Gregory's review of The War of the Worlds ( Nature 57, 339–340 1898) had ventured that “scientific romances are not without a value in furthering scientific interests they attract attention to work that is being done in the realm of natural knowledge, and so create sympathy with the aims and observations of men of science”. Gregory advised Wells on lunar gravity for The First Men in the Moon and when Wells died in 1946, Gregory wrote the Nature obituary of the genius with whom he had first collaborated 50 years before ( Nature 158, 399–402 1946).

Before he became editor of Nature, Gregory had co-authored Honours Physiography with Wells he was an assistant editor at the journal when Wells, a then-unknown teacher and jobbing science writer, published 'Popularising Science'.

Two friendships were constant: one with fellow novelist Arnold Bennett, the other with Gregory. Wells knew, and argued with, most of the significant writers and political leaders of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries. Then, informed by the knowledge of humanity's shared evolutionary origins, the history of the future would see nation states dissolving in favour of a system of cooperative world government. His hope was that, if the intellectual enquirer were armed with the right kinds of knowledge, history might be predicted like the movements of planets and tides. The result was global woe: “to defective education was due the general neglect of science and 'muddling through',” as he told the 11th annual meeting of the British Science Guild ( Nature 99, 186–187 1917). (This positivistic idea of science was fairly short-lived, lasting only from Charles Darwin's dethroning of humanity as the summit of creation to the early-twentieth-century advent of quantum mechanics, which undermined claims of absolute scientific certainty.) But Britain's educational system failed to enshrine science properly, Wells felt the privileged status of classics was a consistent target of his ire.

Wells recording for the BBC (top) and during his biology studies at university.Ĭredit: Top: BBC Photo Library Bottom: Archivio GBB/Contrasto/Eyevineįor Wells, the scientific method conferred on its user the authority to rethink and challenge these stale ideas, and should underpin every area of human endeavour.

Herbert wells war of the worlds