tacky tumbleson

and poor guy was like "it's uhmm. it's pregnant clippy from microsoft office"

The book was written with the effect colonisation and imperialism had on Tasmania in mind, a critique of imperialism. The Black War (one of the deadliest-per-capita wars in history) functionally obliterated the native Aboriginal Tasmanians in a way that would be recognised as genocide today.

In the book there is a something described as having “a stand like a theodolite” (which itself is a surveying tool), which the narrator is informed is a heliograph, also called a sun-telegraph. The British Army used it to reflect light over large distances to send signal messages. This was used widely in the late-19th century but has essentially disappeared from use today.

Every so often Wells brings up the heliograph at work, used as warning of the martians' movements by "devoted scouts." At one point a panicking man asks the narrator "what is that flicker in the sky?" and the narrator responds with "heliograph signaling--that it was the sign of human help and effort in the sky." The narrator had never seen a heliograph before its use to signal against the martians' invasion.

The thing about the heliograph? In real life, it was used primarily in regions that were not heavily built up; that did not have the infrastructure for faster signaling methods, such as an actual telegraph machine. In other words, for the British, it was a tool near-exclusively used in colonial regions. The narrator having never seen it before is because it had no use in "civilised" Britain - until the Martians came - and it has no use in conquered regions, where the infrastructure for telegraph had been built. This technology, perhaps more than any other, literally signaled the presence of the late British Empire.

The heliograph was used solely within the realm of conquest (or resistance as the Boers used it against the British in the Boer Wars). The use of it in Wells' The War of the Worlds is therefore an explicit assertion that Britain was now a colonised space; that the home of empire was now considered the colonial far reaches of another invader, and they are doing to the Britons what the Britons did to the Tasmanian.