Henrique Alvim Corrêa's Martian Attack on London, War of the Worlds 1906

Astonishingly prescient for 1906, this pen-and-ink panorama captures a city skyline — unmistakably London, with a domed structure suggesting St. Paul's Cathedral — engulfed in billowing black smoke from a Martian heat-ray attack, while a stricken flying object tumbles in the upper left sky. Corrêa's loose, energetic linework conveys chaos and scale with remarkable economy, making the destruction feel catastrophically real decades before aerial bombardment became a lived reality for Londoners.