But what if you're not a Doc Smith superman and have to make do with generating atomic power without substance X?  That was the nagging little problem for proponents of an atom-powered world in the 1920s.  Einstein had shown that there was oodles of energy locked up in matter, but no one had the slightest idea of how to get it out.  Small wonder, given that the nature of the atom itself was still up for grabs.

The good news was that this frustrating ignorance left loads of room for wild speculation.  The above depiction of an atomic power plant of the future from the 1920s is a glorious example of taking a possibility and running with it.  When I first saw this, my chief puzzlement was what the deuce those onion-shaped thingees on top of the building were?  Great big hoppers filled with atoms or what? 

It turns out that the artist was actually pretty up on the science of the day–at least, as it trickled down through popular articles. 

At left (click to enlarge) is a thumbnail of an electrostatic atom smasher of the day, which used static electricity to shoot hydrogen atoms at a target and bash them to bits; much as our modern particle accelerators do today.  It was a reasonable assumption that if you were going to produce atomic power, it would be by something that worked along the lines of an atom smasher, only bigger, and therefore a future atomic plant would be made up of a series of great big smashers shaped to look similar to the ones of the present .

I particularly like the way the artist dealt with the problem of how to go from atomic to electric power.  Today, we use atomic power to boil water to drive turbines.  In this depiction, the atom smasher fed from cylinders of hydrogen does "something" that drives what seems to be a piston.  This turns a crank, which drives a flywheel via a belt, which in turn powers a dynamo. 

It's downright whimsical.

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