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(This was written about the time that I was studying The War of the Worlds in ENGL classes, and there was noise about a remake of the movie version of the story.)

People who have never seen these structures, and have only the ill-imagined efforts of artists or the imperfect descriptions of such eye-witnesses as myself to go on, scarcely realise [their] living quality.

And with this Wells, through his nameless Narrator, oddly predicts the trouble that artists would have to present the vital nature of the Martians’ devices in his classic The War of the Worlds.

Somewhere in my room -– where exactly I know not -– I have copious handouts depicting the tripods used by the Martians to lay waste to London, showing in at least two instances clumsy “boilers on stilts” and “pagodas on the rampage”. Roger Dean’s birdlike “terrorpods” (so called because they graced the box of said computer game) appear on the cover of my Signet Classic printing. Bulbous, pseudo-insect contraptions adorn the cover of Jeff Wayne’s musical version and lumber about in the computer game. George Pal wanted his “flying saucers” to hover on great pillars of electricity, but was thwarted for reasons of safety. And the less said about the Marvel comic book monstrosity, the better!

The “rampaging pagodas” perhaps come the closest to showing the “most awefull liveliness” of the machines as compared to the sluggishness of the naked Martian. More to the point, you would observe (if only I could find the blasted handouts!) a lack of swivels and pivots which abound in other renditions:

…[Among] all the things they brought to Earth there is no trace or suggestion of their use of wheels… singularly little use is made of the fixed pivot… with circular motions thereabout confined to one plane. Almost all the joints of the machinery present a complicated system of moving parts sliding over small but beautifully curved friction bearings.

The Narrator then goes on to observe about the electrically powered “muscles” that act as long linkages. One can imagine these “muscles” also doing duty as suspension components, and were undoubtedly used in their manipulating tentacles, probably in groups of three.

…[The] brazen hood that surmounted it moved to and fro with the inevitable suggestion of a head looking about. Behind the main body was a huge mass of white metal like a gigantic fisherman’s basket…

Since Martians did everything in threes, it makes sense that a fighting machine would be tripartite: The hood (or “cab” if you prefer) housing the Martian driver would be separate from the machinery driving the legs, and no doubt the power plant was mounted behind the hood section, or between the hood on top and the legs on the bottom.

The gait of the machine is described as being like “a [three-legged] milking stool tilted and bowled violently along the ground”, but I suspect this is inaccurate. Some sort of swivel would be required for the leg assembly to rotate through 360°; and swivels were unknown to the Martians.

It is more likely that one leg was used as a pivot, with the rearmost leg propelling and the foremost swinging around and forward to a landing place. The legs would be most certainly telescopic, if not blessed with some form of knee joint cum shock absorbers, with whatever suspension elements used to keep the power plant and Martian on a relatively even keel and possibly acting as a counterbalance.

However, this does not mean that the leg assembly rotated around a central pivot point. This would involve a swivel or ball and socket joint, which the Martians lacked. Also, there is the matter of connecting the legs to a power supply without having cables and pipes eventually tearing from stress. Therefore, one can imagine a rapid swivelling of the machine’s “hips” as the leg assembly was rotated first one way, then the other, the foremost leg becoming the pivot point each time.

The exact mechanism for allowing the leg to “swing” would probably involve use of the marvelous mechanical muscles described by the narrator. Recently I saw a program segment depicting the antics of machines using polymers that almost exactly fit Well’s descriptions of the Martian machine musculature: plastics that, on application of an electric current, changed shape. One can envisage the tops of the “legs” being pulled hither and yon by a set of muscles, while further down another set of linkages endeavors to keep the leg in the center of a mounting ring, thus acting as shock absorbers and pivots.