Help us keep Tales of
Future Past going and growing with your donation to our bandwidth fund.
Custom Search
Hugo Gernsback (1884-1967) was one of the most influential
figures in American publishing. A frustrated inventor with over
80 patents to his name, Gernsback gained immortality of a sorts from
his prodigious talents as a publisher and his invention of the term
"science fiction."
Born in Luxembourg,
Gernsback emigrated to
the United States in 1904 in an unsuccessful attempt to market a dry
cell battery he’d invented. When the battery business faltered, he
turned his firm, the Electric Importing Company, into the world’s
first radio supply house.
This was a time when radio was experimental
and ready-made sets were virtually unattainable, but there was an army
of hobbyists who were fascinated by radio and willing to let soldering
iron and screwdriver make up for what the pocketbook lacked so
Gernsback filled his company’s catalogue with articles on the theory
of radio and how to build your own sets. This proved so successful
that the Electric Import Company catalogue became the first magazine
dedicated to radio and electronics, Modern Electrics, in 1909.
Gernsback
may have been a mediocre inventor, but he turned out to be a dab hand
at publishing. Modern Electrics was the first of fifty magazines that
Gernsback started. A quick glance at the covers of his titles, such as
Electrical Experimenter, Science & Invention, and Radio News shows a
man with a flair for promotion mixed with a genuine adolescent love of
gadgetry unhindered by any sense of practicality or even the laws of
physics. For him, science and technology were the stuff of romance. He
loved his cover art to show old battleships being converted into
monster tanks on wheels the size of skyscrapers, thought recorders,
invisibility machines, and giant rocket ships. It was like a preview
of the future. Almost as if Gernsback had
participated in
conference calls to the future with yet to born architects,
engineers and inventors.
In 1911, Gernsback
serialised his novel Ralph 124C41+ in Modern Electrics. Set 600 years
in the future, it is a combination of travelogue, romance, and
adolescent power fantasy that predicted such marvels as radar,
fluorescent lighting systems, videophones, and night baseball; not to
mention absurdities such as train tunnels bored hundreds of miles beneath
the earth, cities suspended in the stratosphere, and using radium to
revive the dead. The novel also showcased Gernsback’s fondness for
neologisms such as “hypnobioscope,” “helio-dynamophores,” and “teleradiograph.”
Small wonder that Life magazine called him the “Barnum of the Space Age,” or that he went on to publish the first science fiction magazine
in 1926.