Futility Closet

H.G. Wells’ 1914 novel The World Set Free is not his best known, but it’s certainly his most prescient — he predicted nuclear weapons:

She felt torn out of the world. There was nothing else in the world but a crimson-purple glare and sound, deafening, all-embracing, continuing sound. Every other light had gone out about her, and against this glare hung slanting walls, pirouetting pillars, projecting fragments of cornices, and a disorderly flight of huge angular sheets of glass.

The novel imagines an invention that accelerates radioactive decay, producing unthinkably powerful bombs. (Wells even dedicated the novel “to Frederick Soddy’s interpretation of radium.”)

This application was far ahead of the science of the time — physicist Leó Szilárd later said it helped inspire his own conception of a nuclear chain reaction.

If that’s not impressive enough: In Wells’ novel, allies drop an atomic bomb on Germany during a world war in the 1940s!

Technically, it’s illegal to resign from the British House of Commons. Since 1623 the rules have stated that a member of Parliament cannot renounce the trust of his constituents.

So members use a loophole: An MP who accepts an office of profit under the Crown must leave his post to avoid a conflict of interest. So today when an MP wishes to resign, the chancellor of the exchequer appoints him crown steward of the Chiltern Hundreds or of the Manor of Northstead, and he can legally resign.

But even this workaround gets awkward. Because there are only two available offices, sometimes MPs must wait in line. When 15 Ulster unionists resigned en masse on Dec. 17, 1985, they had to be appointed one after another in quick succession through the day. What will future historians make of this?

On Sept. 26, 1983, Lt. Col. Stanislav Petrov of the Soviet Air Defense Forces received a warning that the U.S. had launched an ICBM toward the Soviet Union. He dismissed it as a false alarm. Later four additional missiles were detected, and again Petrov decided they were phantoms.

He was right, but he couldn’t have been certain, and if he’d followed protocol he might have started a full-scale nuclear exchange between the superpowers. Bruce Blair of the World Security Institute said, “I think that this is the closest we’ve come to accidental nuclear war.”

The guards at Nazi prisoner-of-war camps were accustomed to looking for tunnels — so they never thought to look in the attic at Colditz Castle, where, astonishingly, British prisoners had constructed a 19-foot glider from scavenged materials.

They planned to launch it from the roof, using a pulley system driven by a falling bathtub full of concrete. They hoped this would send two men soaring across the River Mulde 60 meters below.

The American army liberated the camp before the glider could be launched, and it was subsequently lost, so for 55 years its designers could only wonder whether the “Colditz Cock” would really have flown. But in 1999 a British aviation company built a full-size replica, and the POWs reunited to watch the launch. It worked.

As a writer, W.T. Stead may have been too prescient.

In 1886 he published an article about the sinking of an ocean liner and the consequent loss of life, warning, “This is exactly what might take place and will take place if liners are sent to sea short of boats.”

Six years later he wrote a novel, From the Old World to the New, in which a ship collides with an iceberg in the North Atlantic and sinks; the survivors are picked up by the Majestic, a ship of the White Star Line.

An outspoken newspaper editor, Stead himself embarked for the New World in April 1912 when President Taft invited him to address a peace conference at Carnegie Hall.

Alas, he never arrived — he had booked his passage on the RMS Titanic.

“Mad Jack” Churchill enjoyed danger so much that he fought World War II with arrows and a broadsword — that’s him on the far right, leading a training exercise in Scotland.

“Any officer who goes into action without his sword,” he said, “is improperly dressed.”

Churchill charged through the whole war this way — he’s the only British soldier to fell an enemy with a longbow — and yet he lived to be 90. He died peacefully in Surrey in 1996.

Three of our last four presidents have been left-handed:

Bush I: Left-handed
Clinton: Left-handed
Bush II: Right-handed
Obama: Left-handed

The same would be true if John McCain had won the last election — he’s a leftie too. Indeed, fully half of American presidents since Truman have been southpaws, though only 10 percent of the general population is left-handed.

What accounts for this? Who knows? But UCLA geneticist Daniel Geschwind says, “Six out of the past 12 presidents is statistically significant, and probably means something.”

(Image: Wikimedia Commons)

My infant son rules his mother.
His mother rules me.
I rule the Athenians.
The Athenians rule the Greeks.
The Greeks rule Europe.
And Europe rules the world.

Thus my infant son rules the world.

Dubious but colorful: The Foreign Quarterly Review, January 1844, reports the case of Quatremer Disjonval, a Dutch adjutant-general whom the Prussians had incarcerated in a dungeon at Utrecht.

To pass the time he studied the prison’s spiders and noted that their behavior varied with approaching weather. When a sudden thaw threatened the advance of republican troops in January 1795, Disjonval sent a letter to the French general promising a severe frost within two weeks.

When the cold that arrived 12 days later froze Dutch canals solid enough to bear French artillery, the republicans took Utrecht and “Quatremer Disjonval, who had watched the habits of his spiders with so much intelligence and success, was, as a reward for his ingenuity, released from prison.”

See “Spider Barometers.”

Commandant Louis Joseph Lahure has a singular distinction in military history — he defeated a navy on horseback.

Occupying Holland in January 1795, the French continental army learned that the mighty Dutch navy had been frozen into the ice around Texel Island. So Lahure and 128 men simply rode up to it and demanded surrender. No shots were fired.