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Here it is, explained like you are 10:
How do you fit the whole history of the world into one book you can actually finish? H. G. Wells tried, and he starts long before people, with the Earth itself and the first living things. Then he walks you through empires, religions, wars, and inventions, always asking what it all means. Wells writes clearly and thinks big, so even huge events feel understandable. You will close it seeing our own time differently.
H. G. Wells was already famous for scientific romances when he turned to history, convinced that ordinary people needed one clear account of the whole human story. This short history, published in 1922, was his brisk companion to a much larger outline. It assumes no special training, only curiosity and a willingness to think in very long stretches of time.
Sixty seven brief chapters carry the reader from the early earth and the first living things, through ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome, the rise of the great religions, the Mongol empires, the discovery voyages and the industrial age, closing amid the wreckage and hopes that followed the Great War. Wells writes as a teacher thinking aloud, always asking what changed and why it mattered.
His facts have been revised and his confidence is very much of its moment, but the scale of the attempt still exhilarates. Wells treats history as the shared memory of one species, not a parade of kings. Readers who want a fast, intelligent survey that connects geology, empire and ideas in a single sitting will find this an ideal first map.
H. G. Wells, already famous as a novelist and prophet of the future, published A Short History of the World in 1922 as a brisk companion to his larger Outline of History. In sixty seven short chapters he moves from the earth before life through early humans, empires, religions, and nations to the First World War. It offers one clear, fast moving story of humanity, written for the general reader.
H. G. Wells opens with a warning: the story of our world is still very imperfectly known, and only a couple of hundred years ago most readers believed it had begun in 4004 BC. His answer is a single sweep in 67 short chapters, starting not with kings but with the world in space, the world in time, and the beginnings of life itself.
The early chapters move through the ages of fishes, coal swamps, reptiles, birds and mammals to monkeys, apes, the Neanderthaler and the first true men. Only then come cultivation, writing, Sumeria and Egypt, nomads and seagoing peoples, Greece and Rome, and the long political history that follows. The closing chapters reach the expansion of the United States, the rise of Germany, the Great War of 1914 to 1918, revolution and famine in Russia, and a final chapter on the political and social reconstruction of the world.
There is no preface to slow the start. Wells writes as a popular educator in a hurry, and the speed is the pleasure: deep time and recent politics held in one continuous, opinionated narrative.
Edition: Text: Project Gutenberg ebook 35461.
The first chapter
The story of our world is a story that is still very imperfectly known. A couple of hundred years ago men possessed the history of little more than the last three thousand years. What happened before that time was a matter of legend and speculation. Over a large part of the civilized world it was believed and taught that the world had been created suddenly in 4004 B.C., though authorities differed as to whether this had occurred in the spring or autumn of that year. This fantastically precise misconception was based upon a too literal interpretation of the Hebrew Bible, and upon rather arbitrary theological assumptions connected therewith. Such ideas have long since been abandoned by religious teachers, and it is universally recognized that the universe in which we live has to all appearances existed for an enormous period of time and possibly for endless time. Of course there may be deception in these appearances, as a room may be made to seem endless by putting mirrors facing each other at either end. But that the universe in which we live has existed only for six or seven thousand years may be regarded as an altogether exploded idea.
The earth, as everybody knows nowadays, is a spheroid, a sphere slightly compressed, orange fashion, with a diameter of nearly 8,000 miles. Its spherical shape has been known at least to a limited number of intelligent people for nearly 2,500 years, but before that time it was supposed to be flat, and various ideas which now seem fantastic were entertained about its relations to the sky and the stars and planets. We know now that it rotates upon its axis (which is about 24 miles shorter than its equatorial diameter) every twenty-four hours, and that this is the cause of the alternations of day and night, that it circles about the sun in a slightly distorted and slowly variable oval path in a year. Its distance from the sun varies between ninety-one and a half millions at its nearest and ninety-four and a half million miles.
About the earth circles a smaller sphere, the moon, at an average distance of 239,000 miles. Earth and moon are not the only bodies to travel round the sun. There are also the planets, Mercury and Venus, at distances of thirty-six and sixty-seven millions of miles; and beyond the circle of the earth and disregarding a belt of numerous smaller bodies, the planetoids, there are Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune at mean distances of 141, 483, 886, 1,782, and 1,793 millions of miles respectively. These figures in millions of miles are very difficult for the mind to grasp. It may help the reader’s imagination if we reduce the sun and planets to a smaller, more conceivable scale.
If, then, we represent our earth as a little ball of one inch diameter, the sun would be a big globe nine feet across and 323 yards away, that is about a fifth of a mile, four or five minutes’ walking. The moon would be a small pea two feet and a half from the world. Between earth and sun there would be the two inner planets, Mercury and Venus, at distances of one hundred and twenty-five and two hundred and fifty yards from the sun. All round and about these bodies there would be emptiness until you came to Mars, a hundred and seventy-five feet beyond the earth; Jupiter nearly a mile away, a foot in diameter; Saturn, a little smaller, two miles off; Uranus four miles off and Neptune six miles off. Then nothingness and nothingness except for small particles and drifting scraps of attenuated vapour for thousands of miles. The nearest star to earth on this scale would be 40,000 miles away.
These figures will serve perhaps to give one some conception of the immense emptiness of space in which the drama of life goes on.
For in all this enormous vacancy of space we know certainly of life only upon the surface of our earth. It does not penetrate much more than three miles down into the 4,000 miles that separate us from the centre of our globe, and it does not reach more than five miles above its surface. Apparently all the limitlessness of space is otherwise empty and dead.
The deepest ocean dredgings go down to five miles. The highest recorded flight of an aeroplane is little more than four miles. Men have reached to seven miles up in balloons, but at a cost of great suffering. No bird can fly so high as five miles, and small birds and insects which have been carried up by aeroplanes drop off insensible far below that level.
Source: Project Gutenberg. Published 1922. Author died 1946. Public domain worldwide. Share this book: WhatsApp
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