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) to hoax broadcasts that "the anecdotal nature of such reporting makes it difficult to objectively assess the true extent and intensity of the panic. Bartholomew sees this as yet more evidence that the panic was predominantly a creation of the newspaper industry. In a study published in book form as "The Invasion from Mars" (1940), Princeton professor Hadley Cantril calculated that some six million people heard "The War of the Worlds" broadcast. He estimated that 1.7 million listeners believed the broadcast was an actual news bulletin and, of those, 1.2 million people were frightened or disturbed. Media historians Jefferson Pooley