What Will Happen When Science "Perfects" the Art of Making War

Men Will Be Driven Mad by Sound-Making Machines — Cities Will Be Destroyed by Atomic Force — Nations Will Be Annihilated by Synthetic Lightning, Predicts A Consultant Member of the British War Board

The Weapons of War 100 Years Hence

Jets of water charged with electricity to kill all animal life with which they come in contact.

Wireless telephony, wireless sight, wireless heat, wireless power and wireless writing.

Wireless control of tanks, airplanes, ships and submarines.

Battle planes developing wireless power to destroy aircraft within several miles.

Wireless fire to devastate enemy territory.

Giant transport airplanes of incredible speed.

Radio “eyes” and “ears” for the ferreting out of secret war plans through thousands of miles of space.

Propaganda striking terror to enemy populations by means of wireless receivers, which will be more common than telephones are today.

Combined armored tank-submarine-airplanes, amphibious monsters which, in addition to being able to battle on land or under the seas, will be able to soar into the heavens after prey.

Airplanes with electrical impulse, their guns firing an enormous number of bullets a second without gunpowder.

Electrically controlled rockets operated on wires for wrecking planes.

A wireless controlled torpedo with wireless sighted periscope controlled by a secret combination of wave lengths to prevent the ship attacked from utilizing its own radio equipment to divert the projectile.

Gyroscopic wireless airplanes over which the operator, who may also be in flight in another control plane, will have absolute control and be able to release its bombs at will.

The possible perfection of mental telepathy to the point where it may be used over great distances to verify wireless speech.

Illustrated by William G. Schnelle

The fabled “Battle of the Centuries” is looming on the far horizon.

All of the elemental forces of nature will be perverted from their useful functions and forged into lethal combinations within the next century as the agencies of a universal war which will plunge the world into a vortex of destruction so appalling as to beggar the most fantastic imaginings, according to Professor A. M. Low, of London, internationally known scientist and inventor.

Death swifter than light, silent and stealthy as the shadow of a thought, will ride on the wings of radio to destroy nations in the space of a single breath. Forces now hidden deep within the heart of nature will be unleashed by man, marshaled into battle array and hurled against each other in a titanic struggle which will sweep into oblivion all life in its path like dust motes before a whirlwind.

In that elemental carnage the ultra modern weapons which made of Europe an unprecedented shambles during the World War will be as obsolete as the stone hatchet of a thousand centuries ago.

This is not the prophecy of a romantic fictionist. It is the sober conclusions of a man schooled in conservatism of science. Professor Low was consultant to the British War Inventions Board during the World War. He is a recognized authority on the principles of modern scientific warfare, and his conception of the Battle of the Centuries — which may end not only war but the universe itself — is based upon his own experiments since the war as well as upon a close study of the trend taken by experiments by the scientists of other countries.

Imagine a fleet of battle planes circling, maneuvering, attacking or holding fire at the direction of minds hundreds, even thousands, of miles away. Imagine the human eye endowed with a power of vision capable of spanning these thousands of miles to witness the lightning-like sweep of this squadron over enemy territory, leaving in its wake a burnt and blackened desert, devoid of all life!

In that war of the future men will see by radio, fight by radio, talk and hear by radio as easily as they converse in the same room now and, in short, so utilize what is perhaps the greatest of all natural forces that time and space will be annihilated; the east and the west and the far horizons will meet and the four quarters of the globe merge into a single battlefield.

The sea and the undersea and the air will be “no man’s land.” Here monstrous engines of destruction, controlled by radio, will battle with each other, striving to break through to the areas where the toll will be human life rather than the twisted and splintered wreckage of insensate machines. It is here that the real battles will be fought and won or lost. What follows will be simply systematic destruction. Once the fighting machines break through into enemy territory with their deadly gases and explosives the end will be but a matter of hours — perhaps moments.

Here are some of the weapons which Professor Low predicts for warring nations one hundred years hence:

Jets of water charged with electricity to kill all animal life with which they come in contact.

Wireless telephony, wireless sight, wireless heat, wireless power and wireless writing.

Wireless control of tanks, airplanes, ships and submarines.

Battle planes developing wireless power to destroy aircraft within several miles.

Wireless fire to devastate enemy territory.

Giant transport airplanes of incredible speed.

Radio “eyes” and “ears” for the ferreting out of secret war plans through thousands of miles of space.

Propaganda striking terror to enemy populations by means of wireless receivers, which will be more common than telephones are today.

Combined armored tank-submarine-airplanes, amphibious monsters which, in addition to being able to battle on land or under the seas, will be able to soar into the heavens after prey.

Airplanes with electrical impulse, their guns firing an enormous number of bullets a second without gunpowder.

Electrically controlled rockets operated on wires for wrecking planes.

A wireless controlled torpedo with wireless sighted periscope controlled by a secret combination of wave lengths to prevent the ship attacked from utilizing its own radio equipment to divert the projectile.

Gyroscopic wireless airplanes over which the operator, who may also be in flight in another control plane, will have absolute control and be able to release its bombs at will.

The possible perfection of mental telepathy to the point where it may be used over great distances to verify wireless speech.

With regard to experiments he has conducted which help to form the basis for his conjectures, Professor Low says:

“Every one probably will remember the experiments made some time ago in which smoke columns and water jets were used as wireless materials. I have since experimented with highly charged jets of slightly acidulated water and have given people powerful shocks at a distance of several feet. The effect is really extraordinary. It is easy to see that, on a much larger scale, my model would become a most powerful weapon. Fully developed it would make cavalry obsolete despite the protective measures which naturally would be evolved to combat it.

“This is an agency which, doubtless, could be regulated at will to destroy life utterly or shock combatants into insensibility, making their capture easy. It would be infinitely cheaper than gunpowder and as infinitely more merciful, whether death or merely a period of unconsciousness were inflicted. However, in view of the deadly implements of war which the next hundred years — or the next score of years — will evolve, it is doubtful if nations will concern themselves with any instrument of mercy.

“Back of the deadly front lines where, undoubtedly, mechanical engines, energized and controlled by radio, will battle with all the seeming intelligence of human beings, there will be massed dense populations too intent upon their own survival to burden themselves with the added danger of enormous batches of prisoners.

“With mankind’s killing power at its maximum there will be little quarter asked or given. There will be little opportunity for such negotiations. Once the mechanical lines of defense are down the rest will be slaughter, or, if you prefer, execution.

“Today we have only the most elementary knowledge of electricity as a lethal weapon. Nikola Tesla has conducted exhaustive and enlightening experiments in the induction of electric current over large areas. With quite simple apparatus and using only three horsepower I have been able to destroy thin iron wire placed at a distance of three or four feet.

“The limiting factor at present is that the wire must be in circular form and thus make a closed circuit. However, this is a minor difficulty which would yield readily to intensive study and experimentation. The significance of this accomplishment lies in the fact that properly equipped airplanes could annihilate enemy air craft by destroying the stay wires supporting the planes and the electrical connections in engines.

“The possibilities of electricity as a lethal weapon are limitless. In America artificial lightning, approximating the voltage of a natural bolt, already has been developed. With this much progress made it would be a comparatively simple matter to harness this greatest of all forces and duplicate in actuality the thunderbolts of Jove.

“The warfare of the future will not be a thing of rolling drums, of impassioned heroism and stirring charges. These things proved themselves all but obsolete in the recent World War. They will be forgotten traditions in the greatest of all wars which is to come. This war must be fought with mechanical agencies which will respond to the direction of man over great distances with the readiness and the precision of a pistol held in the hand.

“Human organism could not survive for a moment in a welter of destruction such as science will let loose in the war of wars which is to come. Men will fight not with their bodies but with their minds, and their ingenuity will be directed to the end of supplying themselves with long range weapons, responsive to exact control and capable of keeping at bay the lethal engines of the enemy equipped with facilities for the destruction of whole nations at a single blow.

“It may be that the sheer perfection of mankind’s capacity for destruction will discourage this war that I see looming like a sulphurous cloud of annihilation on the horizon of time, but I do not subscribe to any such optimistic belief. The increasing horror which has attended armed conflicts with the growth of civilization and the progress of science has not turned the world into the byways of peace. The World War was a carnival of destruction which would have staggered the imagination of Napoleon, yet there is no nation of the world which is not now engaged in perfecting newer, more modern, more deadly instruments of war.

“Apparently the accomplishments of peace and constructiveness must in the end be dedicated to the purposes of war and destructiveness. Radio is an instrument of peace, growth — the linking together of the world’s centers of commerce with incalculable possibilities for the betterment and progress of mankind. Yet potentially it is the greatest instrument of destruction ever found in nature. Electricity has contributed perhaps more than any other one force in promoting the welfare and the unity of man. Yet it lends itself readily to the purposes of destruction.”

The wireless torpedo prophesied by Professor Low already is an accomplishment of the United States war engineers, although experiments designed to bring it more perfectly under control still are going forward. His prediction of wireless airplanes and submarines and tanks likewise has basis in the practice of steering steamships, designed as sea targets, by radio.

It has been found that ships, on the one hand, and torpedoes, on the other, are readily susceptible of control by wireless, but thus far experimenters have been unable to overcome the fact that a torpedo directed toward an enemy vessel under wireless control will respond to wireless influence from the target ship seeking to deviate it from its course. Professor Low sees a future in which this difficulty will be overcome by secret combinations of wave lengths so adjusted as to correspond to a written code.

Thus far there is no record of airplanes controlled by wireless and no serious effort has ever been made to adapt the gyroscope to planes as an aid to increased stability. Certain types of airplanes capable of taking off either from water or land likewise have been developed, but they never have graduated from the novelty stage into practical usage, and the most ardent inventor has not thus far attempted a vehicle capable of navigation on land, under the sea, on the water and in the air such as the weird mechanical monster which Professor Low expects will play so prominent a part in future world wars.

Professor Low’s prophecy of guns firing with incredible rapidity and without explosives also has basis in the development in this country of air pressure instruments capable of driving pointed rivets through tempered steel.

In a demonstration conducted by Dr. Miller Reese Hutcheson of New York City, an internationally known engineer, a “gun” of this type drove rivets through two-inch plate, demonstrating its efficacy as a substitute for the compressed air riveter. Dr. Hutcheson said that the same principle applied to ordnance would produce a power far in excess of that created by gunpowder and would, at the same time, result in less recoil and less injury to the rifling.

Professor Low believes that in the War of the Centuries noise will replace propaganda to a very considerable extent.

“Noise undoubtedly will play a very important part in future wars,” he said. “It has a very curious effect on human beings. The more highly civilized we become the more we are affected by noise. Thousands of soldiers who escaped cannon shot and rifle bullets in the late war were incapacitated, many of them permanently, by the continual, unremitting roar of ordnance. Their nerves were racked to the breaking point and they went to hospitals nervous wrecks.

“I can imagine the aggressive use of selected noises to undermine the morale of populations too far removed from the zone of operations to be endangered seriously by other offensive measures.”