The Man Who Rocked the Earth

The Man Who Rocked the Earth, by

Arthur Train Robert Williams Wood
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Title: The Man Who Rocked the Earth
Author: Arthur Train Robert Williams Wood
Release Date: September 4, 2006 [EBook #19174]
Language: English
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The MAN WHO ROCKED THE EARTH
By ARTHUR TRAIN AND ROBERT WILLIAMS WOOD

Reprint Edition 1974 by Arno Press Inc. A New York Times Company New York--1975
SCIENCE FICTION ADVISORY EDITORS R. Reginald Douglas Menville
Copyright © 1915 by Doubleday, Page & Company
All rights reserved, including that of translation into foreign languages, including the
Scandinavian
Reprinted by permission of Mrs. Robert W. Wood
Reprinted from a copy in The Library of the University of California, Riverside

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Train, Arthur Cheney, 1875-1945. The man who rocked the earth.
(Science fiction) Reprint of the ed. published by Doubleday, Page, Garden City, N. Y.
I. Wood, Robert Williams, 1868-1955, joint author. II. Title. III. Series. PZ3.T682Mak6
[PS3539.R23] 813'.5'2 74-16523 ISBN 0-405-06315-6

THE MAN WHO ROCKED THE EARTH
"I thought, too, of the first and most significant realization which the reading of
astronomy imposes: that of the exceeding delicacy of the world's position; how, indeed,
we are dependent for life, and all that now is, upon the small matter of the tilt of the poles;
and that we, as men, are products, as it were, not only of earth's precarious position, but
of her more precarious tilt."--W. L. COMFORT, Nov., 1914
[Illustration: INSTANTLY THE EARTH BLEW UP LIKE A CANNON--UP INTO
THE AIR, A THOUSAND MILES UP]

PROLOGUE
By July 1, 1916, the war had involved every civilized nation upon the globe except the
United States of North and of South America, which had up to that time succeeded in
maintaining their neutrality. Belgium, Holland, Denmark, Switzerland, Poland, Austria
Hungary, Lombardy, and Servia, had been devastated. Five million adult male human
beings had been exterminated by the machines of war, by disease, and by famine. Ten
million had been crippled or invalided. Fifteen million women and children had been
rendered widows or orphans. Industry there was none. No crops were harvested or sown.
The ocean was devoid of sails. Throughout European Christendom women had taken the
place of men as field hands, labourers, mechanics, merchants, and manufacturers. The
amalgamated debt of the involved nations, amounting to more than $100,000,000,000,
had bankrupted the world. Yet the starving armies continued to slaughter one another.
Siberia was a vast charnel-house of Tartars, Chinese, and Russians. Northern Africa was
a holocaust. Within sixty miles of Paris lay an army of two million Germans, while three
million Russians had invested Berlin. In Belgium an English army of eight hundred and
fifty thousand men faced an equal force of Prussians and Austrians, neither daring to take
the offensive.
The inventive genius of mankind, stimulated by the exigencies of war, had produced a
multitude of death-dealing mechanisms, most of which had in turn been rendered
ineffective by some counter-invention of another nation. Three of these products of the
human brain, however, remained unneutralized and in large part accounted for the
impasse at which the hostile armies found themselves. One of these had revolutionized

warfare in the field, and the other two had destroyed those two most important factors of
the preliminary campaign--the aeroplane and the submarine. The German dirigibles had
all been annihilated within the first ten months of the war in their great cross-channel raid
by Pathé contact bombs trailed at the ends of wires by high-flying French planes. This, of
course, had from the beginning been confidently predicted by the French War
Department. But by November, 1915, both the allied and the German aerial fleets had
been wiped from the clouds by Federston's vortex guns, which by projecting a whirling
ring of air to a height of over five thousand feet crumpled the craft in mid-sky like so
many butterflies in a simoon.
The second of these momentous inventions was Captain Barlow's device for destroying
the periscopes of submarines, thus rendering them blind and helpless. Once they were
forced to the surface such craft were easily destroyed by gun fire or driven to a sullen
refuge in protecting harbours.
The third, and perhaps the most vital, invention was Dufay's nitrogen-iodide pellets,
which when sown by pneumatic guns upon the slopes of a battlefield, the ground outside
intrenchments, or round the glacis of a