Leo Szilard: His Version of the Facts; Selected Recollections and Correspon-
dence, vol. 2 ( Cambridge, Mass., and London:MIT Press, 1980). The
British story is told best in Margaret Gowing, Britain and Atomic Energy
1939-1945 ( London: Macmillan, 1964).

It was in 1953 that the first Holsten-Roberts engine brought induced
radio-activity into the sphere of industrial production, and its first general
use was to replace the steam-engine in electrical generating stations. Hard
upon the appearance of this came the Dass-Tata engine--the invention of
two among the brilliant galaxy of Bengali inventors the modernisation of
Indian thought was producing at this time--which was used chiefly for
automobiles, aeroplanes, water-planes and such-like mobile purposes. The
American Kemp engine, differing widely in principle but equally practica-
ble, and the Krupp-Erlanger came hard upon the heels of this, and by the
autumn of 1954 a gigantic replacement of industrial methods and ma-
chinery was in progress all about the habitable globe. Small wonder was
this when the cost even of these earliest and clumsiest of atomic engines is
compared with that of the power they superseded. Allowing for lubrication,
the Dass-Tata engine, once it was started, cost a penny to run thirty-seven
miles, and added only nine and a quarter pounds to the weight of the
carriage it drove. It made the heavy alcohol-driven automobile of the time
ridiculous in appearance as well as preposterously costly. For many years
the price of coal and every form of liquid fuel had been clambering to
levels that made even the revival of the draft-horse seem a practicable
possibility, and now, with the abrupt relaxation of this stringency, the
change in appearance of the traffic upon the world's roads was instanta-
neous. In three years the frightful armoured monsters that had hooted and
smoked and thundered about the world for four awful decades were swept
away to the dealers in old metal, and the highways thronged with light and
clean and shimmering shapes of silvered steel. At the same time a new
impetus was given to aviation by the relatively enormous power for weight

This selection first appeared in H. G. Wells, The World Set Free ( New York: Dutton, 1914),
pp. 51-53, 114-19, 152-53. Used with permission of the Executors of the Estate of H. G.
Wells.

-3-