Edison's Conquest of Mars   By: Garrett Putman Serviss (1851-1929)

BY GARRETT P. SERVISS.

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY A. LANGLEY SEARLES, Ph. D.

CARCOSA HOUSE 1947 LOS ANGELES

The special contents of this volume are copyright 1947 by CARCOSA HOUSE. FIRST EDITION

[Transcriber's note: This is a Rule 6 Clearance. PG has not been able to find a U.S. Copyright Renewal]

DEDICATED to GARRETT PUTMAN SERVISS

A COSMOPOLITE IN TIME 1851 1929

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction

CHAPTER ONE "Let Us Go To Mars"

CHAPTER TWO The Disintegrator

CHAPTER THREE The Congress of Nations

CHAPTER FOUR To Conquer Another World

CHAPTER FIVE The Footprint on the Moon

CHAPTER SIX The Monsters on the Asteroid

CHAPTER SEVEN A Planet of Gold

CHAPTER EIGHT "The Martians are Coming!"

CHAPTER NINE Journey's End

CHAPTER TEN The Great Smoke Barrier

CHAPTER ELEVEN The Earth Girl

CHAPTER TWELVE Retreat to Deimos

CHAPTER THIRTEEN There Were Giants in the Earth

CHAPTER FOURTEEN The Flood Gates of Mars

CHAPTER FIFTEEN Vengeance is Ours

CHAPTER SIXTEEN The Woman From Ceres

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN The Fearful Oaths of Colonel Smith

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN The Great Ovation

Bibliography

ILLUSTRATIONS

"Like men, and yet not like men...."

"... rising out of the shadow of the globe...."

"A consultation in Wizard Edison's laboratory...."

"Through this the meteor had passed...."

"... the ruins of ... an ancient watch tower."

"... another of our ships ... was destroyed."

"Two of the Martians were stretched dead upon the ground."

"He might have been a match for twenty of us."

"... he proceeded to teach us ... words of his language."

"... approaching from the eastward a large airship...."

"... a human being here on Mars!"

"The gigantic statue of their leader is THE GREAT SPHINX!"

"It was a panic of giants."

These illustrations are a selection of the best from the original newspaper installments and were redrawn for this volume by Bernard Manley, Jr., of Chicago, Illinois.

INTRODUCTION

If you picked up a magazine and read in it a story mentioning a passenger carrying rocket driven by atomic power furnished by a substance prepared from uranium, you probably would not be greatly surprised. After all, such an invention is today but a step or two ahead of cold fact. But you might be surprised to learn that if this story was A Columbus of Space , the one I happen to have in mind, your grand parents may well have read it before you were born for A Columbus of Space was published in All Story magazine in 1909, thirty years before the potentialities of U235 were realized, and nearly forty before the atomic bomb became a problem for people to think about.

Did the author of this story simply make a lucky shot in the dark? Perhaps; but let me tell those who are inclined to think so that he was a Carnegie lecturer, a member of half a dozen learned societies, one of the first to write a book on Einstein's theory of relativity, and an internationally known figure in his specialty, astronomy. His name is Garrett Putman Serviss.

He was born on March 24, 1851, at Sharon Springs, New York, of native New England stock. His interest in astronomy began as a boy, and was greatly stimulated when he began to examine the beauties of the heavens through a small telescope, the gift of his older brother. This encouraged his enrolling in the course of science at Cornell University in 1868 (its opening year) from which he was graduated in 1872. There followed two years at the Columbia College Law School, which he left as an LL. B.; and in June, 1874 he was admitted to the bar. He did not practice law, however, but turned instead to newspaper reporting.