Winston Churchill’s essay on alien life found

During the Second World War, Churchill supported the development of radar and Britain’s nuclear programme. He met regularly with scientists such as Bernard Lovell, the father of radio astronomy. An exchange about the use of statistics to fight German U-boats captures his attitude. Air Chief Marshal Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris complained, “Are we fighting this war with weapons or slide rules?” Churchill replied, “Let’s try the slide rule.” evolution and cells in newspapers and magazines. In a 1931 article in The Strand Magazine entitled ‘Fifty Years Hence’, he described fusion power: “If the hydrogen atoms in a pound of water could be prevailed upon to combine together and form helium, they would suffice to drive a thousand-horsepower engine for a whole year.” His writing was likely to have been informed by conversations with his friend and later adviser, the physicist Frederick Lindemann. Winston Churchill is best known as a wartime leader, one of the most influential politicians of the twentieth century, a clear-eyed historian and an eloquent orator. He was also passionate about science and technology. Aged 22, while stationed with the British Army in India in 1896, he read Darwin’s On the Origin of Species and a primer on physics. In the 1920s and 1930s, he wrote popular-science essays on topics such as Winston Churchill at his desk in 1939: a prolific writer, he covered scientific topics as diverse as evolution and fusion power. K U R T H U TT O N /P IC TU R E P O ST /G ET TY