October 30: War of the Worlds

On this date in 1938 Orson Welles's radio adaptation of HG Wells's War Of The Worlds on CBS Radio, was broadcast. Its use of fake news reports caused panic in the US because people tuning in part way through thought it was really happening.

Here are a few facts about The War of the Worlds.

1. The original novel first appeared in 1897, when it appeared as a serial in Pearson's Magazine in the UK and Cosmopolitan in the USA. A hardback book followed a year later. It is one of the most popular science fiction novels ever and has never been out of print.
2. The plot (Spoiler Alert) concerns the invasion of Earth by Martians –Surrey in England, to be exact. Explosions are noticed on the surface of Mars and soon after a “meteor” falls on Horsell Common. It turns out to be a Martian spacecraft and fighting machine. The Martians are not interested in friendship – they want to conquer the Earth and set about doing just that. All resistance put up by the British Army ultimately fails and Earth faces a future of Martian domination – but in the end, the Martians are killed off by bacterial infections to which they have no immunity.
3. The 1938 radio broadcast was directed and narrated by future film maker Orson Welles, who was 23 at the time, and was his breakthrough project. It was the Halloween episode of a programme called The Mercury Theatre of the Air. The first part of the programme consisted of simulated news reports, and unsurprisingly the location for the story wasn't Surrey as in the original novel, but New Jersey.
4. The producers wanted the show to sound as realistic as possible and used the names of real places where possible, although there had been some last minute changes in this regard as executives who read the script on the day were afraid they might get sued by some of the real life institutions that were mentioned. The recording of the real life Hindenberg disaster report was used as a reference and sound effects such as boat horns in New York Harbour were incorporated into the soundtrack. Also, Welles interspersed the news reports with Music, which was hailed as genius, because long periods of music while listeners waited for the next news bulletin increased the suspense.
5. Enough people believed it was real to jam the radio station's switchboard with phone ins. The producers were ordered to broadcast an announcement pointing out the Martian invasion was fiction and not really happening. The police even raided the station while employees scurried to stop them destroying scripts and recordings of the show. At the time, Orson Welles was distraught, thinking he'd made a mistake which would cost him his career. Turned out he couldn't have been more wrong.
6. Adolph Hitler mentioned the broadcast in a speech he made about a week later, citing the panic it caused as evidence that democracy was corrupt and decadent.
7. Which brings us to a potential reason for the panic – that many people who tuned in not only didn't know it was fiction, but they hadn't clocked the fact the fictional invaders were Martians, either. In a world on the brink of the Second World War, many assumed it was an invasion by another country or a national disaster.
8. It is disputed now whether the panic was as widespread as the urban legends made out it was. While it's entirely possible some people tuned in during commercial breaks on other stations, having missed the introduction of the show as a drama, it has been questioned whether this was a widespread practice. Experts believe now that relatively few people actually heard the broadcast having missed the beginning.
9. As well as the radio broadcast there have been seven films based on the novel, several comic books, TV series and video games, not forgetting the best selling musical adaptation by Jeff Wayne in 1978.
10. War of the Worlds has also been an influence on other writers and there are any number of pulp science fiction novels with similar themes and fighting machines, including the 1967 book series The Tripods, and its 1984 TV adaptation. Real life science has been influenced by it, too. It's even possible the moon landings would never have happened without it. Robert H. Goddard was inspired by the book to work on the liquid fuelled and multi-stage rockets which would take men to the Moon 71 years later.

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