One of the things we have to thank September 21 for is… the future. Maybe not the future we actually inhabit, but at least the one with time travel, invisible men, and invaders from Mars. That’s because H.G. Wells was born today in 1866. Although he’s mostly remembered for The Time Machine, War of the Worlds, and The Invisible Man, Wells wrote a great deal more than that, including speculative articles and journals. He predicted war fought by airplanes (or airships, at the time), cars, suburbs, the atomic bomb, and even a sort of Internet/Wikipedia he called The World Brain.
Winston Churchill was a big fan of Wells’ work (and a personal friend), and he borrowed some lines for his famous “gathering storm” speech in 1906 that anticipated Nazi Germany. Wells did a great deal of work on the original League of Nations too, although he ended up disappointed that the organization wasn’t able to prevent World War II — which, really, was the whole reason for having such a group. He called that period between WWI and WWII the “age of frustration.” During that time, though, he wrote The Rights of Man in 1940, which turned out to be the basis for the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the United Nations. He eventually grew pessimistic. His last book, in 1945, was Mind at the End of its Tether, and mused that humanity being replaced by some other species might not be such a bad idea.
Wells’ Law is a rule of writing credible fiction about some alternative future (or past or present, for that matter): he explained that “the more impossible the story I had to tell, the more ordinary must be the setting.” The law itself says that a science fiction story should contain only one outlandish assumption. Everything else should be realistic — although possibly influenced by that assumption. It’s a rule used by countless writers, including Stephen King, who shares his birthday with Wells. And you can even find it in things that aren’t science fiction at all, like Bugs Bunny cartoons — which are the work of Chuck Jones, who was also born today.
But Wells’ wider legacy is probably thinking about the future in a systematic way, and providing a model for innovative thinking — you imagine one single change, and then think about what its effects might be. Preston Tucker was pretty good at that, at least in the realm of automobile design. In the 1930s he designed an armored combat vehicle called the Tucker Tiger” with a unique gun turret. At least one prototype was built, and it proved to be much faster than any similar vehicle; capable of 100mph according to some reports. The army thought it was too fast and rejected it. Tucker’s turret design was used in bombers instead.
Tucker designed the Tucker Torpedo (a car, not an actual torpedo) after WWII ended, and included features that, in 1947, were up to thirty years ahead of their time: disc brakes, fuel injection, construction designed to protect passengers (including a roll bar built into the roof), a padded dashboard, and more. Unfortunately Tucker’s innovation was limited to car design. He doesn’t seem to have been a very good businessman, and fewer than 100 of the cars — all prototypes — were built. Most of them are still running today, and you can still see them in various museums.
The legacy of September 21 in writing and design can’t, however, overshadow what is probably the most significant thing about the date. And this is something you can personally commemorate. I probably don’t even have to mention it — and you must be thinking about the ingredients in your kitchen already. That’s right, September 21 is National Pecan Cookie Day.
