I know it’s a typo or something that you said 19th century, so I went to look it up to figure out when and there’s a chance that this might not actually be true:

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/s/Xzbpyy63RH

It’s a long ass post and I honestly didn’t read it all, but if you read the whole book on salt maybe you’ll soldier through farther than me to decide of the evidence is correct

I honestly don’t remember if I liked War of the Worlds or not, I mainly remember one ridiculous part that taught me the word “ejaculate” has more than one meaning, or maybe had… and I guess it stuck out for a lot of others too:

https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/s/TpERqLpDR4

I read the book before the Internet really existed for regular people… so it may have taken me a while to figure out what this really meant…which in the whole mad this a lot more funny