A guy named Kirby has a friend, Professor Martyn, who is an inventor. Kirby enjoys volunteering to be an experimental subject for the professor’s experiments. In this story he’s invited over to test a machine that can do what Alice in Wonderland experienced when eating the food that made her bigger or smaller. Professor Martyn wants to use the device to explore the stars and atoms… Kirby is given a space suit to provide oxygen and protect him from heat and cold. He then presses the button to grow larger, and he expands and expands. First, he steps off the earth, then out of the solar system, and then out of the Milky Way, but that’s not said explicitly. That’s because Edwin Hubble was still proving the existence of galaxies in the 1920s and the nature of The Milky Way. Like many other stories, Kirby grows until he sees our universe as an atom among many, and then expands until he emerges into the water of another world. He realizes that he could never go back to Earth, and for two reasons. First, he couldn’t pick out the atom that was our universe, and two because expanding evidently meant time speeded up, and he figures he was millions of years into the future…
First Appearance “The Man from the Atom” by G. Peyton Wertenbaker in Science and Invention (August 1923)
First Publisher Experimenter Publishing
Appearance List “The Man from the Atom” by G. Peyton Wertenbaker in Science and Invention (August 1923); “The Man from the Atom” reprinted in Amazing Stories (April 1926, the magazine’s first issue); “The Man from the Atom (Sequel)” in Amazing Stories (May 1926); “The Man from the Atom” reprinted in Amazing Stories (February 1966); “The Man from the Atom (Sequel)” reprinted in Amazing Stories (April 1966); “L’uomo venuto dall’atomo” in Imperi galattici: l’epica fantascientifica 1923–1978, ed. Brian W. Aldiss, Fanucci, trans. by Roberta Rambelli; “The Man from the Atom” reprinted in Amazing Stories (November 1979).
Sample Read “The Man from the Atom” Part 1 and Part 2 from Amazing Stories (April-May 1926) [Internet Archive]
Description A guy named Kirby has a friend, Professor Martyn, who is an inventor. Kirby enjoys volunteering to be an experimental subject for the professor’s experiments. In this story he’s invited over to test a machine that can do what Alice in Wonderland experienced when eating the food that made her bigger or smaller. Professor Martyn wants to use the device to explore the stars and atoms… Kirby is given a space suit to provide oxygen and protect him from heat and cold. He then presses the button to grow larger, and he expands and expands. First, he steps off the earth, then out of the solar system, and then out of the Milky Way, but that’s not said explicitly. That’s because Edwin Hubble was still proving the existence of galaxies in the 1920s and the nature of The Milky Way. Like many other stories, Kirby grows until he sees our universe as an atom among many, and then expands until he emerges into the water of another world. He realizes that he could never go back to Earth, and for two reasons. First, he couldn’t pick out the atom that was our universe, and two because expanding evidently meant time speeded up, and he figures he was millions of years into the future…
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