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#Onthisday in 1938, radio listeners across America were driven into a state of panic. That night, the Mercury Theater of the Air presented “War of the Worlds,” a radio show by theater actor Orson Welles. An adaptation of the science fiction novel by H.G. Wells, it detailed scenes of a Martian invasion that thousands of listeners mistook for the real thing. Seven years before the broadcast, Welles, at age sixteen, had travelled to Europe and found work at the Gate Theater in Dublin, Ireland, after convincing the theater manager he was a vacationing member of the Theater Guild. Welles returned to the States for a stint on Broadway, and worked for supplemental income in radio as the voice of “The Shadow.” His most famous project was Citizen Kane, a controversial, yet critically acclaimed motion picture based loosely on the life of newspaper baron William Randolph Hearst. Typewriter courtesy of Steve Soboroff. Learn more about the typewriter in "The Typewriter: An Innovation in Writing" on display, post-security, in Terminal 2. http://bit.ly/Thetypewriter This image was posted on October 30, 2017.