nineteenth century, had dabbled with multistage rockets for the British Army, so someone, somewhere, knew the principles at some point.

Wells was a genius, but to expect him to draw together every aspect of every topic he touches upon, and then get the engineering right, is asking too much. If he was that much of a technical genius he'd have been inventing the aeroplane or space rocket, not inventing modern science fiction.

[Lensman]

Thanx for the info, and the corrections, McTodd. One should always be wary of relying on encyclopedias for information... sometimes the info is condensed so much it's misleading.

According to
www.informatics.org/museum/tsiol.html
"Free Space" was a "manuscript of Tsiolkovsky, first published in 1956." This directly contradicts the SF Encyclopedia. Also according to that website, the pictures posted make it clear his publications were in Russian, not English. Since the titles were given in English, I wasn't sure which was the actual language of publication. (For non-English publications, the SF Encyclopedia usually gives the original title, followed by the English translation.)

McToddRidesAgain said:

if one wishes to ponder the widespread, or otherwise, knowledge of multistage rockets, one has only to remember that Congreve, early in the nineteenth century, had dabbled with multistage rockets for the British Army, so someone, somewhere, knew the principles at some point.

The Congreve Rocket, as used by the British army, was a solid fuel rocket. I would guess that Congreve's experiments were with solid fuel rockets. So far as I know, Goddard was the first to experiment with liquid fuel rockets. Solid fuel rockets aren't appropriate for manned flight, as they cannot be throttled or shut off. (The Space Shuttle uses solid boosters, but only for the first stage of ascent, and even there they are just auxiliary propulsion.)

At any rate, I think we're agreed that the notion of multi-stage, liquid fueled rockets was so obscure at the time that Wells can hardly be faulted for not using the idea in WotW.

[mctoddridesagain]

Aye, though I don't know when Tsiolkovsky was translated (I have a book about the origins of Soviet rocketry but it's at my parents' - d'oh!). Probably not that long after the start of the 20th century, as I'm sure I've read that Oberth and others were influenced by him (mind, all that shows is that he was translated into German).

But by 1935 and the Space Gun of 'Things to Come', Wells should have known better (though it's probable that Wells was making a metaphorical point with it).

Yes, Congreve's rockets were solid fuel, but they do at least show that someone had thought about staging. Of course, Tsiolkovsky was the first person to demonstrate systematically that liquid fuels were the best bet for space flight.

But such knowledge was either not yet available or was so obscure that, as you say, one can hardly blame old Herbert. And let's not forget how busy he was then - 1895-1898 see him producing something like 5 scientific romances and around two dozen short stories!

[Lensman]

It's been so long since I've read The Shape of Things to Come that I'd forgotten the "space gun" was only in the movie version. McTodd, I think you are very perceptive to suggest the space gun was a metaphor paralleling "beating swords into plowshares." Symbolism like that often whizzes by well over my head.