In 1914, H. G. Wells published a novel called "The World Set Free." In it, he described a war fought with a new kind of weapon. He called them "atomic bombs."

The bombs used the energy locked inside atoms. They could destroy entire cities. The war they caused was devastating and global. Wells had taken the term from the work of Frederick Soddy, a radiochemist who had demonstrated in 1903 that radioactive elements release enormous quantities of energy as they decay. Soddy had speculated that this energy might one day be harnessed. Wells read Soddy's work and wrote a novel about what would happen if it were harnessed for war.

He published it in 1914. The First World War had not yet begun. Nuclear physics was in its infancy. The neutron had not been discovered. The idea of splitting an atom to release energy was decades away from experimental proof.

In 1932, a Hungarian physicist named Leo Szilard, living in London, read the novel. It made, as he later wrote, "a very great impression on me." He had met Wells three years earlier, in 1929. Wells had urged him to find new sources of energy.

On the morning of September 12, 1933, Szilard read an article in The Times reporting a speech by Lord Rutherford, the most eminent nuclear physicist alive, who had dismissed the idea of using atomic energy for practical purposes as "moonshine." Szilard was irritated. He went for a walk. Standing at a street corner on Southampton Row, near the British Museum, he conceived the nuclear chain reaction: if an atom struck by a neutron released two additional neutrons, the process would be exponential and self-sustaining.

He filed a patent in 1934. Then he did something no inventor ordinarily does. He assigned the patent to the British Admiralty, making it secret. His reason, recorded in his memoirs: "Knowing what this would mean, and I knew it because I had read H. G. Wells, I did not want this patent to become public."

Five years later, Szilard co-authored a letter that Albert Einstein signed and sent to President Roosevelt, warning that atomic energy could be used to build a weapon of unprecedented power. The Manhattan Project followed. Hiroshima followed that.

Wells coined the term "atomic bomb" in 1914. Szilard, who had read the novel, conceived the mechanism that made it real. The man who filed the patent tried to keep it secret because a science fiction writer had already shown him what would happen if he did not.

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