Science fiction is often credited with pioneering many scientific innovations, from satellites to the atomic bomb. Stories of space-suited heroes battling bug-eyed monsters were common fodder in science fiction magazines of the 1930s, decades before the first manned spacecraft were launched. When did science fiction pioneer the idea?
The first mention of a protective suit designed for moving about in the airless vacuum of space I could find was in Edison’s Conquest of Mars, by Garrett Putman Serviss (1898). In this crazy story, which is kind of a sequel to H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds, fame inventor Thomas Edison organizes an expedition to launch a pre-emptive strike on the red planet. Of course, he invents all the necessary equipment, including space suits.
“While it was the intention to remain as much as possible within the cars, yet since it was probable that necessity would arise for occasionally quitting the interior of the electrical ships, Mr. Edison had provided for this emergency by inventing an air-tight dress constructed somewhat after the manner of a diver’s suit, but of much lighter material. Each ship was provided with several of these suits, by wearing which one could venture outside the car even when it was beyond the atmosphere of the earth.”
After that, there was a lull in stories requiring self-contained outfits for space travel. H. G. Wells’ First Men in the Moon (1900) provided a convenient atmosphere on the moon for his explorers. And of course, Edgar Rice Burroughs’ heroes bounced around Mars and elsewhere nearly naked.
The next, and possibly the most influential mention of space suits I found was in Amazing Stories, May 1929. In The Moon Strollers by J. Rogers Ullrich, a brilliant young engineer named Scofield proposes an expedition to the moon, using “Goddard rockets.” He explains how he intends to explore the Moon’s surface:
“What would be needed, is a sort of metallic suit, which each traveler could don, a suit impervious to the intense cold of space and containing an adequate air supply to last at least four or five hours at a time. I have in mind a contrivance resembling somewhat that recent invention for deep sea diving. Let us call it the ‘moon stroller.’ It could be of heavy construction since objects on the moon’s surface weigh but 1/6 of that on the earth. Probably of pressed steel, electrically welded and insulated with an elaborate cellular line of vacuum units. With the stroller I would have oxygen cylinders, escape valves, and a chemical purifier to absorb the poisonous exhalations.”
A pretty thorough working out of the idea, I think.
Some have credited the Buck Rogers comic strip with introducing space suits. But at the time of The Moon Strollers, Buck was still waltzing about in jodhpurs and his adventures were solidly Earthbound.
Within a year or two of Ullrich’s story, space suits began to appear commonly in science fiction stories. In The Sargasso of Space in the September 1931 issue of Astounding, Edmond Hamilton featured space men with glass helmets.
“The debris among the pack’s wrecks was just as varied, holding fragments of metal, dark meteors of differing size—and many human bodies. Among these were some clad in the insulated space-suits, with their transparent glassite helmets.”
Hamilton can’t claim the distinction of introducing glass helmets, however, since in The Disc-Men of Jupiter, by Manly Wade Wellman, published the same month in Wonder Stories, featured similar devices.
“The airlock’s inner door then slid open, and the newcomers stepped into the ship’s interior, unscrewing their transparent helmets as they did so.”
It’s helpful to know that, during the 1920s and into the 1930s, balloon aeronauts were attempting to break the oxygen barrier – to soar safely past the point where supplementary oxygen was needed to survive. Part of this effort was dedicated to the development of suits that would provide the oxygen and keep the wearer warm in the frigid realms. Undoubtably, these public efforts would have influenced science fiction writers and artists and increased the popularity of the idea.
It’s possible I may have overlooked a story or two, if so, I’m open to amending this article.
