Herbert George Wells (1866–1946) was born in Bromley, Kent, United Kingdom, on September 21, to servants turned shopkeepers. After a poor education in local private schools he was apprenticed to the drapery trade at age fourteen. After a spell as a pharmacist's assistant Wells became a student-teacher in Midhurst, where he won a scholarship to study for a degree under the biologist Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) at the Normal School of Science in South Kensington. After initially failing to earn a degree, he became a schoolteacher and completed his bachelor of science degree in zoology at the University of London in 1890. He died in London on August 13.

Although eventually Wells became world famous as the author of The Time Machine (1895), The Invisible Man (1897), The War of the Worlds (1898), and other novels, his first two books were science textbooks published in 1893. Throughout the 1890s Wells was a regular...