Where do shields come from?

[Batman]

I'm talking about energy shields that 7 out of 10 Sci Fi franchises seem to have. I have no problem with the concept (in fact I rather like it) but I'm curious about it's origin. Who came up with the idea? The first examples I can think of are the Captain Future novels and Asimov's Foundation stories, and of course Smith's Lensmen stories but I very much doubt they came up with the idea, so where does it come from?

[Shark Bait]

Well energy sheilds are mentioned in the classic story To Serve Man which was later turned into an episode of the Twilight Zone was first televised on March 2, 1962 (so is from before then). I'm still digging for early reffrences to them though.

[Batman]

Um-the Foundation stories, Captain Future novels, and Lensmen stories are from the late 30s/early 40s.

[Shark Bait]

well ya got me then...

[B4UTRUST]

The concept goes back at least as far as the 1920s, in the works of E.E. 'Doc' Smith and others; and William Hope Hodgson's The Night Land (1912) has the Last Redoubt, in which the remnants of humanity shelter, protected by something very like one.

[Elheru Aran]

I would say it was Smith's work that first brought them into standard use in sci-fi, though. Interesting note; his shields were apparently opaque, not invisible, as they cycled through different colours before finally collapsing. Would be very visually interesting to see on the screen, IMO...

[Hotfoot]

I would say it was Smith's work that first brought them into standard use in sci-fi, though. Interesting note; his shields were apparently opaque, not invisible, as they cycled through different colours before finally collapsing. Would be very visually interesting to see on the screen, IMO...

Well, it depended on the shields. The Zone of Force was entirely opaque, and blocked all energies 4th order and below, which included all manner of realspace energies, EM, gravity, etc. It was for all intents and purposes black. It wasn't until 5th and 6th order shields that cycled through colors. It's interesting to note that 5th order shields not only defended against realspace energies, but actually absorbed it to power the ship! Skylark ships are nearly unbelievably powerful.

[The Cleric]

War Of the Worlds had them.

[Cynical Cat]

War Of the Worlds had them.

I don't recall them from the book.

[Narsil]

I don't recall them from the book.

That's because they weren't in the book (from Chapter Seventeen: Thunder Child), they just had armour:

Keeping his footing on the heaving deck by clutching the bulwarks, my brother looked past this charging leviathan at the Martians again, and he saw the three of them now close together, and standing so far out to sea that their tripod supports were almost entirely submerged. Thus sunken, and seen in remote perspective, they appeared far less formidable than the huge iron bulk in whose wake the steamer was pitching so helplessly. It would seem they were regarding this new antagonist with astonishment. To their intelligence, it may be, the giant was even such another as themselves. The Thunder Child fired no gun, but simply drove full speed towards them. It was probably her not firing that enabled her to get so near the enemy as she did. They did not know what to make of her. One shell, and they would have sent her to the bottom forthwith with the Heat-Ray.

She was steaming at such a pace that in a minute she seemed halfway between the steamboat and the Martians--a diminishing black bulk against the receding horizontal expanse of the Essex coast.

Suddenly the foremost Martian lowered his tube and discharged a canister of the black gas at the ironclad. It hit her larboard side and glanced off in an inky jet that rolled away to seaward, an unfolding torrent of Black Smoke, from which the ironclad drove clear. To the watchers from the steamer, low in the water and with the sun in their eyes, it seemed as though she were already among the Martians.

They saw the gaunt figures separating and rising out of the water as they retreated shoreward, and one of them raised the camera-like generator of the Heat-Ray. He held it pointing obliquely downward, and a bank of steam sprang from the water at its touch. It must have driven through the iron of the ship's side like a white-hot iron rod through paper.

A flicker of flame went up through the rising steam, and then the Martian reeled and staggered. In another moment he was cut down, and a great body of water and steam shot high in the air. The guns of the Thunder Child sounded through the reek, going off one after the other, and one shot splashed the water high close by the steamer, ricocheted towards the other flying ships to the north, and smashed a smack to matchwood.

But no one heeded that very much. At the sight of the Martian's collapse the captain on the bridge yelled inarticulately, and all the crowding passengers on the steamer's stern shouted together. And then they yelled again. For, surging out beyond the white tumult, drove something long and black, the flames streaming from its middle parts, its ventilators and funnels spouting fire.

She was alive still; the steering gear, it seems, was intact and her engines working. She headed straight for a second Martian, and was within a hundred yards of him when the Heat-Ray came to bear. Then with a violent thud, a blinding flash, her decks, her funnels, leaped upward. The Martian staggered with the violence of her explosion, and in another moment the flaming wreckage, still driving forward with the impetus of its pace, had struck him and crumpled him up like a thing of cardboard. My brother shouted involuntarily. A boiling tumult of steam hid everything again.