their eyes and carriage something not altogether degraded below the level of a man." The Ironclads The term "ironclad" was coined in the mid-19th century for steam-propelled ocean warships protected by iron or steel armour plates. By the time of Wells' story the notion became a commonplace of boys' literature in the U.S., in popular weekly series such as that published by Frank Reade, and which featured many 'land ironclads' often with different designs each week. Wells' land ironclads are similar to these, described as steam powered and are "essentially long, narrow, and very strong steel frameworks carrying the engines, and borne on eight pairs of big pedrail wheels, each about ten feet in diameter, each a driving wheel and set upon long axles free to swivel around a common axis. [...] the captain [...] had look-out points at small ports all round the upper edge of the adjustable skirt of twelve-inch ironplating which protected the whole affair, and [...] could also raise or depress a conning-tower set above the port-holes through the centre of the iron top cover." Riflemen are installed in cabins in the "monsters", being "slung along the sides of and behind and before the great main framework". There the men operate what appear to be mechanically targeting, semi-automatic rifles. Impact Contemporaries saw Wells' battle between countrymen "defenders" (who rely on cavalry and entrenched infantry) and attacking townsmen as echoing the Boer War, as well as being something of a re-tread of his 1898 novel The War of the Worlds which also featured a struggle between technologically uneven protagonists. But the story served to contribute to Wells' growing reputation as a "prophet of the future", something that many early socialists and newspaper editors were keen to promote., especially when real tanks first appeared on the battlefield 12 years later in 1916. Wells's story did predict the use of armoured vehicles in combat, but numerous authors (for example Sam Moskowitz in Science Fiction by Gaslight) have mistakenly stated that he also described modern caterpillar treads on a tank and did so before the tank's invention. This is incorrect. Inspiration In his later War and the Future (1917), H. G. Wells specifically acknowledges Bramah Diplock's pedrail wheel as the origin for his idea of an all-terrain armoured vehicle in The Land Ironclads: Indeed, within the story itself the war correspondent, upon his first sight of the machine's pedrails, recalls