Fighting machine (The War of the Worlds) the machines of Wells' novel. The fighting machines walk upon legs (four legs instead of three) and carry a weapon above their head on a neck, resembling the Martian heat-ray from George Pal's 1953 film adaptation. Fighting machine (The War of the Worlds) The Fighting Machine (also known as "Tripod") is one of the fictional machines used by the Martians in H.G. Wells' 1898 classic science fiction novel "The War of the Worlds". It is a fast-moving, three-legged walker, reported to be 100 feet tall, with multiple whip-like tentacles used for grasping, and two lethal weapons: the heat-ray and a
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