In 1897, H.G. Wells made literary history by creating the first scientific stealth human being--an invisible man.  This invisibility was different from its predecessors because Wells, as Bernard Bergonzi says, had the “ability to combine mythic or legendary subjects with rational-seeming, scientific explanation.”   Instead of a magical genie or an ancient ring of invisibility, Wells’ character Griffin in The Invisible Man develops a pill to make him literally invisible to others.  He knows that “to do such a thing would transcend magic.”  Griffin goes from a fascination with optical density to an obsession that leads him to thievery and murder.  His discovery of the secret to invisibility is accidental: “And I had hardly worked and thought about the matter six months before light came through one of the meshes suddenly--blindingly!  I found a general principle of pigments and refractions, --a formula, a geometrical expression involving four dimensions.”

     A formula becomes a reality when Griffin first tests his discovery on a piece of wool.  According to Griffin, “It was the strangest thing in the world to see it in the flicker of the flashes soft and white, and then to watch it fade like a wreath of smoke and vanish...I put my hand into the emptiness, and there was the thing as solid as ever.”   After seeing that his experiment has worked, Griffin makes his neighbor’s cat invisible in the same fashion.  He says that, “the process failed...in two particulars. These were the claws and the pigment stuff--what is it?--at the back of the eye in a cat...the tapetum.”  Conflict with his landlord leads Griffin to make himself invisible in an effort to escape impending financial difficulty and legal action.  But this decision is irreversible once he has undergone the painstaking process.

     Griffin describes his steps to invisibility in scientific and systemic terms.  An albino, the physicist takes “drugs that decolourise [sic] the blood,” then spends “a night of racking anguish, sickness and fainting,” and finds in the morning that “[my] hands had become as clouded glass,...growing clearer and thinner as the day went by...”  He continues: “...until at last I could see the sickly disorder of my room through them, though I closed my transparent eyelids.  My limbs became glassy, the bones and arteries faded, vanished, and the little white nerves went last.”  When Griffin goes to look at himself in the mirror, he can see nothing but “an attenuated pigment...behind the retina of my eyes, fainter than mist.”  He knows to expect the pigment behind his retina because of his experience with the cat’s “tapetum.” His last and essential step is to lower his body’s refractive index “between two radiating centres of a sort of ethereal vibration.”

     When Griffin speaks of the “ethereal vibration,” he has in mind the nineteenth-century concept of the “luminiferous aether.” This idea saw space not as an “empty” space, but a rarefied medium of very elementary energy through which electromagnetic forms such as gravity or light propagated. Wells, aware of the latest theoretical achievements of Rutherford and Maxwell, recognizes that this aether, like the light itself which propagates through it from radiant, energetic sources such as the sun, is as much a wave phenomenon as a particle phenomenon.  Thus, the “ethereal vibration” could be an artificial instance of these phenomena that Griffin has somehow caused, allowing him to subsequently control the propagation of light within the medium of the aether.  Just as matter is existent or embedded in three-dimensional space, so it seems that moving light is existent or embedded in four-dimensional space.  This helps explain Griffin’s mention of a “formula, a geometrical expression involving four dimensions,”  since nineteenth-century speculative physics viewed the aether as a fourth-dimensional reality.

     The fourth dimension, while only mentioned briefly in The Invisible Man, is evidently a subject of great interest to Wells (as to all Victorian physicists and science fiction writers), who explores this in “The Plattner Story” and The Time Machine.  In “The Plattner Story,” a schoolmaster named Gottfried Plattner performs a scientific experiment and unexpectedly blasts himself into the fourth dimension.  The Time Traveller in The Time Machine voices his fears about existence in a fourth dimension when he says, “But to come to a stop involved the jamming of myself...meant bringing my atoms into such intimate contact with those of the obstacles that a profound chemical reaction...would result, and blow myself and my apparatus out of all possible dimensions--into the unknown.”  In Griffin’s case, invisibility is perhaps enabled because light itself is no longer flowing from a three-dimensional illuminated object out into space, which is permeated by the four-dimensional aether.  The two “radiating centres,” or radiant energy sources, create an interference pattern within the wave-forms of the luminiferous aether.  Interference patterns amount to the filtering out or amplifying of correspondent wave forms.  Thus Wells may mean that the four-dimensional interference, caused by two wave-form sources in the form of “radiating centres,” causes the filtering out of light itself, which moves by nature in four-dimensional reality.

     But Griffin himself tries for a more direct exploration of his methods.  In order to explain what makes something invisible, Griffin in turn focuses on light by telling his fellow scientist Kemp what makes something visible.  As he says, “Visibility depends on the action of the visible bodies of light.  Either a body absorbs light, or it reflects or refracts it, or it does all three.  If it neither reflects nor refracts nor absorbs light, it cannot of itself be visible.”  Visible light to humans is only a very small portion of the electromagnetic spectrum.  Most electromagnetic waves are essentially colors invisible to the human eye. These waves cause electrons to oscillate, and the way the electrons react to the electromagnetic push is what determines whether matter can absorb, reflect, or refract light.  According to Pat Murphy and Paul Doherty in “The Science of Invisibility,” most objects absorb some visible light, whose frequency determines the object’s color.  As Murphy and Doherty describe what Griffin has to overcome,
                    "To become invisible in Wells’ tale, the would-be invisible man had to deal with
                             biological pigments, compounds that absorb light.  The main pigments in the
                             human body are hemoglobin and melanin.  Since the invisible man was an albino
                             and his body produced no melanin, his job was easier.  He just had to deal with
                             the hemoglobin, the compound in blood that absorbs oxygen.  So he discovers
                             a chemical that bleached hemoglobin, rendering it colorless, while allowing it to
                             retain its oxygen transporting function."

As Murphy and Doherty note, the invisible man could have stopped with bleaching hemoglobin and made a fortune with a product that removed blood stains instantly.   But this is only the first step to becoming virtually invisible.

     Griffin would also have to eliminate the problems of reflection and refraction.  Glass windows are visible because light reflects off the surface, and clouds look white because the water droplets scatter light.  In Griffin’s special case, his albino skin looks white because of clear skin proteins which scatter light.  Even though light may shine through an object such as a lens, the light which passes through is still bent or refracted.  The distortion of the view is how one knows not to try to put his hands through an object like a clear crystal ball.

     When light shines through a specific material, its speed depends on the index of refraction for that material.  This ratio of “the speed of light in a vacuum to the speed of light in a material,”  when equal to that of the medium, can cause an object to seemingly disappear.  But making the indices of refraction equal to each other can be very difficult, if not impossible.  The index of refraction for a human body is greater than 1.3 and the index of refraction of air is 1.003, which is a huge difference.  Griffin’s method of closing this gap is to “place the transparent object whose refractive index was to be lowered between,” as I have so far noted, “two radiating centres of a sort of ethereal vibration.”  This is compared to a roentgen ray, which is now called an x-ray.  Griffin uses this ray to reduce the index of refraction of body tissues somehow, although this explanation is not very credible to scientists.   So much for Griffin’s direct explanations.

     But according to Roslynn Haynes, many literary critics of Wells failed to fully understand the nature of the scientific method and twentieth-century physics. Up until the twentieth century, a “prevailing mechanistic view of the universe obliged scientists to cultivate detachment and rigourous objectivity.”  But Heisenberg’s 1927 Uncertainty Principle made this concept of science implausible.  Instead, empirical science “involves a very large element of induction, and educated guess, which leaps beyond the observed facts and suggests a further hypothesis or a new synthesis of previously-known facts.”   Wells offers “some novel postulate and proceeds to demonstrate with great precision the consequences and implications, so that, if we are once led to accept his initial supposition, we can scarcely dispute the conclusion.”   Thus if we accept Griffin’s initial postulate that he can make himself invisible by dealing with absorption, reflection, and refraction of light, then it is hard to argue with the conclusion.

     Besides his solid training from Thomas Huxley and other teachers at the Royal College of Science,  the ultimate foundation for Wells’ knowledge of optics comes from Isaac Newton’s Opticks.  In this significant source of classical physical science, Newton gives a survey of his eighteenth-century knowledge about all aspects of light.  Well’s understanding of reflection and refraction of light is the same as that of Newton’s: “For here the thickness of the Glass determines whether that Power by which Glass acts upon Light shall cause it to be reflected, or suffer it to be transmitted....And, Thirdly, because those Surfaces of transparent Bodies which have the greatest refracting power, reflect the greatest quantity of Light...”  Scientific poets in Newton’s time often based many of their ideas on Newton’s Opticks as Henry Brooke did in Universal Beauty. The following passage is a poem of Newtonian theories of the reflection, refraction, and inflection of light:
                   How, as a talisman of magic frame,
                           This atmosphere conveys th’ enlight’ning beam,
                           Reflects, inflects, refracts the orient ray;
                           Anticipating sheds the rising day--
                           High from this seat the solar glory heaves,
                           (Whose image fires the horizontal waves)
                           Abridging, shears the sable robe of night,
                           And through the globe protracts the cheerful light;
                           With sweet preambling twilight blends the shade,
                           And gently lets our evening beam recede.

Modern ideas of light and vision are obviously more sophisticated, but from this classical tradition of light comes speculation on how human invisibility can be achieved.

     Like the writings of the eighteenth-century English metaphysical poets, Wells’ rationale for Griffin’s invisibility sounds convincing as he has a distinctive “ability to use scientific language as a form of rhetoric.”  But despite his extensive scientific background, there is a vagueness about Griffin’s progress to invisibility.   Wells himself, in a letter to friend Arnold Bennett, admits that human invisibility is a scientific absurdity.  As he says,
                  "There is another difficulty...which really makes the whole story impossible.
                          I believe it to be insurmountable.  Any alteration in the refractive index of the
                          eye lenses would make vision impossible.  Without such alteration the eyes
                          would be visible as glassy globules.  And for vision it is also necessary that
                          there should also be visual purple behind the retina and an opaque cornea and iris."

Murphy and Doherty add that Griffin would also have problems staying equally invisible in the winter.  “When air changes temperature, its index of refraction changes...So if Wells’ character became invisible on a hot summer day, he wouldn’t be quite so invisible in the chill of winter.  He’d be visible in the same way that the hot air rising from a vent on a cold day is visible.”   This is another good reason for Griffin to go to Algiers, where, as he knows, the hot sun allows an invisible man to walk about unclothed and undetected.

     Griffin’s most obvious problems with invisibility are daily matters, such as food. If he drinks some beer, a stomach-shaped blob of beer would be visible until digested.  Because his undigested food remains visible,  he has to hide when he wishes to eat and still remain undetected. In reality, the bodily processes of digestion and excretion “would replace invisible cellular components and body fluids with visible materials from food.”

     Another major problem for Griffin is the fact that his clothing does not attain invisibility while on his body.   When he does wear clothes, they seem to float in midair. While the techno-gadget in the movie Predator can transfer invisibility to an object merely by being held, Griffin must remain naked.  One would think that Griffin should have thought ahead and made some invisible clothes as well, but Wells explains this by Griffin’s rush to destroy his apparatus before the landlord arrived.  His footsteps in the mud and vegetation are visible, as well as anything which he holds.  Carrying money that he has stolen becomes quite a visible dilemma for the invisible thief, so he scares a tramp into serving him.   Housing is a problem, since no one would rent a room to an invisible man.  So when Griffin is tired, he must either sleep in a desolate place or in someone else’s bed, like Kemp’s.  Wells does not mention that Griffin has actual problems sleeping, but it would be hard for Griffin to sleep with what would amount to his eyes being open. Arnold Bennett, in his review of The Invisible Man, says that “if the man was invisible his eyelids must have been transparent, and his eyes, without their natural shield, must speedily have become useless from simple irritation.”   Griffin says that he watched his hands “grow clearer and thinner as the day went by, until at last I could see the sickly disorder of my room through them, though I closed my transparent eyelids.”   It does not matter if he closes his eyes or not--he can still see through his eyelids.  Thus, along with eye irritation at all times, sleeping would be a problem even if he was simply distracted by things around him while he attempted to sleep.

     In his novel, Wells presents many practical consequences of invisibility.  While he is clearly interested in the psychological effects of invisibility on Griffin and others, the practical aspect is quite significant.  There seem to be no ultimately rewarding advantages to Griffin’s newfound power, although he can attack people unseen and steal money.  As Griffin puts it, “This invisibility, in fact, is only good in two cases: It’s useful in getting away, it’s useful in approaching.” But even these actions can turn against him, as in the case when traffic does not stop for him because no one can see him. Therefore Griffin “sees” once he is invisible--he realizes that he is never in a position to start a Reign of Terror as he wishes. As he describes his unexpected situation, “I realised what a helpless absurdity an invisible man was, --in a cold and dirty climate and a crowded civilised city...No doubt invisibility made it possible to get [what I desired], but it made it impossible to enjoy them when they were got.”  This perspective on invisibility is ultimately echoed though invented by Ellison’s novel on social invisibility, as I have already suggested.

     Griffin soon discovers that even though he is not seen by the eyes of others both physically and socially, their other senses are just as useful.  As he tells it,
                  "I saw in time a blind man approaching me, and fled limping, for I feared his
                  subtle intuitions...I had caught a cold, and do as I would I could not avoid an
                  occasional sneeze.  And every dog that came in sight, with its pointing nose
                  and curious sniffing, was a terror to me."

Also, when Griffin is bleeding, his blood dries and the red color of hemoglobin becomes visible, betraying his presence.  This is how Kemp knows to put broken glass on the streets so that the naked Griffin will cut his feet and leave a visible trail.  When the whole region turns against Griffin and uses his weaknesses against him, he cannot possibly survive for much longer.  Even the weapons he holds for self-defense give him away.

     Overall, Wells provides a general lack of description of the Invisible Man.  Only the effects of his invisibility are provided, so that the reader knows the response of his own body, his mind, and his impact on other people.  It is only at the end of the novel that the actual appearance of Griffin is portrayed, (with a shift in narrative voice to the third-person,) and he is already dead:  “...there lay, naked and pitiful on the ground, the bruised and broken body of a young man about thirty.  His hair and beard were white,--not grey with age, but white with the whiteness of albinism, and his eyes were like garnets.”   The dying figure becomes human again in every physical and emotional sense once he has lost his invisible properties.  The sight of Griffin becoming visible again “...was like the slow spreading of a poison.  First came the little white nerves, a hazy grey sketch of a limb, then the glassy bones and intricate arteries, then the flesh and skin, first a faint fogginess, and then growing rapidly dense and opaque.”  Once again Wells uses a systemicist focus to describe the process of “de-invisibility.”  As Griffin is dying, the effects of the pill gradually weaken, and light can once more be reflected, refracted, and absorbed by the man’s cells and tissues.

     With the late Griffin’s cryptic notes left behind, Wells leaves the concept of human invisibility open to the future. Bennett quotes Wells in one of his lectures as saying, “[The mind] sees the world as one great workshop and the present is no more than material for the future, for the thing that is destined yet to be.”  Even though Wells’ novel has been received as “pseudo-scientific,” his explanation for invisibility is valuable nonetheless as a step in the right direction. The Invisible Man  has become part of the scientific heritage which gives us “material for the future,” as we shall see with the Philadelphia Experiment in the next section.

--A.R. May 1999
Part III: The Philadelphia Experiment and Invisible Truth