Abstract
There is one particular scene in H G Wells' 1898 tale The War of the Worlds that, if only I had remembered it, could have helped me to avoid a bad moment in my laser lab in 1980. In the story – published long before lasers came along in 1960 – the Martians wreak destruction on earthlings with a ray that the protagonist calls an "invisible, inevitable sword of heat", projected as if an "intensely heated finger were drawn... between me and the Martians". In all but name, Wells was describing an infrared laser emitting an invisible straight-line beam – the same type of laser that, decades later in my lab, burned through a favourite shirt and started on my arm.