It is curious to reflect, for example, upon the remarkable legend of the Philosopher's Stone, one of the oldest and most universal beliefs, the origin of which, however far back we penetrate into the records of the past, we do not probably trace its real source.

Soddy wrote that financial debts grew exponentially at compound interest but the real economy was based on exhaustible stocks of fossil fuels. From 1904 to 1914 Soddy was a lecturer at the University of Glasgow and while there he showed that uranium decays to radium. Wells's The World Set Free (1914) which features atomic bombs dropped from biplanes in a war set many years in the future.

Frederick Soddy (2 September 1877 – 22 September 1956) was an English radiochemist and monetary economist who explained with Ernest Rutherford that radioactivity is due to the transmutation of elements now known to involve nuclear reactions.