Szilard suddenly came up with the answer in September 1933 - the chain reaction - while watching the traffic lights turn green in Russell Square in London. He later wrote that Wells showed him "what the liberation of atomic energy on a large scale would mean". Szilard believed that the splitting of the atom could produce vast energy. But the same year the Hungarian emigre physicist Leo Szilard read The World Set Free. (D) By 1932 British scientists had succeeded in splitting the atom for the first time by artificial means, although some believed it couldn't produce huge amounts of energy. In the article, Churchill wrote: "Might a bomb no bigger than an orange be found to possess a secret power to destroy a whole block of buildings - nay to concentrate the force of a thousand tons of cordite and blast a township at a stroke?" This idea of the orange-sized bomb is credited by Graham Farmelo, author of Churchill's Bomb, directly to the imagery of The World Set Free. Churchill grasped the danger of technology running ahead of human maturity, penning a 1924 article in the Pall Mall Gazette called "Shall we all commit suicide?". (C) The two men met and discussed ideas over the decades, especially as Churchill, a highly popular writer himself, spent the interwar years out of political power, contemplating the rising instability of Europe. Winston Churchill credited Wells for coming up with the idea of using aeroplanes and tanks in combat ahead of World War One. He had a track record of predicting technological innovations. Wells was fascinated with the new discoveries. "When it became apparent that the Rutherford atom had a dense nucleus, there was a sense that it was like a coiled spring," says Andrew Nahum, curator of the Science Museum's Churchill's Scientists exhibition. The idea was that solid elements might be made up of tiny particles in atoms. (B) The story of the atom bomb starts in the Edwardian age, when scientists such as Ernest Rutherford were grappling with a new way of conceiving the physical world. What he couldn't predict was how a strange conjunction of his friends and acquaintances - notably Winston Churchill, who'd read all Wells's novels twice, and the physicist Leo Szilard - would turn the idea from fantasy to reality, leaving them deeply tormented by the scale of destructive power that it unleashed. He even thought it would be dropped from planes. HG Wells first imagined a uranium-based hand grenade that "would continue to explode indefinitely" in his 1914 novel The World Set Free. One day you dream up the idea of a bomb of infinite power. (A) Imagine you're the greatest fantasy writer of your age. So how did science fiction writer HG Wells predict its invention three decades before the first detonations? The atom bomb was one of the defining inventions of the 20th Century.
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