H. G. Wells · 1914
The World Set Free
- Language
- English
- Form
- Fiction
- Text
- Full text
- English
- English original
- Source text
- gutenberg.org
- Selected
- Ben Breen, 2026-09-29; suggested by Claude research agents, 29 Sep 2026
- Status
- Arguments unverified; quotations chosen by machine, unchecked
Q26CONTROL
Can inventors remain responsible for harmful uses of their inventions that they did not intend?Yes. the discoverer feels answerable for later uses. The narrator describes Holsten’s fear of his discovery’s consequences and his thought that publication might be premature. His later disclaimer of unforeseeable consequences is a separate passage.
Summary disputed by reviewer: Description reconciled with the current quotation by Codex, 28 Oct 2026; historical interpretation and existing draft category remain unvalidated.
He was oppressed, he was indeed scared, by his sense of the immense consequences of his discovery. He had a vague idea that night that he ought not to publish his results, that they were premature, that some secret association of wise men should take care of his work and hand it on from generation to generation until the world was riper for its practical application.
Chapter the First · Gutenberg #1059; Holsten passage found in Chapter the First.
‘It has begun,’ he writes in the diary in which these things are recorded. ‘It is not for me to reach out to consequences I cannot foresee. I am a part, not a whole; I am a little instrument in the armoury of Change. If I were to burn all these papers, before a score of years had passed, some other man would be doing this. . .