Hugo gernsback the man who invented the future

For evenings on the town, he favored formal wear, including spats, an opera cape and an expensive silk homburg. Visions completely out of step with his surroundings seemed to fall out of him wherever he went. But when his father Moritz died at age 57, Gernsback sensed that it was time to branch out on his own. In February , at the age of nineteen, he emigrated to New York by himself, appearing in a photograph wearing an elaborate three-piece suit aboard the S.

Pennsylvania on his way across the Atlantic. Having been denied patents in both France and Germany for the battery, Gernsback decided to try his luck in the United States. He was able to sell his battery technology to the Packard Motor Car Company, who ended up using the device in their ignition systems. With the profits of his sale, Gernsback formed the Electro Importing Company, an importer of specialized electrical equipment from Europe and one of the first mail-order radio retailers in the country.

Through their catalog and retail store on the Lower West Side of Manhattan, the company provided access to specialized wireless and electrical equipment not found anywhere outside of Europe.

Electro Importing catered to a diverse clientele, first manufacturing the Telimco in for their novice users, and providing their more advanced amateur experimenters with the first vacuum tube offered for sale to the general public in Electro Importing Company store, circa After several issues of their mail-order catalog and a growing subscription list, Electro Importing began including features, editorials, and letters to the editor.

Between and , the catalog evolved into Modern Electrics, a monthly magazine for the wireless homebrewer. The transition from mail-order catalog to monthly magazine was smooth, evidenced by the fact that the third and fourth editions and of the Electro Importing catalog bear the title of the new full-format magazine, Modern Electrics. Each page, 6 by 9.

Some freelancers attributed their decision to pursue science as a profession to their experiences with Modern Electrics, as did Donald H.

Menzel, later director of the Harvard Observatory, who earned money for college by writing for the magazine. But the hallmark of the magazine became its more speculative articles, those that were willing to extrapolate fantastic scenarios out of the technical details at hand.

In a sense, the future stood as the horizon of technical description. The quantitative description of the transmitting apparatus in terms of its necessary output a gargantuan 70, kilowatts and best time of year to signal summer is only one aspect of this scenario.

Gernsback goes on to take into account the nature of Martian intelligence that would be necessary for such a communicative circuit to be completed:. For readers of Modern Electrics, the technical context in which this highly speculative article appeared only lent credence to an idea as fanciful as the one that contact with an alien civilization was right around the corner.

Left there as if to vouch for the plausibility of the idea that we will soon be able to connect with our nearest planetary neighbor, the clipping provides a wonderful sense of how people read these magazines.

This frame affected the reception of the magazines by their readers, the design ethos that grew up around them, and the kind of fiction they eventually produced.

Courtesy Firestone Library. The word Science, from the Latin scientia, meaning knowledge, is closely related to Invention, which, derived from the Latin inventio, means, finding out. Science and Invention. This article is a key of sorts for the many valences science can take throughout the Gernsback magazines. Science is the sum of its many products progressively connecting the modern world, and a hybrid ontology that saw no distinction between theories and their application.

Quite the contrary, it is the public that popularizes science—not our scientists. In many ways, this starry-eyed fanaticism for science as the sum of its progressive advance in the material world reflects how public discourse was shifting on a larger scale as science entered mass-market newsstands, corporate research facilities, and public school classrooms.

If science was a highly variable concept for Gernsback, conversation surrounding its application was just as muddled. The way we read these essays should also be complicated by the fact that technology was a word unknown to most English speakers at the time.

Somewhere around , Schatzberg argues,. Science and technology for Gernsback are collapsed into one another, meeting somewhere in the middle as the thoughtful use of tools and making. Hoping to build on the success of Modern Electrics, Gernsback sold the magazine to the competing publisher of Electrician and Mechanic and launched a new title in May The Electrical Experimenter. Science in the newsstands.

The larger 11 x 8. To page through the print run of The Electrical Experimenter across the s is to watch the activities of a quirky group of hobbyists grow into a mass cultural phenomenon. Over the course of its publication, Gernsback and his staff gradually widened their focus from the highly specialized electrical arts of Modern Electrics to a range of topics geared more toward the general public.

Nicholas —the signature of his Gernsback covers was the Rockwellesque way he was able to tell the story of an entirely speculative technology through facial expressions and dramatic gestures.

It was in no small part due to the vivid illustrations that readers were so drawn to these visions of the future. As a character in Robert A. The shape of media to come took on an iconography all its own through the illustrations of Frank R.

Trained in Vienna, London, and Paris as an architectural draftsman, Paul is known for his exquisitely detailed cityscapes as well as the robots, aliens, and astronauts that would later adorn the covers of Amazing Stories. Howard V. As the magazines in which they appeared gained a wider following, these images began to circulate far beyond their original venues.

Plans for the Osophone, a device Gernsback designed to replace headphones by transmitting sound through vibrations in the jawbone of the listener Hearing through Your Teeth , were published and reviewed in the German journal Der Radio-Amateur. Science and Invention illustrations republished in Chinese film journal Yingxi zazhi. Unfortunately, this approach tends to flatten the richness of his work into a list of the impressively early dates by which he had described the coming of technologies like in vitro fertilization, the transistor radio, atomic war, education by video, and telemedicine.

Gernsback himself seemed to enjoy the continued notoriety these predictions brought him. In a sense, their sheer number is of course impressive, as it was for Arthur C. A Frank R. Paul caricature of The Electrical Experimenter newsroom from the April issue. But descriptions of Gernsback as a prophet miss the fact that these imminent futures felt so close to hand thanks to a collective endeavor between contributing writers, assistant editors, illustrators, and readers. Throughout his writings, Gernsback relies on input from readers, quoting them sometimes at great length.

As his magazines began to grow both in number and circulation, Gernsback increasingly delegated work to assistant editors like T. Lasser, and Charles Hornig. As Justine Larbalestier writes,. Gernsback did not necessarily write all or even the majority of the editorial comments during the periods in which he was the publisher and editor of such magazines as Amazing Stories and Wonder Stories [—36]. However, such is the mythic force of Gernsback, the founding father, that in the majority of the work I have read on this period he is spoken of as though he wrote every word of editorial comment in the magazines he published.

Gernsback, about whom we know little outside of the self-propagated myths, is thus best understood as an embodiment of this moment that falls between the gaps of literary and technological history, a distillation of what was in the air.

To make Gernsback synonymous with his magazines, each of which was highly responsive to the interests and activities of its readership, is to follow the voice of a community that developed over the course of three decades.

Understanding media was a primary goal of his magazines, not just from the perspective of the expert experimenter but also from that of the bemused end user. Our lives are crowded to such an extent, that it is impossible to read as much as our grandfathers could. His publications, his ideas, and his prose were purpose-built to move fast in a pulp environment with short deadlines and low overhead, and it was for this reason that they were uniquely suited to the analysis of rapidly shifting media conditions.

While this speed sometimes results in seeming contradictions and an all-too-hasty embrace of the new, it also contributes to an inviting sense of openness for a diverse community of inquiry.

A core set of his essays take up the question of where new media come from, as well as how ordinary people could participate in the conditions of their emergence rather than feeling like they had been swept up in their wake. In Is Radio at a Standstill? In the model that Gernsback outlines, here, of the historical cycles that the technology industry goes through, competing formats do not replace but rather force one another to find their own unique attributes, simply as a matter of survival.

Despite his penchant for projecting far-flung futures, Gernsback is often remarkably conservative when it comes to the specifics of precisely how long such perfection would take, and what it would mean for developments in emerging media like wireless and television.

Given the small sample size of these very young histories, there was little the technologist had to go on when thinking about the stable, almost Platonic forms that might emerge. As he writes in Edison and Radio :. The radio industry today is only five years old, and it may safely be predicted that when it becomes as old as the phonograph is today we shall hardly be able to recognize it as the same development.

It is admitted that radio is not yet perfect. Neither is the phonograph, nor the automobile, or motion pictures, nor electric lights; nor, for that matter, a pair of shoes. Radio has always been able to take care of itself, and will continue to do so in the future. To be sure, we all want a radio law to straighten out some of our present tangles, but in the end radio engineering will make the best law obsolete.

The Electro Importing Company began publishing its annual Blue Book in , a telephone book of sorts that listed the names and call signs of amateur wireless operators around the country, and later, the world. Its presence was designed to encourage greater accountability for the content of wireless messages once the names of their senders were shared openly and freely Signaling to Mars. In addition, Gernsback and his associates formed The Wireless Association of America in , an education and outreach organization that ended up training many of the wireless operators that the Navy would need once the United States entered the Great War in ; one of these operators even developed a means of recording clandestine German U-boat commands that were being relayed through a New Jersey wireless station, unbeknownst to the American government Sayville.

Electrical Experimenter became a community forum for frustrations over this policy, as well as a drawing board for what broadcast regulation should look like once the war was over. While at certain moments Gernsback evokes the perversity of media that seemed to evolve as if according to their own internal logic, at others he claims that user communities are driving these developments. While one article might obsess over the merits of a new detector, another might find that detector to be far less important than the new forms of connection it made possible.

Writing two, sometimes three or more, articles a month meant that he was firing off ideas as they came to him, ideas that were picked up and discarded as utility demanded. For this reason, it is not quite accurate to describe these variations as contradictions. Instead, they reflect the thinking of a tinkerer, comfortable with fragments and capable of applying any one of multiple perspectives to a single issue.

This was especially the case with his profiles of wireless. Wireless promised constant contact between friends, family, and complete strangers, regardless of location. Readers were largely but not exclusively wage-earning people who describe themselves in letter columns as students, engineers, radio operators, amateur scientists, mill hands, office workers, salesmen, lathe operators, enlisted men, and government bureaucrats.

While there was a significantly visible contingent of precocious mostly middle-class boys among the letter-writers, most readers were the adults who provided the routine intellectual, clerical, mechanical and physical labor that made the new mass production economy function. Further, this community may have been more heterogeneous than is apparent from the surface of the magazines. Steve Silberman identifies wireless amateurism as a haven for voices unable to find an audience anywhere else:.

The culture of wireless was also a strict meritocracy where no one cared about what you looked like or how gracefully you deported yourself in public. If you knew how to set up a rig and keep it running, you were welcome to join the party. One has to read Electrical Experimenter against the grain to find the presence of women, for instance. A issue opens with a fanciful tale in which King Outis VII of Erehwon, a great fan of the magazine, visits the offices of Experimenter Publishing to witness how the magazine is made.

He meets with editors, artists, advertising staff, linotypers, compositors, proofreaders, the binding department, and photographers. We informed him immediately that they were secretaries, stenographers and typists, as well as editors and proofreaders and many others who had directly to do with the production of the magazine.

The firm that did the composing had several dozen girls that performed various jobs in connection with the magazine. The printer had a number of girls who were either bookkeepers or stenographers, through whose hands passed the bills for the magazine, and the same was true of practically every other industry connected with the production of the magazine.

Rarely made visible in the content of the magazines themselves, women were there at every stage in the process of their production, from the chemical supply houses to the newsdealers.

To what end was this future progressing, and who got to make decisions about the direction it took? Technocracy blossomed in the United States during the Depression with its plan to put engineers and skilled technologists in charge of the government. His ideas were picked up by Howard Scott, a leading figure in the movement who formed Technocracy Inc.

This bimonthly magazine lasted only two issues, and Gernsback himself attempted to remain entirely neutral in its pages save for the argument that machines have throughout history created more jobs than they have taken. As Langdon Winner describes it,. In the technocratic understanding, the real activity of governing can have no place for participation by the masses of men.

All of the crucial decisions to be made, plans to be formulated, and actions to be taken are simply beyond their comprehension.

Confusion and disorder would result if a democratic populace had a direct voice in determining the course the system would follow. Science and technics, in their own workings and in their utility for the polity, are not democratic, dealing as they do with truth on the one hand and optimal technical solutions on the other. Although Gernsback tried not to have an overt politics, and rarely formulated his positions in such terms, his gestures toward community participation, grassroots education, and social mobility were anything but apolitical.

Sometimes this simply meant taking a step back from the bleeding edge of increasingly corporate innovation. Throughout Radio for All , a book designed to transform a novice readership into a polity of wirelessly connected citizens, Gernsback purposefully uses what were by then slightly outmoded and thus simpler to understand components in all of his examples.

For Gernsback, scientific language was a universal language of progress that ought to be accessible even to those without a college degree. Unfortunately, the rapid progress so valued by Gernsback in the electrical arts ended up rendering obsolete the circuits of amateur cooperation and frugal ingenuity he helped institute. Falling back on hagiographic profiles of Edison, Marconi, and Tesla established unreal expectations for readers entering a new world of professionalized engineering.

The early twentieth century is commonly seen as a transitional period in American invention, from a reliance on the work of independent, almost mythologically brilliant inventors to corporate-based industrial research laboratories.

Historian of technology Eric S. Small and medium-sized firms often pursued innovation strategies—licensing independent inventors, hiring consultants, and outsourcing inventions—that were much different from the ones followed by bigger firms.

Conceptualization was often stimulated by access to new information. And the construction, testing, and redesigning of apparatus necessary for practical application almost invariably required an inventor to seek the assistance of others, whose own contributions often altered the original design.

Much like the forums of questions and wrinkles shared by wireless amateurs, nineteenth-century craftsmen communicated through trade journals like The Telegrapher: A Journal of Electrical Progress — Falling somewhere in the middle of this collaborative—individualistic divide, Gernsback emphasized the virtues of amateurism in his writings on the development of new devices.

A recurring argument in his editorials throughout the s had it that the next great innovations, like television, would come not from corporate laboratories but from the avant garde of enterprising amateurs who could afford to take risks and try out wacky ideas Why the Radio Set Builder? But these amateurs were up against an establishment that was rapidly consolidating its power. After the federal government took control of the airwaves during World War I and assumed ownership of all wireless patents in order to aid the war effort, RCA was formed as the new steward of this amassed intellectual property.

The new emphasis on control, precision, uniformity, predictability, and standardization meant the extinction of the entrepreneur-inventor. At the same time, radio was exploding in popularity among an American public who could comfortably listen in to nightly broadcasts.

Seemingly overnight, radio was firmly cemented in American life as an everyday piece of household furniture. And after the so-called radio Christmas of , when families around the country bought their first set, the legislative frameworks that would determine the structure of American broadcasting were finally in the process of being hammered out.

Radio was big entertainment. This made it quite an interesting time for a new magazine to emerge as the voice of radio amateurism. The gradual shift we saw in Electrical Experimenter from a specialized companion magazine for tinkerers into the shiny, gold-covered Science and Invention tracked the growth of a reading public interested in a much wider array of developments across the sciences.

But in order to maintain a relationship with his original audience of experimenters, Gernsback launched a new title, Radio Amateur News later shortened to Radio News in Of what real use is the amateur of today? What does he really do to make the world a better place to live in? Of what use is he to the community at large? If the amateur will ask himself these questions, and search his heart, he will come to the conclusion that, indeed, his utility is microscopic.

As far as the public is concerned, the radio amateur does not even exist. Who Will Save the Radio Amateur? The response from a passionate audience was swift. I have seen many different editions of these magazines in various university and personal archives, and it is clear from the great number of issues containing underlining and annotations, scribbles in the margins from readers working out measurements, and relevant newspaper clippings slipped between the pages, that this was a highly active and responsive community.

The set builder naturally is well able to compete with the manufacturer, for two reasons. First, his time costs him little, and in price, therefore, he can compete easily with the factory-made set. Secondly, he has the jump on the manufactured set for the simple reason that, as like as not, his circuit is the latest out, and, therefore, will have improvements that the manufactured set can not boast for some months to come.

He was an evangelist for the church we might call electronic culture. Most of us are its parishioners nowadays, with our magic boxes. Gernsback left a trail of technical writings, patents, interviews, newspaper clippings, and prophetic essays, and the best of these have now been gathered into a beautifully illustrated compendium and sourcebook titled The Perversity of Things: Hugo Gernsback on Media, Tinkering, and Scientifiction , by Grant Wythoff, a Columbia University historian of media studies.

Not just a hobby, tinkering in the early twentieth century was a special form of intuition or creativity, a means of advancement for a self-educated working class. Economically and politically, tinkering meant building technology from the bottom up rather than the top down. Amateurs rather than corporate research labs. His writings veer freely between the scientific and the fantastic. Born Hugo Gernsbacher, the son of a wine merchant in a Luxembourg suburb before electrification, he started tinkering as a child with electric bell-ringers.

When he emigrated to New York City at the age of nineteen, in , he carried in his baggage a design for a new kind of electrolytic battery. His mail-order catalogue of novelties and vacuum tubes soon morphed into a magazine, printed on the same cheap paper but now titled Modern Electrics.

Public awareness of science and technology was new and in flux. He returned again and again to the theme of fact versus fiction—a false dichotomy, as far as he was concerned. Leonardo da Vinci, Jules Verne, and H. Wells were inventors and prophets, their fantastic visions giving us our parachutes and submarines and spaceships.

For him, imagination and prophecy were one and the same. If he could imagine a future of marvels and wonders, they were sure to arrive sooner or later. Floating cities. Coggeshall, and they rented space in a building at 32 Park Place in New York, where they established the Electro Importing Company to sell radio components and electrical supplies by mail order.

Demand mushroomed. Within two years, the Electro Importing Company was sending its page catalog throughout North America. Not surprisingly, he soon married a young woman named Rose Harvey. She bore him a daughter in He would marry twice more and father a son and another daughter. Hugo Gernsback in the flamboyant, aristocratic persona he presented to the world. The Gernsback-Coggeshall partnership dissolved in Partner wanted in well-established electrical manufacturing business; good chance for right party; have more orders than can fill; only parties with sufficient capital need apply.

Gernsback, Duane St. The ad was answered by a man named Milton Hymes. With the infusion of capital, the company moved its factory and 60 employees to Fulton Street in New York and soon opened two retail stores. Gernsback wrote lengthy tutorial articles for the Electro Importing catalog. This gave him the idea of starting a magazine for electrical experimenters, which he called Modern Electrics. Gernsback maintained that a French author had used the term before him, however.

Gernsback was publisher, editor, chief writer, and often ghost-writer of Modern Electrics and did the layouts and sold advertising. WAOA soon claimed 22, members and Gernsback worked to represent the interests of amateur radio operators in Washington D. One day in , Gernsback needed to fill some empty space in the issue of Modern Electrics he was preparing. Readers enjoyed his forecasts about the future of technology, so he decided to give them more of the same — in the form of an adventure tale set in the year He wrote only enough to fill the empty space and ended with a cliff-hanger.

It was eventually published in book form and remains in print today. Gernsback soon added science-oriented adventure tales to all his magazines — some written by Gernsback under pseudonyms.

A new magazine called Electrical Experimenter served as another platform for Gernsback to push the science of the future. A typical futuristic Gernsback magazine cover, this one depicted a satellite orbiting the moon.

He designed electrical kits based on the parts in his warehouse. When amateur radio was revived in , Gernsback launched the first magazine devoted to radio, Radio Amateur News. While Gernsback found it easy to describe his ideas in print, he developed few; details bored him and some ideas were too broad or impractical.

For example, he proposed that automobiles be made extremely narrow, with one wheel in the front and one in the rear. Such automobiles, Gernsback said, would solve parking problems.