Another staple of 19th century Future War stories were the ice-inducing artillery shells which froze an area around the impact. A nice "clean" weapon which get rid of the enemy soldiers without damaging (too much) the material. This is shown as a German Secret Weapon in Jules Verne "les 500 millions de la Begum" . But was any serious research carried on the feasability of such weapon ?
From memory in one of Verne's stories the 'baddie' (a sort of 19th century Ernst Bloefeldt) constructed a super gun, the cryogenic shell from which went into low orbit coming back to freeze the secret lair from which it was fired! Beat that Mr Bond! And I think that the cryogenic shells were just that a Verne invention. I don't think the technology existed to build such weapons in 1914 ( and doesn't today)
