50 Years ago

On the Beach by N. Shute — The theme of “On the Beach” is the extinction of the human race resulting from an atomic war. Everybody dies. Just that. When the novel opens in Melbourne, 1962, nobody is alive in the northern hemisphere. Movements of the atmosphere are steadily carrying lethal particles southwards. Mr Shute has deployed his remarkable imagination as engineer, naval officer and storyteller... On his immense popular following this book can only inflict a haunting distress: one takes off one's hat to him. Mr Shute has limited his canvas: he has taken only five main characters—five very ordinary people at that; and he has pitched the emotional and dramatic tone invariably low. Until the moment when the radiation sickness comes on, everybody sticks to the tamest of domestic preoccupations; and then quietly takes a suicide pill. The effect is hypnotic and also odd. Mr Shute's world ends not, as the epigraph warns, with a whimper, but with a stoical silence, movingly impressive...The moral in so far as Mr Shute states it explicitly, comes via his characters thus: “Maybe we've been too silly to deserve a world like this”...

From Nature, 24 August 1957.

100 Years ago

According to Engineering, an Australian record in wireless telegraphy has been achieved by the successful transmission of messages from H.M.S. Challenger, one of the Australian squadron at present stationed in Hobson's Bay, to the flagship Powerful, which at the time was moored in Farm Cove, Port Jackson. The Challenger was in communication with the flagship by means of wireless telegraphy the whole of her voyage. The longest message was one flashed over a distance of 410 miles in a direct line, and this constitutes an Australian record, as previously never more than 240 miles had been achieved by warships on the Australian station.

From Nature, 22 August 1907.