Photo of the Day

A Martian fighting machine in the Thames valley

Monday 21 September 2026

H. G. Wells was born on 21 September 1866.

Sepia drawing of a three-legged Martian machine firing a heat ray across a river, as a wrecked steamboat lists and people flee up the bank — Ink drawing · 1906

A Martian war machine striding through the Thames valley, drawn by the Brazilian artist Henrique Alvim Corrêa for a 1906 French-language edition of H. G. Wells's The War of the Worlds, published in Brussels. Wells himself approved the drawings, and they remain among the most famous illustrations of the novel.

Fun facts

The War of the Worlds was first serialised in 1897 and published as a book in 1898. source ↗
Wells set the invasion in the real towns around Woking, Surrey, where he lived while writing it. source ↗
Orson Welles's 1938 radio adaptation moved the story to New Jersey and famously alarmed some listeners. source ↗
Wells also coined or popularised ideas such as the time machine, the invisible man and the atomic bomb, decades before it existed. source ↗

Image: Henrique Alvim Corrêa
Licence: Public domain
Source: Wikimedia Commons