Embankment machine (The War of the Worlds) Embankment machine (The War of the Worlds) The Embankment machine (also known as the Digging machine) is one of the fictional machines used by the Martians in the H. G. Wells' classic science fiction novel "The War of the Worlds". It is an excavator, and is one of the four types of machine the Martians bring with them when they invade Earth, the three others being the fighting machine, the flying machine, and the handling machine. The embankment machine is featured only once in the novel in very little detail. Rather than describe its appearance, Well's mentions it in passing
The War of the Worlds (radio drama) because "The Mercury Theatre on the Air", an unsponsored CBS cultural program with a relatively small audience, ran at the same time as the NBC Red Network's popular "Chase and Sanborn Hour" featuring ventriloquist Edgar Bergen. At the time, many Americans assumed that a significant number of "Chase and Sanborn" listeners changed stations when the first comic sketch ended and a musical number by Nelson Eddy began and then tuned in "The War of the Worlds" after the opening announcements, but historian A. Brad Schwartz, after studying hundreds of letters from people who heard "The War of the Worlds", as