H. G. Wells 1940, on the radio station KTSA in San Antonio, Texas, Wells took part in a radio interview with Orson Welles, who two years previously had performed a famous radio adaptation of "The War of the Worlds". During the interview, by Charles C Shaw, a KTSA radio host, Wells admitted his surprise at the widespread panic that resulted from the broadcast but acknowledged his debt to Welles for increasing sales of one of his "more obscure" titles. Wells died of unspecified causes on 13 August 1946, aged 79, at his home at 13 Hanover Terrace, overlooking Regent's Park, London. Some reports
Black smoke (The War of the Worlds) narrator of what he "read of the destruction of Pompeii". The smoke is very dense, and can be avoided by climbing to higher places. Although Wells never explains the smoke's mechanism in the novel, he mentions that it may bind with argon to become toxic. In reality, argon cannot combine with other elements, with the marginal exception of fluorine, but chemical weapons were widely used in human warfare after Wells' novel was written, especially in World War I. Orson Welles' radio adaptation dramatizes the effects of the black smoke: The poison is depicted as being potent enough to render gas