Science: Gernsback, the Amazing

One of the most fertile of U.S. inventors startled his friends last week with an unusual device: an electronic keyhole peeper to eliminate stooping. It offered comfortable tompeeping complete with eavesdropping and a permanent record on film.

This was only one of many suggestions which Hugo Gernsback sent out for Christmas in a parody of one of his own magazines, Radio-Craft. Other Gernsback ideas in the burlesque publication included a “radiotronicar” which would hop over cross traffic, an electronic “evil eye” to paralyze burglars, and an electronic production line for inducting draftees.

Hugo Gernsback is widely and affectionately known among U.S. inventors as a bottomless well of incredible notions. For more than 30 years fantasies have come in such profusion from his brain that there is hardly a modern invention he cannot claim to have anticipated. The father of pseudo-scientific fiction, he has started a number of pulp magazines such as Amazing Stories, Wonder Stories, etc. As a radio magazine publisher, he has given laboratory workers some suggestive ideas. Gernsback himself has patented some 80 inventions, none of which, his admirers are proud to say, has ever proved of the slightest practical use.

Ralph 124C 41+ and Immortality. Born in Luxembourg, Hugo took an electric bell apart at the age of six. At 13 he was allowed to install a telephone system in a Luxembourg convent (he says he got a special dispensation to enter it from Pope Leo XIII). At 22, having moved to Manhattan, he built one of the first amateur wireless transmitters with which he could ring a bell a quarter of a mile away. But then Hugo’s imagination began outstripping his technical resources.

Without the faintest notion how they might be built, he predicted radio loud speakers, chain broadcasting (in 1909), visible radio waves (now accomplished by the cathode-ray oscilloscope), television (his friends credit him with coining the word). In one of Gernsback’s first science fiction stories (1911), a character futuristically named Ralph 1240 41+ drained a dog’s blood, filled its veins with a mythical preservative called “Radium-K bromide” and three years later restored the dog to life by pumping blood back—a fantasy which Gernsback claims has been fully validated by recent Soviet dog-reviving experiments (TIME, Nov. 22). In Gernsback’s view, mankind’s abolition of death is only a question of time.

Hypnobioscope and the Subconscious. Not all his predictions have panned out. The inventions which Gernsback likes best are the “osophone,” an instrument designed to enable deaf people to hear through their teeth, and the “hypnobioscope,” an electrical device for educating people while they sleep. During the war Gernsback has advanced a great variety of military ideas, all described in plausible detail, including a flying tank which would shed its wings when it landed, and radio-controlled vehicles which might be sent ahead of an army to explode land mines.

Alumni of genial, ruddy Hugo’s numerous publications today hold many important positions in the U.S. radio industry. They fondly call Gernsback “the old buzzard.” At 59, Hugo presides over a shabby Manhattan office where he has a death mask of his good friend, the late, great, grandly eccentric inventor Nikola Tesla.* Hugo Gernsback has never made much money out of his astounding ideas, but he has had a lot of fun.

*For many years before his death at 86, last January, Tesla was arecluse in a Manhattan hotel room, where he kept his laboratory andnursed sick pigeons. At each birthday he solemnly announced to newsmenthat he was on the verge of communicating with other planets.