The World Set Free, by futurist H.G. Wells, is a future history describing the political and social consequences of a world-changing discovery: the harnessing of atomic energy. Physicist Leo Szilard read the book in 1932 and, a year later, conceived the idea of neutron chain reactions. He assigned his patent to the British War Office to keep it safe from the wider scientific community, writing: "Knowing what this would mean—and I knew it because I had read H.G. Wells—I did not want this patent to become public." Szilard’s ideas, and the warnings of Wells, were vital to the development of the atomic bomb during World War II, and especially to the subsequent efforts of scientists to mitigate the threat of global atomic warfare.