What knowledge could H.G. Wells bring to Britain’s war work? By 1914 he had enjoyed a successful literary career, and rather less enjoyed a spell at the Normal School and a decade teaching science. He recollected in his experimental autobiography that he refused voluntary service or drill work on the home front, and explained he would only join the war effort if he was given the opportunity to use his particular skills: ‘I meant to be used effectively.’ He was outraged at not being invited to work on the development of the tank: ‘it is absurd that my imagination was not mobilized in scheming the structure and use of these contrivances.’ Yet Wells found a path where he could use his creativity both in invention, working on the telepherage, and campaigning for the importance of inventing and scientific organisation during these vital years. Writing to G.K. Chesterton in 1915, Wells reported ‘I’m absurdly busy in bringing together the Rulers of the country and the scientific people of whom they are totally ignorant.’ This paper considers Wells’s role in the changing representation of British science and invention at the start of the twentieth century. His credentials as a science teacher, writer and his desire to be elected a fellow of the Royal Society are well-documented by his literary biographers. Patrick Parrinder and David C. Smith specifically draw on this context to shed light on his fictional works. While in the emerging histories of twentieth-century British science he is primarily portrayed as a member of the intelligentsia networks that pursued social and economic reform, and/or as a futurologist prophet whose fictional creations, such as the ‘land ironclad’ (tank), found form in the early twentieth century. Wells’s contribution to the representation of scientific research and invention is less clear. Research presented in this paper reveals Wells to be a walking, talking knowledge and idea broker, possessed of literary gifts and a conviction that scientific knowledge and skill were key to Britain’s war effort. He presented the case that war was a ‘struggle of invention’, publishing essays and letters in The Times, Daily Chronicle and a number of other press outlets. With this evidence we may present a new perspective of Wells as a science commentator who actively shaped ideas concerning the relationship between science, warfare and the state.