X-rays and radioactivity were in the scientific air when Robert Cromie created a novel called The Crack of Doom (1895) about a crazy scientist who invents a bomb with “vast stores of etheric energy locked up in the huge atomic warehouse of this planet”. The book was praised by H.G. Wells, who later actually made the first reference to an atomic bomb in the last part of his science fiction trilogy The World Set Free. There another scientist manages to convert the substance “carolinum” into three atomic bombs which contain great destruction and which would continue to explode indefinitely.
After the discovery of radioactivity, there was a sense that physics was at the point of a breakthrough which would transform warfare. Just three years later in the Yale Review, Simeon Strunsky takes up Wells and continues the train of thought in his article The Prolongation of Peace “When you can drop just one atomic bomb and wipe out Paris or Berlin, war will have become monstrous and impossible.” He then continues, “After the murder of women and babes from the air, it is no longer easy to believe that a mechanical device like the atomic bomb will keep men from fighting forevermore.”
The word atomic bomb was used over the next thirty years, but not very frequently. Certainly Leo Szilard read the The Word Set Free two years before discovering just how to set free the power in a chain reaction, the idea of which he patented in 1934. But it was only with the actual use of the bombs at the end of the Second World War on Hiroshima and Nagasaki that the phase really came into general use world-wide. In that year, there was a huge leap from virtually no use at all to something like 5% of all fiction books including a reference to atomic bombs.
