The Chances of Drawing a Tripod With Four Legs are a Million to One...

January 5, 2021 7:57 AM

2021 is the 75th anniversary of the death of science fiction writer H.G. Wells, and the UK's Royal Mint is marking the occasion with the issue of a commemorative coin. Unfortunately there are some issues with the design that have led to questions as to whether the designer is actually familiar with Wells' most famous works...
posted by Major Clanger (42 comments total)

Maybe the Martians have evolved, hence the new appendage...?
posted by davidmsc at 8:00 AM on January 5, 2021

One of those is, um *cough* not a leg.
posted by kyrademon at 8:14 AM on January 5, 2021 [20 favorites]

It's a lucky four-legged tripod! Make a wish.
posted by saturday_morning at 8:21 AM on January 5, 2021 [32 favorites]

This is one of the problems with ridiculous copyright terms. By the time you are allowed to make derivative works no one can remember the details of the original. 60 years ago no one would have made this error.
posted by Mitheral at 8:32 AM on January 5, 2021 [3 favorites]

Wow I clicked the link and within 0.5 seconds thought , why does it have four legs? How did they miss that?
posted by freecellwizard at 8:38 AM on January 5, 2021 [1 favorite]

60 years ago no one would have made this error.

60? I doubt they would have made the error 20 years ago. All anyone had to do is reference any depiction of the Martian machines since the book was first published. It's an incomprehensible effup.
posted by Thorzdad at 8:50 AM on January 5, 2021 [2 favorites]

Today, the 5th of January 2021, the entirety of the original Wayne production is available, if you're able to watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hf-gCVdPiIs

It expires end of day (UK) today though, so not much time left. Well worth it in my opinion.
posted by bonehead at 8:55 AM on January 5, 2021 [1 favorite]

I was hoping that to honour the author of The Invisible Man, they would just leave a big blank where the profile would usually be.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 9:08 AM on January 5, 2021 [6 favorites]

How did they miss that?

How did no one think, early in the process, "we should be in contact with someone who's a reasonable representative of his fan base, to review our design and point out obvious errors"
posted by fatbird at 10:06 AM on January 5, 2021

I'm glad to see the artist remembered the handling machines, but the tripods are TRIpods!
posted by doctornemo at 10:11 AM on January 5, 2021 [1 favorite]

Behold:

...abruptly my attention was arrested by something that was moving rapidly down the opposite slope of Maybury Hill. At first I took it for the wet roof of a house, but one flash following another showed it to be in swift rolling movement. It was an elusive vision—a moment of bewildering darkness, and then, in a flash like daylight, the red masses of the Orphanage near the crest of the hill, the green tops of the pine trees, and this problematical object came out clear and sharp and bright.

And this Thing I saw! How can I describe it? A monstrous tripod, higher than many houses, striding over the young pine trees, and smashing them aside in its career; a walking engine of glittering metal, striding now across the heather; articulate ropes of steel dangling from it, and the clattering tumult of its passage mingling with the riot of the thunder. A flash, and it came out vividly, heeling over one way with two feet in the air, to vanish and reappear almost instantly as it seemed, with the next flash, a hundred yards nearer. Can you imagine a milking stool tilted and bowled violently along the ground? That was the impression those instant flashes gave. But instead of a milking stool imagine it a great body of machinery on a tripod stand.
posted by doctornemo at 10:12 AM on January 5, 2021 [4 favorites]

FWIW, the Royal Mint link has this statement from the artist:

“The characters in War of the Worlds have been depicted many times, and I wanted to create something original and contemporary. My design takes inspiration from a variety of machines featured in the book - including tripods and the handling machines which have five jointed legs and multiple appendages. The final design combines multiple stories into one stylized and unified composition that is emblematic of all of H.G. Well’s work and fits the unique canvas of a coin."

I mean ok, I guess? Seems like a bit of a weird choice to me, but I don't get to design currency so what do I know. I mean, if I was going to combine multiple HG Wells stories into one design, I'd probably end up having a time travelling submarine captain team up with the Invisible Man aboard a hot air balloon to fight alien tripods before realizing that "Around the World in 80 Days" was Jules Verne and not HG Wells.
posted by mhum at 10:28 AM on January 5, 2021 [10 favorites]

emblematic of all of H.G. Well’s work

SERIOUSLY?
posted by dlugoczaj at 10:51 AM on January 5, 2021 [13 favorites]

I don't really care about the hat thing but the alien machines are CALLED FUCKING TRIPODS. There is zero room for interpretation there.
posted by showbiz_liz at 10:57 AM on January 5, 2021 [5 favorites]

That's how you know it's a MARTIAN tripod. So unutterably alien to our Terran sensibilities and intelligence that even their mathematical nomenclature cannot be correlated by our limited brains.
posted by KingEdRa at 11:09 AM on January 5, 2021 [8 favorites]

KingEdRa, good point. Maybe we should take a closer look. Peer into this crystal egg:

And where was this other world? On this, also, the alert intelligence of Mr. Wace speedily threw light. After sunset, the sky darkened rapidly—there was a very brief twilight interval indeed—and the stars shone out. They were recognisably the same as those we see, arranged in the same constellations. Mr. Cave recognised the Bear, the Pleiades, Aldebaran, and Sirius: so that the other world must be somewhere in the solar system, and, at the utmost, only a few hundreds of millions of miles from our own. Following up this clue, Mr. Wace learned that the midnight sky was a darker blue even than our midwinter sky, and that the sun seemed a little smaller. And there were two small moons! "like our moon but smaller, and quite differently marked" one of which moved so rapidly that its motion was[26] clearly visible as one regarded it. These moons were never high in the sky, but vanished as they rose: that is, every time they revolved they were eclipsed because they were so near their primary planet. And all this answers quite completely, although Mr. Cave did not know it, to what must be the condition of things on Mars.

Indeed, it seems an exceedingly plausible conclusion that peering into this crystal Mr. Cave did actually see the planet Mars and its inhabitants. And, if that be the case, then the evening star that shone so brilliantly in the sky of that distant vision, was neither more nor less than our own familiar earth.
posted by doctornemo at 11:28 AM on January 5, 2021

I'd probably end up having a time travelling submarine captain team up with the Invisible Man aboard a hot air balloon to fight alien tripods before realizing that "Around the World in 80 Days" was Jules Verne and not HG Wells.

I'll just mention my personal bête noire: there is no balloon in Around the World in 80 Days. Yes, I know, it was in the movie, but it wasn't in the book.
posted by SPrintF at 12:33 PM on January 5, 2021 [7 favorites]

I can see how it happened though based on this favorite empirical study of a client/design meeting.

designer: by definition, it is impossible to draw a four-legged tripod.
client: for the last time, can you or can you not draw a four-legged tripod, it is a simple question?
designer: yes. yes, I can do that. I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert.
posted by th3ph17 at 1:06 PM on January 5, 2021 [2 favorites]

Four legs good, two legs bad.
posted by joeyh at 1:23 PM on January 5, 2021 [3 favorites]

I dunno the legs seem to join at the bottom. I thought that was a heat ray or something emitting from the top disc.
posted by mazola at 1:39 PM on January 5, 2021 [3 favorites]

Has anybody claimed that this is what you get when you no longer teach Latin in comprehensive schools, instead reserving it as a shibboleth for the elites?
posted by acb at 1:59 PM on January 5, 2021

War of the Worlds was published in 1897 in the UK, at which time the UK used the 'long scale'. In the long scale a 'trillion' would be 10^18, or as it is known today a quintillion. By induction, a long-scale 'tripod' would actually be what we today would call a 'quintapod' (or pentapod). The coin correctly depicts a pentapod which has simply lost a leg in the titular War.
posted by Pyry at 3:43 PM on January 5, 2021 [3 favorites]

🌠 You TriedPod
posted by Pallas Athena at 3:44 PM on January 5, 2021 [4 favorites]

. The coin correctly depicts a pentapod which has simply lost a leg in the titular War.

dorothy parker had something to say about martinis drunk in that war
posted by lalochezia at 3:59 PM on January 5, 2021

Given the times we live in, just be glad it wasn't a Tide Pod.
posted by biogeo at 4:24 PM on January 5, 2021 [4 favorites]

I mean ok, I guess? Seems like a bit of a weird choice to me, but I don't get to design currency so what do I know. I mean, if I was going to combine multiple HG Wells stories into one design, I'd probably end up having a time travelling submarine captain team up with the Invisible Man aboard a hot air balloon to fight alien tripods before realizing that "Around the World in 80 Days" was Jules Verne and not HG Wells.

I was going to say "they already did League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" but I admit this improves upon the original movie in many points. Sequel?
posted by brook horse at 4:40 PM on January 5, 2021

I was hoping that to honour the author of The Invisible Man, they would just leave a big blank where the profile would usually be.

They tried, but the Queen was standing behind the Invisible Man when they took the photo, so …

Anyway, they didn't depict him in front of the Tripod, which makes up for failing to not depict him on the obverse.
posted by Joe in Australia at 4:47 PM on January 5, 2021

Has anybody claimed that this is what you get when you no longer teach Latin in comprehensive schools, instead reserving it as a shibboleth for the elites?

Latin? We’re not talking about icosapods or dodecapods here. I learned that tri means three with triangles and tricycles in kindergarten!

And yes, I know those are Greek roots.
posted by Jawn at 5:00 PM on January 5, 2021

Incorrect £2 coin designs are nothing new. The original coin design has a circle of cogs to symbolise technology that wouldn't actually rotate properly because there's an odd number of them.
posted by EndsOfInvention at 5:37 PM on January 5, 2021 [5 favorites]

Earth mathematics are base 10. Mars mathematics are base 10-minus-1. Ergo, that is a Martian tripod.
posted by chimpsonfilm at 6:06 PM on January 5, 2021

I've always wondered how the The Tripods got away with hewing so close to the HG Wells stories or if there was some kind of back room agreement going on with Wells estate.
posted by loquacious at 6:38 PM on January 5, 2021

I did not come to this website looking for an argument that it might not have been so bad if the United Kingdom had converted to the Euro, but the argument came and found me.
posted by cattypist at 7:24 PM on January 5, 2021

John Christopher, or someone acting on his behalf, may have just paid them off. When I was poking around to verify that HG Wells' stuff only recently came out of copyright there were quite a few stories of authors doing just that. The HG Wells estate seems much more accommodating than say the Tolkien Estate. Maybe because they were well aware of the short time expiry date on their exclusive access. Mind you the first Tripods book came out in '67. Which bring up another possibility in that copyright has had a sort of bumpy ride. I wonder if War of the Worlds had fallen out of copyright and then had it retroactively regranted and at least the first book came out in the out of copyright period.
posted by Mitheral at 8:02 PM on January 5, 2021

I'm confused because if you look closely at the coin it clearly clearly depicts a tripod. It's supported by three legs that come together at a sort of waist. It also happens to have what looks like a tail extending downward but it's clearly not a leg, and then it has an arm extending from the front, attached far above the waist. Has no one at the mint, or even the artist themselves pointed this out?
posted by simra at 11:12 PM on January 5, 2021 [1 favorite]

simra: "and then it has an arm extending from the front, attached far above the waist."

It looks like that in one of the photos, but that "arm" in the front is also a leg attached at the "waist" which extends up to the saucer and then bends down. The artist defended himself saying it is an amalgam of machines from the book; he did not say it is a tripod.
posted by team lowkey at 12:14 AM on January 6, 2021

It would be cool if they corrected it and then then low-key took as many out of circulation as possible so that 4-legged version became super rare and valuable. That happens sometimes with stamps, short-lived errors or misprints of otherwise unremarkable stamps become valuable collector's items.
posted by L.P. Hatecraft at 12:36 AM on January 6, 2021 [1 favorite]

Has anyone checked, under Boris Johnson's bedhead hair, whether there's a metal Cap?
posted by Harvey Kilobit at 1:17 AM on January 6, 2021 [1 favorite]

Ah, I see it now. Thanks!
posted by simra at 5:29 AM on January 6, 2021

As I understand it, this designer is also the person who invented the typeface Papyrus.
posted by Just this guy, y'know at 5:30 AM on January 6, 2021

A team of coin engineers goes directly to HG Wells.

"How many legs does your tripod need? Is 4 the right number?"

"That would not be the right number," he told them.
posted by phunniemee at 6:03 AM on January 6, 2021

Four-legged Tripod, you say? Nah, 'E's off ON the twig!
posted by cenoxo at 6:39 AM on January 6, 2021

The coin also features a false quote
posted by vacapinta at 8:30 AM on January 8, 2021