HUGO GERNSBACK (1884-1967)
The son of a wine merchant in Luxembourg, he became fascinated with electricity. At a young age he wired the family house for electricity, and in grade school, developed dry cells with solid electrolyte cores (portable as they didn’t contain corrosive liquid that could slosh and spill) enabling portable electronic devices. He was never content with the accumulated scientific knowledge of his day. At age 13, he installed an intercom system in a Carmelite convent. Despite early recognition from his elders, Gernsbacher felt like an outsider in society and wrote a novel called “A Jinxed Person” or “A Schlemiel” about a hapless, unworldly boy whose obsessive tinkering constantly got him into trouble.
In 1903, he moved to the US and started the Electro Importing Company, the first mail-order supplier for home electronics buffs in the country. At age 19, he was already managing two start-ups.
He was also a genius at marketing. The vast catalogue promoted his products as hip accessories for a 20th-century lifestyle based on scientific discovery and excitement. His branding proved to be catnip for nerdy outcasts, who became heroic young “experimenters” in the pages of his catalogues. He opened a retail store with a precocious knack for salesmanship by offering 10-cent crystal detectors that could pick up any radio signals in the area. Soon he was selling a thousand a day. These simple semiconductor devices were only a come-along for the first radio transmitter and receiver kit designed for amateurs, the Telimco Wireless Telegraph selling for $7.50 instead of the $50,000 cost of a standard commercial rig. It allowed ham operators to transmit and receive snippets of Morse code over a range of a mile. The kits flew off the shelves and were also marketed at department stores. Within a year, the Telimco would also transmit and receive voice signals.
But he inevitably struck people s odd, rude, self-centered, and even callous. He predicted it would not be long before the caller could see your face over the wires. In 1908, he then launched the first magazine (called Modern Electronics) for ham radio operators, a powerful vehicle for promoting his business. The marvels of the world of the future could be soldered together in a garage from off-the-shelf parts. Its motto was “The Electrical Magazine for Everybody”. The magazine embraced a wide range of innovations beyond amateur radio, featuring articles, editorials, and special issues on airships, electronic photography, radiotelegraphy, model railroading, and a proto-Internet scheme for “typewriting by wire”.
The December 1909 issue was devoted to television. His international correspondents also tackled such far-out subjects as the potential for harnessing tides and sunlight as limitless sources of power. In 1910, he inaugurated a genre of popular storytelling that blended hard science and speculative fiction, with a strong emphasis on gadgetry, calling it “scientifiction” which was quickly superseded by “science fiction”. He anticipated a broad swath of technological marvels, including TV, radar, fluorescent lighting, stainless steel, videophones, night baseball games, speech-to-text software, wireless power transmission, and electronic weather control. His prophecies were unusually accurate as he befriended someone already living in the future, Nicola Tesla.
He was brilliant at fostering the formation of communities of shared interest. He published his subscribers’ names, radio call numbers, and addresses in a wireless registry that appeared at the back of Modern Electrics, and in three years, his circulation base soared from 8,000 to 52,000. By creating a decentralized network of radio enthusiasts who could get in touch with one another directly over the airwaves or by mail. He provided his magazines and gadgets with an ever-expanding market.
In the mid-1920s, Gernsback turned his full attention to growing the market for science fiction He launched a new publication devoted to the genre to be called Amazing Stories. It represented not just the emergence of a form of popular literature but the dawn of a new sensibility, embodied by coolly rational, sardonic, tech-savvy heroes. The bold tagline – “Extravagant Fiction Today, Cold Fact Tomorrow” – practically dared its readers to build labs in their garages and help invent the marvellous future.
Within a decade, bookstore shelves and drugstore racks all over the United States and Europe were bulging with knockoff titles Air Wonder Stories, Science Wonder Quarterly, and Astounding Stories of Super-Science. Printed on coarse, untrimmed wood-pulp pages, these affordable gateways to awe and mystery (cover price, ten cents) became collectively known as the pulps.
The contemporary culture of fandom in America – the whole thriving multiverse of Trekkers, Whovians, Twihards, and Potterheads – had its humble beginnings in the letters-to-the-editor column of Amazing Stories. He printed his readers’ names and addresses along with their letters. The exchanges in this column were often more sophisticated than the stories around them. There was more fervent discussion of Einstein’s theory of relativity in the letter’s column of Amazing Stories than in mainstream science journals.
Soon pulp fans everywhere started compiling networks of pen pals, which led to organizations like the Science Correspondents Club in Chicago and the Scienceers, a group of New York City teens who met in the Harlem apartment of its first president, an African American space buff named Warren Fitzgerald. Using early methods of duplication like mimeography and hectography, these groups churned out hand-stapled publications with names like the Comet and The Planet – the first “fanzines” in history.
As an editor, Gernsback was primarily a hardware man. He favoured galactic stories crammed with fantastic gizmos, cunning contraptions, and diabolical engines of mayhem (death rays were a perennial favourite). Sutler masters of the art later ridiculed this – in which technology took precedence over psychology, and plat and character were secondary to product placement. One learned a lot about the tools of the future but very little about the people who used them. Nuances of interpersonal interaction were irrelevant, women existed as hapless props to be rescued, and heroes were monastically chaste.
It’s a reasonable assumption that Gernsback was an undiagnosed Aspergian. Though Gernsback’s career as an inventor was overshadowed by Tesla’s (whose wasn’t?), he earned more than 80 patents in his lifetime, encompassing a range of innovations including the first walkie-talkie, one of the first bone-conducting hearing aids, a design for TV glasses (complete with a tiny aerial, and a submersible Ferris wheel. His most blatantly autistic creation was a contraption for reducing distracting sensory input in noisy offices called “the Isolator.” It looked like a deep-sea diver in a particularly cumbersome helmet, complete with a private air supply furnished by a nearby tank. With outside noises eliminated, the worker can concentrate with ease on the subject at hand.
When Gernsback died in 1967, many of his predictions were coming true; TV made its debut in 1928 and 172 spacecraft left the earth’s surface that year alone. The groundwork was laid for a global network that would make the wireless revolution look quaint.
NICOLA TESLA
The brilliant Serbian inventor’s wireless experiments preceded those of the “father of the radio, Guglielmo Marconi. A former lab assistant of Thomas Edison’s. Tesla did trailblazing research in an astonishing array of fields, including robotics, home lighting, X-rays, proto-transistors, remote control, and alternating current. He even predicted 21st-century warfare, semiautonomous drones, which he called Telautomata. “When wireless is perfectly applied, the whole earth will be converted into a huge brain,” Tesla told an interviewer in 1926. “We shall be able to communicate with one another instantly, irrespective of distance. We shall see and hear one another as perfectly as though we were face to face, despite intervening distances of thousands of miles. The instruments to do this will be carried in your vest pocket.
Whatever Tesla was, the word typical didn’t describe him. Eccentric genius ran in his family: his mother was an expert weaver from a long line of inventors who designed her own sewing. Tools. His older brother was a child prodigy who died when Tesla spooked the horse he was riding. He suffered as a boy from what would now be diagnosed as epilepsy. He could be honest to a fault when his two elderly aunts asked him to choose which one was prettier and he replied that one was “not as ugly as the other”. He felt compelled to calculate the precise volume of coffee cups, soup bowls, and morsels of food at the table, and counted the exact number of steps he took when he went out for a walk (like Cavendish and Dirac, he talked 8-10 miles every day in Manhattan in a rigid timetable). As a teenager, Tesla developed rigid habits and aversions, along with a fascination for certain shapes. The mere sight of a pearl made him feel ill, but the glittering objects with flat surfaces mesmerized him.
He embarked on his career as an inventor when he discovered that he could visualize theoretical machines in minute detail and even set them running in his mind, tweaking his design as parts wore out. “I needed no models, drawings, or experiments,” Tesla recalled in his memoir. “I could picture them all as real . . . It is absolutely immaterial to me whether I run my turbine in thought or test it in my shop. I even note if it is out of balance. (Temple Grandin’s account of her own design process is virtually identical: before I attempt any construction, I test-run the equipment in my imagination. I visualize my designs being used in every possible situation, with different sizes and breeds of cattle and in different weather conditions, Doing this enables me to correct mistakes before construction.”)
Gernsback, who was 28 years younger, became Tesla’s most prominent advocate. The first theme issue of Modern Electrics was wholly devoted to Tesla’s work. Together Gernsback, the inventor, and the editor forged a mutually beneficial alliance.
Tesla died in 1943 – impoverished and emaciated in his room at the Hotel New Yorker with a “do not disturb” sign permanently affixed to his door.
