CHAPTER XIX. CERTAIN FIRST PRINCIPLES

by H. G. Wells

“What’s going on?” Kemp asked as he stepped into the room, where the Invisible Man was waiting.

“Nothing,” came the reply.

“But, come on! The mess?”

“Just a little temper,” the Invisible Man said. “I forgot about this arm, and it’s sore.”

“You seem to have a knack for that sort of thing.”

“I do.”

Kemp crossed the room and picked up the shards of broken glass. “The truth is out about you,” he said, standing with the glass in hand. “Everything that happened in Iping and down the hill. The world knows about its invisible citizen now. But no one knows you’re here.”

The Invisible Man swore under his breath.

“The secret’s out. I assume it was a secret. I don’t know what your plans are, but I’m eager to help.”

The Invisible Man sank onto the bed.

“There’s breakfast upstairs,” Kemp said, trying to keep the mood light, and he felt relieved when his unusual guest agreed to follow. He led the way up the narrow staircase to the small dining area.

“Before we do anything else,” Kemp said, settling into a chair after a quick glance out the window, “I need to understand more about this invisibility of yours.” He spoke with the air of someone who had a lot to say. His doubts about the sanity of the entire situation flickered and vanished as he looked across the table at Griffin—a headless, handless figure in a dressing gown, wiping unseen lips with a serviette.

“It’s simple enough—and believable enough,” Griffin said, setting the serviette aside and resting his invisible head on an invisible hand.

“Sure, it seems that way to you, but—” Kemp chuckled.

“Well, yes; it did seem incredible at first. But now, good grief! ... We’ll accomplish great things yet! I first stumbled upon the idea at Chesilstowe.”

“Chesilstowe?”

“I went there after leaving London. You know I dropped medicine to pursue physics? No? Well, I did. Light fascinated me.”

“Ah!”

“Optical density! The whole field is a web of riddles, with solutions glimmering just out of reach. And being only twenty-two and full of enthusiasm, I thought, ‘I’ll dedicate my life to this. It’s worth it.’ You know how foolish we are at that age?”

“Fools then or fools now,” Kemp replied.

“As if knowing could ever satisfy a person!

“But I worked hard—like a dog. And barely six months into my research, light broke through one of the barriers—blindingly! I discovered a general principle of pigments and refraction—a formula, a geometrical expression involving four dimensions. Ordinary people, even average mathematicians, have no idea what a general expression can mean to someone studying molecular physics. In the books—the books that tramp has hidden—there are wonders, miracles! But this wasn’t just a method; it was an idea that could lead to a method to lower the refractive index of a substance, solid or liquid, to that of air—at least for all practical purposes.”

“Wow!” Kemp said. “That’s strange! But I still don’t quite see ... I can understand how you could ruin a valuable gem, but personal invisibility is a whole different story.”

“Exactly,” Griffin replied. “But think about it: visibility depends on how visible objects interact with light. A body either absorbs light, reflects it, refracts it, or does all three. If it doesn’t reflect, refract, or absorb light, it can’t be seen. You see an opaque red box, for example, because the color absorbs some light and reflects the rest—the red part—to you. If it didn’t absorb any specific part of the light but reflected all of it, it would appear as a shining white box. Silver! A diamond box wouldn’t absorb much light or reflect much from its surface, but in certain spots, where the surfaces are just right, light would be reflected and refracted, creating a brilliant display of flashing reflections and translucency—a sort of skeleton of light. A glass box wouldn’t be as brilliant or as clearly visible as a diamond box, because it would reflect and refract less light. Do you see? From certain angles, you could see right through it. Some types of glass are more visible than others; a box made of flint glass would shine brighter than one made of ordinary window glass. A very thin piece of common glass would be hard to spot in dim light because it absorbs very little light and refracts and reflects even less. And if you placed a sheet of common white glass in water, or even more so in a denser liquid than water, it would nearly vanish because light passing from water to glass is only slightly refracted or reflected. It’s almost as invisible as a jet of coal gas or hydrogen in the air. For exactly the same reason!”

“Yes,” Kemp said, “that makes sense.”

“And here’s something you need to understand, Kemp. When a sheet of glass shatters and is ground into powder, it becomes much more visible while it's suspended in the air. Eventually, it turns into an opaque white powder. This happens because the process of grinding increases the number of surfaces the light interacts with, causing more refraction and reflection. A solid sheet of glass has only two surfaces, but in the powdered form, light hits each tiny grain, and very little of it passes straight through. However, if you mix that white powdered glass with water, it disappears. That’s because the powdered glass and water have nearly the same refractive index, meaning light doesn’t bend or reflect much as it moves from one to the other.

“You can make the glass invisible by placing it in a liquid that has a similar refractive index. A transparent object becomes invisible when it’s submerged in a medium that has almost the same refractive index. If you think about it for just a moment, you’ll realize that powdered glass could also vanish in air if its refractive index matched that of air. In that case, there would be no bending or reflection of light as it moved from glass to air.”

“Yes, yes,” Kemp replied. “But a person isn’t powdered glass!”

“No,” Griffin said. “He’s even more transparent!”

“That’s ridiculous!”

“Coming from a doctor, that’s quite amusing! Have you really forgotten everything you learned in physics over the past ten years? Just consider how many things are transparent but don’t seem that way. Take paper, for example. It’s made of transparent fibers, yet it appears white and opaque for the same reason that powdered glass does. If you coat the paper with oil, filling in the gaps between the fibers so that light only reflects off the surfaces, it becomes as clear as glass. And it’s not just paper—cotton, linen, wool, wood, even bone, flesh, hair, nails, and nerves, Kemp. The entire structure of a human being, except for the red of blood and the black pigment in hair, is made up of transparent, colorless tissue. It takes so little to make us visible to one another. Most of the fibers in a living creature are no more opaque than water.”

“Good heavens!” Kemp exclaimed. “Of course! Just last night, I was thinking about sea larvae and jellyfish!”

“Now you’ve got me! That’s exactly what I was thinking about a year after I left London—six years ago. But I kept it to myself. I had to work under terrible conditions. Oliver, my professor, was a scientific fraud, a journalist at heart, a thief of ideas—always snooping around! You know how the scientific world operates. I refused to publish anything that would let him share the credit. I kept working, inching closer to turning my formula into a real experiment. I didn’t tell a soul because I wanted to reveal my work to the world with a bang and become famous overnight. I even explored pigments to fill in some gaps. Then, unexpectedly, I stumbled upon a discovery in physiology.”

“Really?”

“You know the red pigment in blood? It can be made white—colorless—and still retain all its functions!”

Kemp gasped in disbelief.

Griffin stood up and began pacing the small study. “You can understand why you’d be shocked. I remember that night vividly. It was late, and during the day, I had to deal with the clueless students. Sometimes I worked until dawn. The idea struck me suddenly, fully formed in my mind. I was alone in the lab, the tall lights burning brightly and quietly. In all my significant moments, I’ve been alone. ‘One could make an animal—a tissue—transparent! One could make it invisible! Everything except the pigments—I could be invisible!’ I realized what it meant to have such knowledge as an albino. It was overwhelming. I left my work and stared out at the stars through the big window. ‘I could be invisible!’ I repeated to myself.

“To achieve something like that would be to transcend magic. I envisioned all the possibilities that invisibility could offer—a sense of mystery, power, freedom. I saw no drawbacks. Just think about it! I, a shabby, broke demonstrator, stuck teaching fools in a provincial college, could suddenly become... this. I ask you, Kemp, if _you_... Anyone would have jumped at that chance. I worked for three years, and every mountain of difficulty I climbed revealed another one waiting for me. The endless details! The frustration! A professor, a provincial professor, always snooping. ‘When are you going to publish this work of yours?’ was his constant question. And the students, the limited resources! I endured three years of that—

“And after three years of secrecy and frustration, I discovered that completing it was impossible—impossible.”

“How?” Kemp asked.

“Money,” the Invisible Man said, turning back to gaze out the window once more.

He spun around suddenly. “I stole from the old man—my father.

“The money wasn’t even his, and then he took his own life.”