In 1932, the blueprints for the atomic bomb were
handed directly to the British military. But
they don't come from some top secret physicist's
laboratory. No, they didn't. They actually came
from a science fiction novel, a novel written
decades earlier by a guy who had literally dropped
out of a miserable retail job. Right. It's wild.
Welcome to today's Deep Dive, everyone. We are
so thrilled to have you with us. Today, we've
got a fascinating stack of sources to go through.
It's an extensive biographical and historical
deep dive into a man you probably know as the
father of science fiction. And it forces you
to completely rethink what a novel can actually
do because we tend to view literature as a mirror
reflecting society. But here. The book was the
actual engine driving history forward. Exactly.
Our mission for this deep dive is to uncover
how a guy who wrote about the future didn't just
passively predict it. He actively engineered
the modern world that you and I are living in
right now. The sheer scale of his influence is
just staggering once you start connecting those
historical dots. You realize he wasn't just entertaining
people. He was planting seeds in the minds of
the exact people who would go on to build the
20th century. Yeah, you probably know him for
the War of the Worlds or like the Time Machine.
But what you might not know is that his writings
directly inspired the invention of the atomic
bomb or that his influence was so profound he
ended up on. literal Nazi hit list. The literal
hit list. Which is just crazy to think about
for a novelist. Okay let's unpack this. To understand
how Wells could so accurately see the future
we kind of have to start by looking at his past.
Because from what I'm reading in these sources
his origins were completely grounded in a really
miserable harsh reality. Far from it. I mean
his early life was anything but a utopian fantasy.
He was born in 1866 into a lower middle class
family in Kent and they were You know, constantly
hovering right on the edge of total poverty.
He wasn't born into some wealthy aristocratic
family of Victorian thinkers. Not at all. And
the defining moment of his childhood actually
happens when he's just eight years old. He breaks
his leg in a pretty severe accident. Which today
means a cast and playing some video games on
the couch for a few weeks. Right. But back then,
a broken leg meant he was entirely bedridden
for a very long time. He was just... immobilized.
So what did he do? Well, he was completely reliant
on his father to bring him books from the local
literary institute just to pass the time. And
for a young kid trapped in a tiny cramped room,
those books were his only way out. They were
an escape hatch. Exactly. They opened up entire
other worlds to him. It ignited this desperate
intellectual hunger that essentially defined
the rest of his life. But then history tragically
repeats itself, doesn't it? Because his father,
who actually made a portion of his living as
a professional cricketer, also breaks his leg
a few years later. Yeah, he breaks his thigh.
And that injury effectively ends his father's
career. And whatever tiny bit of financial stability
the family had is just gone. They are plunged
into severe poverty. So because they can't support
themselves, a young Wells is pulled out of school.
And he's forced into an apprenticeship as a draper.
Basically. He is thrust into the 19th century
equivalent of an exhausting dead end retail job.
It sounds incredibly soul crushing. I mean, he's
working 13 hour days, measuring clock, dealing
with customers, and then he has to sleep in a
crowded dormitory with all the other apprentices.
He was miserable. So how does a poor Draper's
apprentice with no money and literally no free
time end up getting his hands on the advanced
scientific texts that would define his whole
career? Well, his mother eventually takes a job
as a housekeeper at this grand country estate
called Up Park. And Up Park happens to have a
magnificent sprawling library. So Wells just
starts sneaking in there. Oh, wow. So he's just
reading on the sly. Yeah. He's reading Plato's
Republic. He's reading Thomas More's Utopia.
He's feeding that same intellectual hunger that
started with his broken leg. But now he's absorbing
high level philosophical and political theory.
And that self -education really pays off. because
he eventually wins a scholarship to the Normal
School of Science in London. But the fascinating
detail here is that he isn't studying literature
or creative writing. No, he's studying biology.
And he is studying it under Thomas Henry Huxley.
Huxley is a massive figure in scientific history.
Huge. He was famously known as Darwin's bulldog
for his really fierce public advocacy of Charles
Darwin's theory of evolution. So Wells is sitting
in Huxley's lecture halls, absorbing all the
mechanics of natural selection anatomy and just
the brutal realities of how species survive or
go extinct. Exactly. But even with that scholarship,
his daily life is a total grind. He's surviving
on a meager 21 shillings a week. Which is practically
nothing. Right. He is walking miles across London
every day because he literally can't afford a
tram ticket. He is suffering from constant malnutrition.
If you look at photos of him from this time,
he is just painfully, shockingly thin. So let
me ask you this. Did his specific training in
Darwinian biology, combined with that intense
physical struggle for his own survival, make
his later science fiction feel more visceral
and real compared to other fantasy writers at
the time? It absolutely did. And this raises
an important question about how our early environments
shape our adult philosophies. You know, Wells's
early exposure to extreme class divides, going
from the squalor of a draper's dormitory to the
grandeur of a park, combined with his strict
bylaw. training, it hardwired him. hardwired
him to view society differently. Yes. He viewed
human society through a very cold evolutionary
lens. He wasn't just dreaming up fantastical
creatures for the fun of it. He was looking at
humanity as a species and asking, well, how might
we adapt or fundamentally fail to adapt to changing
environments? He applied the brutal logic of
natural selection rate to modern human civilization.
And because his fiction was grounded in such
strict scientific logic, it required a totally
different approach to writing. His scientific
background didn't just give him themes to write
about. It gave him a very rigid, almost mechanical
framework for inventing a completely new genre
of storytelling. Right. He revolutionized speculative
fiction by inventing a structural rule that we
now literally call Welles's Law. Walk us through
Welles's Law. How does it actually work in practice?
So the rule is remarkably elegant. A story should
contain only a single extraordinary assumption.
one impossible thing. Just one. Just one. Maybe
it's a machine that travels through time or a
chemical formula that grants invisibility. But
everything else around that one impossible thing
must remain relentlessly ordinary, human, and
scientifically grounded. That makes so much sense.
He applied this masterfully to his first novella,
The Time Machine, which, by the way, he coined
the term time machine. Before him, people just
didn't use that phrase. They really didn't. But
when you read the book, the time traveler doesn't
step into some glowing magical portal in an enchanted
forest. Wells surrounds the impossible machine
with solid upper class Victorian comforts. The
scene is set in a normal drawing room with cigars,
ticking grandfather clocks and leather chairs.
Right. He even spends pages having the characters
debate the geometry of the fourth dimension before
the machine is ever turned on. He grounds the
reader's belief in the mundane physics of the
real world before he asks them to take the leak
into the fantastic. And he also used cutting
-edge science from the headlines of his day,
didn't he? He did. He incorporated the newly
discovered concept of radioactive decay into
his narratives. For the first man in the moon,
he drew directly on Nikola Tesla's highly publicized
claims that he had received radio signals from
Mars. Let me play devil's advocate here for a
second. Usually when you read fantasy, you want
to escape reality completely. You know, you want
sleeping space operas or magical realms. Why
does dragging mundane prosaic details into the
fantasy actually make it more terrifying? To
me, it feels kind of like a magic trick. What's
fascinating here is that the magic trick analogy
is the perfect way to understand the underlying
mechanism of his writing. Wells famously called
his technique the plausible impossible. Because
if the magician's sleeves look weird, your brain
immediately flags it as a trick, your threat
detection system goes off, and you start looking
for the hidden coin. But if the magician's sleeves
look perfectly normal... Your brain turns off
its logical defenses. Precisely. Wells bored
your brain's threat detection system with mundane
details about cigar smoke and parliamentary debates.
So by the time he introduces the time machine
or the Martian tripods, your logical defenses
are completely down. You accept the impossible
because the environment it exists in is undeniably
real. This bypassed the reader's natural skepticism,
which allowed his audience to accept deeply disturbing
concepts like the horrific biological engineering
in the island of Dr. Moreau. or the total apocalyptic
destruction of London in the War of the Worlds.
Exactly. He permanently burned these ideas into
the human psyche because he made them feel like
they were happening right outside the reader's
window. And because he grounded his fiction so
heavily in strict scientific and sociological
logic, the books eventually stopped being mere
entertainment. They evolved into terrifyingly
accurate prophecies. Scientists and politicians
actually started reading them not as fiction,
but as roadmaps. This is the era where Wells
transitions from a popular novelist into a Vatican
or prophetic futurist. His deep understanding
of the mechanics of technological progress allowed
him to mathematically where society was heading.
His track record is genuinely insane. I mean
we aren't just talking about vague psychic predictions
here. He foresaw the use of aircraft in warfare
long before airplanes were weaponized. He predicted
armored tanks, space travel. He wrote about satellite
television too. He even predicted a proto Wikipedia
which he called the world brain. The world brain.
That's such a brilliant example of how he extrapolated.
It really is. He didn't just guess that the internet
would exist. He looked at the early tech technologies
of microfilm and global telegraph networks. And
he logically deduced that eventually humanity
would find a way to continuously update and distribute
all of human knowledge to anyone, anywhere, at
any time. He saw the mechanics of early 20th
century communication and stretched them to their
ultimate conclusion. So when I pull my smartphone
out of my pocket to look up a fact, I am essentially
holding a piece of Wells's world brain. You are.
And he didn't stop at technology. He applied
that same predictive logic to geopolitical shifts.
In his 1933 book, The Shape of Things to Come,
he mapped out the rising tensions in Europe and
predicted that a second world war would begin
in January 1940. Wow, and he was off by what,
only four months? From the actual start of the
war in September 1939? Just four months. Here's
where it gets really interesting, though. Let's
talk about his 1914 novel, The World Set Free,
because in this book, Wells writes the very first
description of what he specifically termed atomic
bombs. Right, and he didn't just imagine a really
big stick of dynamite. Because he understood
the physics of radioactive decay, he imagined
a bomb dropped from an airplane that would continuously
explode for days on end. Rendering the entire
geographic area completely uninhabitable due
to radiation, it was a chillingly accurate vision
of nuclear fallout, written a full three decades
before the weapon actually existed. And the historical
ripple effect of this specific book is monumental.
In 1932, a Hungarian -born physicist named Leo
Szilard read The World Set Free. Wait, Leo Szilard?
The scientist who literally conceived the nuclear
chain reaction? The very same. Szilard reads
Wells' book, and the concept of harnessing atomic
energy for a continuous explosive reaction plants
a seed in his mind. The following year, Szilard
is waiting at a traffic light in London, and
the actual physics of the nuclear chain reaction
suddenly clicks for him. Just standing at a traffic
light. Yes. He immediately patents the concept.
But, and this is crucial, he doesn't publish
it. He takes that patent and hands it straight
to the British Admiralty with strict instructions
to keep it a total military secret. Because he
knew what would happen if the wrong people got
a hold of it. Exactly that. In his own memoirs,
Silder specifically stated that he knew exactly
what a nuclear chain reaction would mean for
the destruction of the world, and he knew it
because he had read H .G. Wells. That is mind
-blowing. It's like a modern sci -fi author casually
writing a novel about a warp drive and an actual
NASA engineer reading it, looking at the math
on page 40, saying, wait a minute, this physics
actually works, and then going into a lab to
build it. It perfectly illustrates the staggering
cultural power of the Vatican writer. Wells wasn't
just predicting the future. By putting these
highly logical, scientifically grounded ideas
into the minds of the readers who actually shaped
society, he was inadvertently providing the blueprints
to build it. And it wasn't just scientists who
were taking notes. Politicians were obsessed
with his work. Winston Churchill was a massive
fan and an avid reader. Churchill and Wells had
a long, ongoing intellectual dialogue. Churchill
actually borrowed the famous phrase, the gathering
storm directly from Wells, the war of the worlds,
to describe the looming rise of Nazi Germany.
Oh, I had no idea that phrase came from Wells.
Yeah, and Churchill also frequently incorporated
Wells' ideas of a highly structured, supportive,
utopian state into his own political speeches.
But engineering the future is a messy business,
isn't it? When you're a guy trying to map out
the entire destiny of humanity on a global scale,
you are inevitably bound to collide with the
very real, very dark politics of your time. Absolutely.
Wells was highly political. He was a lifelong
socialist, deeply involved with the Fabian Society
early in his career. Hold on. What exactly was
the Fabian Society? It was a prominent British
socialist organization. Unlike Marxist revolutionaries
who wanted to violently overthrow the government,
the Fabians believed in gradualist reform. So
they wanted it to work within the system. Right.
They wanted to advance socialism through intellectual
debate, political education, and slowly transforming
society from the inside out using democratic
means. Wells aligned with this because he believes
society didn't need a bloody revolution. It needed
a massive, rational, scientific overhaul. And
he was so committed to this vision that he traveled
the globe meeting with world leaders. He met
with FDR, and in 1934, he actually traveled to
the Soviet Union to interview Joseph Stalin.
Yes, he sat down with Joseph Stalin for three
hours. Wait, he sat down with Stalin for three
hours to try to convince him to embrace free
expression. Wasn't that incredibly naive? The
man was running a brutal totalitarian regime.
Did Stalin just laugh him out of the room? It
was incredibly naive in hindsight, yes. Wells
went in hoping he could reason with Stalin, you
know, hoping to convince him that a true utopian
state required intellectual freedom and an open
exchange of ideas. How did that go? Well, the
transcript of their conversation is fascinating
because you see Wells trying to apply his logical
reformist ideals to a dictator who only understands
absolute power. Stalin didn't laugh him out of
the room, but he firmly dismantled Wells' arguments.
Wills left the Soviet Union deeply disillusioned.
He ultimately realized the system was paralyzed
by state violence. He also had this profound
idealism about global conflict that backfired.
In 1914, he coined the phrase, the war that will
end war. He genuinely believed that defeating
German militarism would rationally end all global
conflict forever. Which was a tragic miscalculation
of human nature. However, his vocal lifelong
opposition to fascism made him a major target.
During World War II, his books were publicly
burned by the Nazis. And when Allied forces later
discovered the SS Black Book, which was a literal
hit list for immediate arrest and execution,
if Britain were successfully invaded, H .G. Wells
was right there on the list. He was. But despite
the staggering horrors of the two world wars,
he never stopped pushing for a unified global
structure. He was a massive advocate for the
League of Nations. And later on, his extensive
writings on human rights laid the direct groundwork
for the UN's 1948 Universal Declaration of Human
Rights. So you have this man who is a champion
of free expression, a sworn enemy of the Nazis
and a foundational architect of modern human
rights. But this is where the historical reality
becomes incredibly complex and frankly, deeply
uncomfortable. for modern readers. Right. And
we need to be very clear with you listening.
We are strictly looking at the factual historical
record here. We are not endorsing any political
ideology from any side of the spectrum. But the
facts of his underlying beliefs are really jarring
to read today. They are. Because for much of
his adult life, H .G. Wills was a passionate
advocate for eugenics and involuntary euthanasia.
Wow. Yeah. He argued in favor of what he coldly
called the scurrilization of failure. He believed
that for a socialist utopian society to function
efficiently, humanity needed to ruthlessly weed
out those he deemed unfit or biologically inferior.
Now he did eventually recant these views by around
1940 as the true horrific realities of where
those ideologies lead became visible in Nazi
Germany, but he held and published those beliefs
for decades. He did. And it's so completely at
odds with the guy who thought for the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights? How do we reconcile
the visionary who laid the groundwork for human
rights with a man who spent years advocating
for eugenics and the sterilization of failure?
If we connect this to the bigger picture, we
have to understand what drove Wells at his core.
We have to look at social Darwinism. Wells was
a man utterly obsessed with efficiency, progress,
and evolutionary fitness. Because he was trained
by Huxley. Exactly. He looked at society not
as a collection of messy emotional individuals
with inherent moral value, but as a biological
organism that needed to be optimized. So he was
taking the exact same cold mechanical logic he
used to invent the time machine and applying
it to human reproduction. Yes. And the danger
of looking at humanity merely as a biological
puzzle to be solved is that it strips away basic
empathy. It leads you down paths of incredibly
dark clinical ideologies where the system matters
more than the human being. It's a stark historical
reminder of the ethical blind spots that even
the most forward -looking thinkers can possess.
It really is the ultimate warning about treating
human beings like math equations. And honestly,
his own personal life proves how messy being
a human actually is. He wasn't some cold clinical
machine. His daily life was chaotic. I mean,
he had multiple affairs resulting in children
outside his marriages. He struggled with his
health. He was a diabetic and he actually co
-founded the charity that is now Diabetes UK.
And amidst all that grand political posturing
and scientific theorizing, he had this wondrously
quirky affectionate side. He communicated with
his second wife, Jane. through these little intimate
diary sketches he drew. He called them pictuas.
Pictuas. That's actually really sweet. It is.
It shows a deeply human, vulnerable side to a
man who spent his entire public life trying to
dictate the grand sweep of global history. He
was a walking contradiction. So what does this
all mean for us today? When we look back at the
life of H .G. Wells, we are looking at someone
who was far more than just an entertainer. He
was a foundational architect of the 20th century.
Absolutely. The sheer force of his imagination
gave us our modern nightmares, the atomic bomb,
alien invasions, but it also gave us our modern
miracles, like the framework for human rights
and the concept of the World Wide Web. It really
shows you the immense value of reading widely,
but also thinking critically about the media
we consume, because the ideas we absorb today
literally build the reality of tomorrow. Which
leaves us with a fascinating final thought to
mull over. Wells predicted the atomic bomb and
the internet simply by looking at the embryonic,
barely there science of his own Victorian era
and taking it to its logical extreme. So I encourage
you to look around you today. What quiet, barely
noticed piece of technology or what subtle social
shift happening right now is actually the seed
of an unimaginable reality for the year 2126.
It really makes you wonder. The next time you
open a science fiction novel to escape the real
world, take a really close look at the pages.
Because you might not be looking at a fantasy.
You might be looking at the blueprints of our
future.