War of the Worlds: Technical Timeline

~1774: The MFEE — Mars Catastrophe

The Catastrophic Event

• Directed Energy Weapons on Mars fire at Earth during the Pugachev Rebellion (~1773–1774)
• Secondary discharge backfires along the firing path to Mars
• Two massive energetic events — one centred on Mare Acidalium (near Cydonia), one on Utopia Planum (near Galaxias Chaos)
• Airbursts (no craters) — energy arrived from above, not detonated at surface
• Biosphere destroyed — ocean evaporates, atmosphere collapses, climate system fails permanently

The Telepathic Purge (Jeff Wayne / Archon Defender Evidence)

• The electromagnetic/plasma discharge differentially kills telepathically sensitive Martians
• “Mass telepathic execution” — the MFEE experienced from the telepathic caste’s perspective
• Technocratic faction survives, possibly shielded by machine infrastructure
• The winged, embodied Crystal Egg Martians are eliminated; the machine-dependent “bodiless brains” remain

The Aftermath

• Mars becomes the dying world Wells describes — “cooling,” “depleted,” resources exhausted
• 40 years of desert conditions on Earth from the same event
• Survivors consolidate into the technocratic remnant — the WotW Martians
• Crystal surveillance network used to monitor Earth as potential refuge
• Planning begins for the invasion/refugee operation

Pre-Invasion: Crystal Surveillance Phase (Unknown Duration)

Date Unknown — Crystal Devices Seeded on Earth

• At least one crystal surveillance device (“crystal egg”) present on Earth, found in a London curiosity shop. Date of arrival unknown — could predate the invasion by years or decades.
• Crystal paired with mast-mounted devices on Mars — approximately 20 crystal mast stations observed on terraced Martian platforms.
• Winged Martians observed coiling tentacles around mast bases and peering into crystals for up to 15 minutes per session — active real-time surveillance of Earth’s surface.
• Through the crystal, Mr. Cave observed: Martian architecture (circular openings, no doors, metallic tracery), winged Martians in flight, wingless large-headed Martians, white translucent bipeds (livestock?), and a vast mechanism of shining metals of extraordinary complexity.

Assessment

• The crystal network constitutes a pre-invasion reconnaissance operation. Target mapping, defense assessment, and environmental survey conducted before any cylinders were launched.
• The ruling caste (winged Martians) conducted this surveillance. They are a different physical type from the “bodiless brain” worker caste sent in the cylinders.
• After Mr. Cave’s death, the crystal was purchased by “a tall, dark man in grey” and has not been seen since — possible intelligence recovery operation.

Pre-Landing: The Opposition of Mars

~6 Years Before Landing (Opposition of 1894)

• Great light observed on illuminated part of Mars (Lick Observatory, then Perrotin of Nice)
• Narrator speculates this was the casting of the huge gun — the vast pit sunk into the Martian surface from which the cylinders were fired

10 Nights Before First Cylinder Arrives

• Night 1 (the 12th): Enormous outbreak of incandescent gas observed on Mars toward midnight. Spectroscope indicated a mass of flaming gas, chiefly hydrogen, moving with enormous velocity toward Earth. Jet of fire became invisible ~quarter past twelve. Compared to “a colossal puff of flame suddenly and violently squirted out of the planet, as flaming gas rushes out of a gun.”
• Nights 2–10: A flame observed each night, about midnight. Ten shots fired total.
• After the tenth shot, firing ceased. Possibly the gases of firing caused the Martians inconvenience — dense clouds of smoke/dust visible on Mars through telescopes.

Day 1 — Thursday: First Cylinder Lands

Early Morning (Pre-Dawn)

• First falling star seen rushing over Winchester eastward — a line of flame high in the atmosphere, leaving a greenish streak. First appearance at ~90–100 miles altitude.
• Impact: Enormous hole made on Horsell Common (between Horsell, Ottershaw, and Woking). Sand and gravel flung violently in every direction, visible 1.5 miles away. Heather set on fire eastward.

~6:00 AM

• Ogilvy discovers the cylinder. Partly buried in sand amid shattered fir tree. Diameter: ~30 yards. Caked with thick, scaly, dun-colored incrustation. Still too hot to approach. Stirring noise within — ascribed to unequal cooling but cylinder was hollow.
• Ogilvy observes the circular top rotating on its body — screwing open from within. A black mark moves along the circumference. Muffled grating sound. “The cylinder was artificial — hollow — with an end that screwed out!”

~8:00 AM – Afternoon

• Crowd gathers. Cylinder still screwing. Faint stirring audible within. Workmen fail to unscrew top — affords no grip. Case enormously thick. Astronomers (Stent, Ogilvy, Henderson) coordinate. Henderson telegraphs London.

~6:00 PM (Sunset)

• Cylinder opens. The screw projects nearly two feet, then the lid falls onto gravel.
• First Martian emergence: Grayish billowy movements visible in the dark interior — two luminous disks (eyes) — then tentacles, “about the thickness of a walking-stick,” coiling out and wriggling in the air.
• A big grayish rounded bulk, bear-sized, rises slowly and painfully.
• V-shaped mouth, no brow ridges, no chin, Gorgon groups of tentacles, tumultuous breathing, oily brown fungoid skin.
• First Martian topples over the brim and falls into the pit with “a thud like the fall of a great mass of leather.” Gives a peculiar thick cry. Second creature appears in the aperture.
• Thin black whips (like octopus arms) flash across the sunset and withdraw. A thin rod rises joint by joint, bearing a circular disk that spins with a wobbling motion at its apex.

~Dusk — After Dark

• Deputation with white flag approaches (Ogilvy, Stent, Henderson, and others).
• First use of Heat-Ray: Three puffs of luminous greenish smoke from the pit. Faint hissing passes into humming, into a long loud droning. A humped shape rises and a ghost of a beam flickers out. Men turned to fire — “an almost noiseless and blinding flash of light.” Pine trees burst into flame, furze bushes ignite. The beam sweeps round in a curving arc. Trees, hedges, buildings set alight.
• ~40 people killed, charred and distorted.
• The black dome-like object sinks back into the pit.
• Thin mast with wobbling restless mirror left visible above pit.
• Heat-Ray operates as a searchlight-like sweep throughout the night, picking off anyone approaching.
• All night: Hammering sounds audible from the pit. Puffs of greenish-white smoke rise. The Martians are building machines, sleepless, indefatigable.

~11:00 PM

• Company of soldiers deploys along south edge of the common (cordon).
• Second company through Chobham deploys on north side.
• Major Eden reported missing.

~Midnight

• Squadron of hussars, two Maxims, ~400 men of Cardigan Regiment start from Aldershot.

Day 2 — Friday: Second Cylinder / First Tripod Assembly

Just After Midnight

• Second cylinder falls — a star falling from heaven into pine-woods to the northwest (near Addlestone Golf Links). Greenish light, flash like summer lightning.

Dawn – Afternoon

• Surrounded by troops. Guns expected. Pine-woods around second cylinder burning.
• Hammering continues from Horsell Pit. Continuous streamer of smoke. Martians not visible — busy in pit.
• Fresh attempts to signal the Martians fail — “The Martians took as much notice of such advances as we should of the lowing of a cow.”

~3:00 PM

• Guns begin firing at the second cylinder location from Chertsey/Addlestone — shelling the smouldering pine-woods in hope of destroying it before it opens.

~5:00 PM

• Field-gun reaches Chobham for use against first body of Martians.

~6:00 PM

• Muffled detonation from the common. Gust of firing.
• Heat-Ray deployed against the Oriental College — tower slides down into ruin, college roof devastated. The crest of Maybury Hill now within Heat-Ray range.
• A hussar reports: something “crawling out in a thing like a dish cover.”

~7:00 PM — The First Tripod Rises

• First fighting-machine assembled. Reported as a metal shield that “staggered up on tripod legs” from the pit.
• Artillery gun near Horsell opens fire — precipitates action. Gun explodes, ammunition blows up. Cardigan men attempt a rush at the pit — swept out of existence by the Heat-Ray.
• Tripod rises to full height and begins walking leisurely to and fro across the common. Cowl rotates exactly like the head of a cowled human being. A kind of arm carries the Heat-Ray generator case.
• Woking station and town destroyed by Heat-Ray — “a heap of fiery ruins.”
• A second tripod builds itself up out of the pit.
• Both tripods move toward the pine-woods sheltering the second cylinder.
• One tripod observed pursuing a man — catches him in a steely tentacle, knocks his head against a pine tree trunk.

~Midnight (Late Friday)

• Narrator returns from Leatherhead. Encounters first moving tripod near Maybury Hill. Described in lightning flashes:
  • “A monstrous tripod, higher than many houses, striding over the young pine-trees and smashing them aside”
  • “A walking engine of glittering metal”
  • “Articulate ropes of steel dangling from it”
  • Heeling over with two feet in the air, righting itself
  • A second tripod appears, parting trees like brittle reeds
• Behind the main body: a huge mass of white metal like a gigantic fisherman’s basket (carrier). Puffs of green smoke from limb joints.
• The two tripods converge on the third cylinder landing site (near Pyrford).
• Exultant deafening howl: “Aloo! Aloo!”

Late Friday Night

• Three tripods visible about the Horsell pit at dawn — cowls rotating, surveying the desolation.
• Pit appears enlarged. Puffs of vivid green vapor stream up.
• The common from Horsell to Maybury is a valley of ashes.
• Wrecked train visible — forepart smashed and on fire.

Day 3 — Saturday: First Tripod Destroyed / Martian Repair Observed

Early Morning (pre-dawn)

• Narrator and artilleryman depart toward Weybridge. Encounter 8th Hussars with heliograph equipment.
• Six twelve-pounder guns in position across meadows near Byfleet, pointing toward Woking.
• Guns and ramparts being constructed near Weybridge.

Midday — The Battle of Weybridge/Shepperton

• Five fighting-machines appear across flat meadows toward Chertsey, striding hurriedly toward the river, growing rapidly larger. “Little cowled figures… going with a rolling motion and as fast as flying birds.”
• One on extreme left flourishes the Heat-Ray case, strikes Chertsey.
• Martian wades across the river — knees bend at far bank, raises to full height near Shepperton.
• Six hidden guns fire simultaneously at point-blank range.
  • First shell bursts 6 yards above the hood.
  • Two more shells burst near the body.
  • Fourth shell bursts clean in the face of the Thing — “The hood bulged, flashed, was whirled off in a dozen tattered fragments of red flesh and glittering metal.”
  • First Martian killed. The living intelligence splashed to the four winds.
• Decapitated tripod continues moving — “no longer heeding its steps, the camera that fired the Heat-Ray now rigidly upheld, it reeled swiftly upon Shepperton.” Strikes Shepperton Church tower, collapses into the river. Violent explosion when Heat-Ray camera hits water — massive steam/mud spout. Enormous ruddy-brown fluid spurts from machine.
• Four remaining tripods advance down the riverbank. Two stoop over the frothing ruins of their comrade. Third and fourth stand in the water. Heat-Ray generators wave high, smiting beams down in all directions.
• Weybridge destroyed by Heat-Ray — incandescent white flashes, smoky flames, houses caving in.
• Faint siren-like yelling as they work.

Afternoon

• Martians retreat to Horsell Common carrying debris of their smashed companion.
• They spend the afternoon transferring everything from the second and third cylinders (Addlestone Golf Links & Pyrford) to the original Horsell pit.
• One tripod stands sentinel while the rest abandon fighting-machines and descend into the pit.
• Towering pillar of dense green smoke visible from miles away.
• Repair observed: A Martian whose tripod had a smashed leg crawled tediously out of his hood — “a small brown figure” — and engaged in repair of his support. In about an hour, the cowl was seen above the trees again.

Evening → Night

• Fourth cylinder falls — brilliant green meteor — in Bushey Park.
• Fitful cannonade in the southwest.

Day 4 — Sunday: Black Smoke Deployed / London Advance

~8:00 PM

• Three Martians emerge from Horsell pit. Advance slowly and cautiously through Byfleet and Pyrford toward Ripley and Weybridge. Move in a line, each ~1.5 miles apart. Communicate by siren-like howls running up and down the scale.
• Four additional tripods join the three, each carrying a thick black tube — the Black Smoke launcher. A tube handed to each of the original three. Seven tripods total distribute in a curved line between St. George’s Hill, Weybridge, and Send.
• Four more fighting-machines with tubes cross the river.

~9:00 PM

• St. George’s Hill battery scores a hit — a tripod staggers and goes down. Smashed tripod leg. A prolonged ululation from the overthrown Martian. Second glittering giant appears. Both companions bring Heat-Rays to bear — battery destroyed.
• Martians halt and take counsel — stationary for 30 minutes.
• Damaged Martian repairs its tripod in ~1 hour.

~9:00 PM — First Black Smoke deployment

• The Martians form a crescent with twelve miles between its horns — from Staines to beyond Send. Twelve rockets launch from the hills as they move.
• Martians discharge Black Smoke canisters against every hill, copse, cluster of houses, or other possible gun cover ahead of them.
• Canisters smash on striking ground (no explosion). Enormous volume of heavy, inky vapor — coiling upward, then sinking.
• Touch or inhalation = instant death.
• Batteries toward Esher — eliminated entirely by Black Smoke. No survivors.
• Black vapor pours through streets of Richmond by dawn.
• Martians clear used Black Smoke with jets of superheated steam.

Sunday Night

• Organized opposition to Martian movements effectively ends.
• Even torpedo-boat and destroyer crews refuse orders and retreat down the Thames.

Day 5 — Monday: London Evacuation / Peak Advance

Pre-Dawn

• London awakened to danger. Six million people begin fleeing north and east.
• Martian seen at Barnes. Black Smoke cloud advances along Thames and across Lambeth.
• Another Black Smoke bank over Ealing — survivors trapped on Castle Hill.

Daytime

• Martians advance methodically:
  • Do not seem to aim at extermination — aim at “complete demoralization and the destruction of any opposition”
  • Explode powder stores, cut every telegraph, wreck railways — “hamstringing mankind”
  • Seem in no hurry to extend operations — do not come beyond central London this day
  • Sparing of Heat-Ray — “either because they had but a limited supply of material for its production or because they did not wish to destroy the country but only to crush and overawe the opposition”

~1:00 PM

• Black Smoke appears between arches of Blackfriars Bridge.
• Chaos at Pool of London — boats jammed in northern arch of Tower Bridge.

Later Afternoon

• A Martian appears beyond the Clock Tower (Parliament) and wades down the river. Nothing but wreckage above Limehouse.

Night

• Fifth cylinder falls — directly into the house at Sheen where the narrator shelters. House collapses, burying the narrator under ruins adjacent to the new pit.

Day 6 — Tuesday: Consolidation / Machine Construction

Observations from the Ruined House (narrator’s peep-hole)

• Fifth cylinder already opened in the center of the new pit.
• One fighting-machine stands stiff and tall on the farther edge, deserted by its occupant.
• Handling-machine observed in detail for the first time:
  • Metallic spider with five jointed agile legs
  • Extraordinary number of jointed levers, bars, reaching/clutching tentacles
  • Three long tentacles fishing out rods, plates, and bars from the cylinder
  • Motion swift, complex, and perfect — “at first I did not see it as a machine”
  • Tentacles extend telescopically
  • Musical clinking sounds
  • Lifts bars of white aluminium and deposits them in a growing stack
• Excavating-machine observed:
  • Busy little digging mechanism emitting jets of green vapor
  • Works round the pit excavating and embanking methodically
  • Causes regular beating noise and rhythmic shocks
  • Piped and whistled as it worked
  • Appeared to operate without a directing Martian
• Handling-machine assembles a copy of itself from cylinder parts.
• By this point, occupants of no fewer than three fighting-machines have reinforced this pit.
• Second handling-machine completed and serving novel contrivances.

Aluminium Smelting Operation

• Milk-can-shaped apparatus with oscillating pear-shaped receptacle above and circular basin below.
• Clay dug and flung into the pear-shaped receptacle.
• Stream of white powder flows into basin.
• Rusty blackened clinkers removed from middle section.
• Powder directed along a ribbed channel to an unseen receiver.
• Thread of green smoke rises from receiver.
• Output: bars of white aluminium, shining dazzlingly — more than a hundred bars produced between sunset and starlight.
• Mound of bluish dust (byproduct) rises steadily.

First Observed Human Capture and Feeding

• A long tentacle reaches over the shoulder of a fighting-machine to a little cage mounted on its back.
• Something struggling violently lifted against the sky — a man, stout and well-dressed.
• Vanishes behind the mound.
• Silence, then shrieking and sustained cheerful hooting from the Martians.
• (This is the feeding process — blood injected directly via pipette.)

Concurrent Global Events

• Narrator’s brother reaches Chelmsford (Wednesday). News of Martians at Epping. Destruction of Waltham Abbey Powder Mills.
• Ships mass along Essex coast to evacuate refugees.

Day 7 — Wednesday: Expansion / Thunder Child Engagement

Essex Coast

• Three Martians appear stalking seaward along the coast — wading into the sea to intercept fleeing ships between Foulness and the Naze.
• Engagement with HMS Thunder Child (torpedo-ram ironclad):
  • Thunder Child steams headlong at the Martians without firing — this confusion prevents them from using the Heat-Ray immediately
  • One Martian fires a Black Smoke canister — hits larboard side, glances off
  • A Martian raises the Heat-Ray, pointing obliquely downward — bank of steam from water
  • Heat-Ray drives through ship’s iron side “like a white-hot iron rod through paper”
  • Flame flickers through rising steam — the Martian reels and staggers — cut down. Second Martian killed.
  • Thunder Child, still alive — steering intact, engines working — heads straight for a second Martian, Heat-Ray comes to bear, violent explosion — crumples the second Martian like cardboard. Third Martian killed.
  • Thunder Child destroyed in the process.
  • Third Martian’s fate unclear — hidden by steam and Black Smoke.
  • Something flat, broad, and very large seen rushing up into the sky from the western haze — the Martians’ experimental craft?

Seventh cylinder falls — on Primrose Hill.

Days 8–14: Occupation / Industrial Operations

Operations at Sheen Pit (observed by narrator)

• Handling-machines, fighting-machines, and digging machines all active.
• Continuous excavation — pit grows vastly larger.
• Aluminium production ongoing.
• Humans brought to the pit for feeding — narrator observes a lad killed on Day ~10 (third day of his imprisonment).
• A young Martian born on Earth — found attached to its parent, partially budded off (asexual budding reproduction).
• Heavy guns heard on the 4th or 5th night of imprisonment — distant artillery.
• By the 6th day of imprisonment: excavating-machine removed. Only a fighting-machine on the far bank and a handling-machine in the corner remain.

Global Context

• Martians hold all of London.
• Seen at Highgate, Neasdon, Hampstead.
• “Of a night, all over there, Hampstead way, the sky is alive with their lights. It’s like a great city.”
• Two Martians observed carrying something big across Hammersmith.
• Something observed flying at night — believed to be the flying-machine under development.
• Reports that half the British government gathered at Birmingham.
• High explosives being manufactured for automatic mines across Midland counties.

Days 15–18: Martian Sickness / Death

Day 15 (of narrator’s account, ~Day 20 overall)

• Narrator escapes the ruined house through red weed.
• Pit now empty of Martians — all machinery gone.
• Only remains: mound of grayish-blue powder, bars of aluminium, skeletons of consumed humans, black birds fighting over remains.

Narrator’s Journey Through Dead London

• Red weed everywhere, choking rivers and bridges, but already showing signs of disease — whitening, bleaching.
• Dead bodies in streets, covered in Black Smoke residue.
• No living Martians encountered.

Near Regent’s Park — The Death Cry

• “Ulla, ulla, ulla, ulla” — a sobbing alternation of two notes, keeping on perpetually.
• Superhuman note, great waves of sound sweeping down broad roads.
• Source: a Martian fighting-machine near Regent’s Park, standing and yelling — stationary, not moving.
• The sound eventually cuts off abruptly — “like a thunder-clap” of silence.

Near St. John’s Wood

• Wrecked handling-machine found — tentacles bent, smashed, twisted among ruins. Forepart shattered. Had apparently driven blindly straight at a house. Seat smeared with blood. Gnawed Martian gristle left by dogs.
• This machine’s Martian operator had died at the controls — the machine kept moving until it crashed.

Primrose Hill — The Final Redoubt

What Was Found

• The largest place the Martians had made — a mighty space with:
  • Gigantic machines
  • Huge mounds of material
  • Strange shelter-places
  • A great flying-machine — flat and vast — the one they had been experimenting with on Earth’s denser atmosphere
• Approximately fifty Martians found dead:
  • Some in overturned war-machines
  • Some in now-rigid handling-machines
  • A dozen stark and silent, laid in a row
  • “Slain by the putrefactive and disease bacteria against which their systems were unprepared”

Cause of Death

• Terrestrial bacteria — “these germs of disease have taken toll of humanity since the beginning of things”
• “Directly these invaders arrived, directly they drank and fed, our microscopic allies began to work their overthrow”
• “Already when I watched them they were irrevocably doomed, dying and rotting even as they went to and fro”
• No bacteria exist on Mars — the Martians had zero resistance
• Death came through the feeding process — the very act of injecting human blood introduced lethal pathogens

The Flying-Machine

• Lay flat and vast across the far lip of the pit
• They had been experimenting upon Earth’s denser atmosphere when decay and death arrested them
• “Death had come not a day too soon”

Slave Theory Timeline Overlay

Key Anomaly: The Flying-Machine

The Martians already had fighting-machines that could stride 100 feet tall at express-train speed. They had the Heat-Ray and Black Smoke. They had total military dominance over Earth.

Why build a flying-machine?

Not for combat — they didn’t need it. Not for colonization — they weren’t settling. The flying-machine was being built to leave. It was their ticket home. And they died before they could use it.

Under the slave theory: these were laborers sent to prepare a foothold and return. But the blood-feeding was never part of the mission plan — it was the thing that destroyed it.

The Forbidden Blood: Discipline Collapse, Not Protocol

There were never any orders to “feed” on human blood. The blood-feeding was completely forbidden — insanely dangerous and incompatible with mission integrity. Consider the operational reality: these were workers dispatched to build infrastructure on a biologically alien world. Every surface, every organism, every fluid on Earth was a potential contamination vector. Any competent mission commander would have issued a strict non-contact protocol for indigenous biology.

What Wells actually describes is discipline collapse. The Martians did not begin feeding on humans immediately upon arrival. They spent Days 1–4 assembling machines, fighting the military, consolidating resources. The feeding begins only after they have achieved total military dominance and have idle time at the pits. This is not a planned logistics operation — it is opportunistic consumption by unsupervised workers.

The analogy is precise: giving every crew member on a battle cruiser unlimited cocaine and heroin, and expecting them to carry on as normal. Human blood to a Martian — a being from a sterile world with no bacteria, no immune system, no evolved resistance to terrestrial pathogens — was the most dangerous substance imaginable. It was a narcotic and a death sentence simultaneously. And like narcotics, once one started, the behavior spread through the group.

The text supports this reading:

• No feeding apparatus was brought from Mars — they improvised with pipettes
• No systematic harvesting infrastructure was built — humans were grabbed ad hoc from cages on fighting-machine backs
• The feeding is described with “shrieking and sustained cheerful hooting” — intoxication behavior, not clinical resource extraction
• A handling-machine operator died at the controls and crashed blindly into a house — consistent with impairment, not orderly sickness
• The final death scene at Primrose Hill shows Martians dead in overturned machines, slumped in rigid handling-machines — the postures of beings who lost motor control, not who succumbed to slow illness in their quarters

The flying-machine — their return vessel — sat incomplete at Primrose Hill. They had military dominance, unlimited labor capacity, and all materials. The only explanation for mission failure is that the workforce became too impaired to function. They got high on human blood and couldn’t stop.

Their masters on Mars watched through the crystal surveillance network as fifty workers succumbed to terrestrial contamination they had been explicitly warned to avoid. No rescue cylinders were sent. The mission was written off. The blood-addicted labor force was left to die.

They were never going to be allowed to return.

Keywords: #Wotw #War #Worlds #Technical