Bad day at Grover’s Mill
In 1938, Orson Welles produced a version of HG Wells’ The War of the Worlds (no relation), for an American radio station. His company, the Mercury Theatre, had already dramatized several books, including The Count of Monte Cristo and Dracula, but now Welles decided on a new approach.
At that time, radio was still a powerful new medium. The big radio networks like CBS and NBC had only been around for about ten years. They were nervous and nervous times. Storm clouds were gathering over Europe, as Churchill said. Britain was less than a year away from the most desperate fight for survival in its long history, and most Americans felt that sooner or later they too would be involved.
Americans were getting used to the dramatic stories that unfolded on the radio. The first live broadcast from an actual war zone came in 1932, when a reporter brought the sounds of a real battle from Spain into people’s homes. Then there was the mystery of aviator Charles Lindbergh’s kidnapped son, which dragged on for several months. To this day there are some unanswered questions related to this case. In 1937, the fatal Hindenberg blimp crash occurred, described by Herbert Morrison of Chicago’s WLS station in a recording released the next day. “Oh, the flames, a hundred and twenty or five hundred feet in the sky, that’s a terrible shock, ladies and gentlemen. Smoke and flames now and the frame is crashing to the ground, not exactly the mooring post. Oh, the humanity and all passengers,” he says, before pausing for a few minutes, overwhelmed with horror.
It was at this nervous time that Orson Welles hit the US airwaves with his new production. Welles had brought the story up to date from its cozy late-Victorian English setting to contemporary New Jersey, presenting it as a series of increasingly apocalyptic news reports. Listeners who were about to listen to what they thought was a dance music program suddenly heard it interrupted by a report of several “glow gas” explosions on the planet Mars, followed, after a few more minutes of music, by a interview with a ‘professor’ at the Princeton Observatory, assuring everyone that there was nothing to worry about.
From here, the story gets wilder as reports of a Martian invasion in full swing begin to trickle in. The Martians had landed, for reasons they (and Welles) knew best, in the sleepy country village of Grovers Mill, and were fanning out toward New York City, spreading death and destruction as they went. . The realistic effect was enhanced by the use of genuine place names along the route.
The result was more initial than anyone, including Orson, could have anticipated. He just so happened that about half the audience tuned in late that night, so he missed the brief introduction, explaining that it was just a radio play they were listening to. Thousands of people panicked. Roads were blocked with people and cars. Some people hid in basements, others wrapped their heads in wet towels to escape the poison gas, some grabbed their guns and declared that they were going to help defend Grovers Mill.
Public services were saturated. A man called Bronx Police Headquarters and told the cop at the desk, “They’re bombing New Jersey!” “How do you know?” asked Patrolman Morrison. “I heard it on the radio. Then I went up on the roof and I could see the smoke from the bombs.”
It would be a cheap response to laugh at the unsophisticated reaction of those Americans, nearly seventy years ago, when they mistook science fiction for reality, but in those anxious days, who knew what might be possible? Welles later claimed that he had not intended to cause mass panic and that there is no reason not to believe him. Regardless, he must have known that he was tapping into a well-established fantasy.
The fascination with extraterrestrial activities goes back a long way if you think of the Greek gods as the first space travelers, and Icarus was one of the first fatalities when he flew too close to the sun on his wings of wax and feathers, having been warned. against her by her father, Daedalus. As we all know, the wax melted and fell into the sea…
Science fiction in its modern form began with Jules Verne and HG Wells. In From the Earth to the Moon, which was written as a sort of travelogue, Verne has his space capsule with its three-man crew fired at the moon from a cannon. This story influenced most of the original space pioneers. Although he was not as educated as HG Wells, he used actual engineering analysis to arrive at the design of his manned lunar cannon and missile, and by the time of the Apollo missions it was recognized that he made a number of correct engineering predictions.
Science fiction literature really took off in the ’50s and ’60s. CS Lewis wrote his ‘Interplanetary Trilogy’ in 1953; Travel to Venus, that horrible force and off the silent planet. These had a strong Christian and moral theme. Originally from Ireland, Lewis moved to England and eventually became a professor at Oxford, so it’s understandable that his fiction was a bit shaky on science. But he was an exception. Many science fiction writers of the time were scientists, engineers, or mathematicians, sometimes all three. Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov (I, Robot), and Arthur C. Clarke are just three of many that come to mind. Ray Bradbury is in a class by himself, for his beautifully crafted poetic images of lost and ruined civilizations on the Red Planet.
Today there is less distance between science fiction and science than before. Arthur C. Clarke is so respected in scientific circles that several craters on the moon are named after him. Many of Clarke’s ideas have been used by space engineers. For example, in 1963 he wrote a story called Windjammer, or The Wind from the Sun, in which space vehicles had enormously wide sails made of extremely thin material. The idea was that they would be propelled between the planets by ‘solar winds’, or the pressure of the sun. The rate of acceleration would be small, but a ship would eventually reach speeds close to the speed of light, using no fuel at all.
I read some time ago that the Russians took up the challenge and were building a spaceship based on Clarke’s idea. As I write, this vehicle just failed to launch, due to failure of the initial stage of the rocket, not the space wings themselves, but such is the interest in Clarke’s concept that programs are being prepared in the US. USA, Japan and Europe. .
Another of Arthur C. Clarke’s ideas was for a tower that extended into space, as a kind of docking point for spacecraft. This idea is also receiving serious consideration.
NASA’s entrepreneurial approach to space exploration from the 1960s onwards has taken some of the mystery out of local space travel and affected the popularity of science fiction literature. The emphasis has shifted to movies. Once again, Arthur C. Clarke led the way with the 2001 classic. Since then, we’ve had Star Wars, Close Encounters, ET, Alien, Independence Day, and of course Star Trek. I must also mention Contact, the book and film by Carl Sagan, a scientist and writer who left us too soon. He was largely responsible for NASA’s program to search for extraterrestrial radio signals. And now, to close the circle, we have a new version of The War of the Worlds…
Seventy years later, it is true that we could not be fooled by Welles’s radio soap opera, but technology advances at such a speed that we are no longer sure what is possible and what is not. Antimatter, antigravity, enchanted particles, alien abduction, go for it! The truth is out there. Personally, I wouldn’t be surprised when they discover a way to travel faster than the speed of light. Warp factor two, Mr. Sulu, and keep going until morning.
James DonaldsonCollins