Hugo Gernsback

Ray Bradbury said Hugo “made us fall in love with the future.” But he’s also been berated as a hack whose proclamations about what does and does not qualify as science fiction have been problematic and limiting from the start.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy he Wilson. So Tracy,
I think you might be like me where there are
some subjects to the podcast that are at the top
of the list for a really long time, and in

(00:24):
my case, I feel like I'm sort of circling them
like an animal stocking prey. I'll do a little bit
of research on him and then back away, and it's
like I want to tackle them, but I'm also a
little unsure of when to jump for a variety of reasons.
Uh And Hugo gerns Back has been one of those
for a very long time, and he's tricky for a
few different reasons. For one, he was ceaselessly interesting, and

(00:46):
he did a lot of things that influenced the world
we live in today. And topics like that are hard
because you don't want to get into the like a
big minutia party where you just list all the stuff
that they did and touched and and and how it's
you know, echoing in today's world. But you also don't
want to leave any of the important stuff out so
it could just be a little bit wilming to try

(01:07):
to figure those out, and for another he can be
a little bit polarizing. There are people who laud him
as a genius, and there are others who label him
as a crackpot opportunist, but they do usually acknowledge that
he was an insightful crackpot opportunist. Um. He is the
man who, in the words of Ray Bradbury quote made
us fall in love with the future. But he's also

(01:27):
been berated as kind of a hack whose proclamations about
what does and does not qualify as science fiction have
been problematic and limiting from the start. But even people
who have very little nice to say about the man
acknowledge his influence and importance on the world of science fiction.
He was also an inventor of some wacky and marvelous

(01:49):
things and a writer himself. He was also a prognosticator
of the future with some startling lee accurate insights, and
odds are very good that you have come across references
to him, whether you know it or not. So. Author
William Gibson, who penned one of my top three books
of all time, Neuromancer, wrote a short story called The
gerns Back Continuum in eight one to reference him, and

(02:12):
in nineteen eighty five Steven Spielberg created a TV series
inspired by Gernsback's magazine Amazing Stories. There was also a
revival of Amazing Stories in and Today the Hugo Awards,
recognizing science fiction and fantasy writers for excellence each year
are given out in his name. That was an award
that started when he was still alive, even though he

(02:34):
was not the one that gave it. One journalist once
described him as part scientist, part inventor, part joker, part
little boy, and I kind of feel like that might
be the best way to think of him as we're
talking through his life story, because he could be very mercurial,
and he would make a case or stayed an opinion
about something and then not very much later, say something

(02:55):
completely contradictory to that other statement. But he didn't seem
to see how that was a problem. Was just always
exploring ideas from a fairly conceptual place without getting two
mired in the details, and he seemed to have no
problem at all jumping from one idea or project to another.
He is always described as ceaselessly energetic and following his

(03:16):
thoughts down whatever path they led. Some of those and
we will talk about them very problematic. But lately I
keep running into references to him, even when I am
looking at things that seemed completely unrelated. So it seems
like the universes like, girl, just do that Hugo episode,
already do it? Uh, So here we are. Hugo Gernsbach

(03:36):
was born Hugo Gernsbacher on August four and Luxembourg City, Luxembourg.
His family was quite comfortable. His father, more as Gernsbacher,
was a successful wine wholesaler who had moved to Luxembourg
from Germany. Hugo was the third son born to Mori
ITTs and his wife Bertha Derlocker Gernsbacher, and from a

(03:59):
very lie age, Hugo Gernsback was a tinkerer. When he
was six years old, he was given a battery bell
kit by the man who took care of the Gernsbaka
State of handyman named Jean Pierre Gorgan, and Gorgon taught
Hugo how to wire the bells to a battery called
the le clanche. So Hugo loved this entire process and

(04:19):
particularly was captivated by the green sparks that were admitted
when the bell rang. He told the story over and
over throughout his life, and he was soon ordering additional
supplies from Paris to create new, bigger iterations of this
simple system. And he said to have eventually wired his
family home with intercoms and little buzzers, and soon he
was assembling similar setups for his friends and neighbors homes.

(04:42):
And from there he was basically constantly working on batteries
and battery powered devices and became recognized in his community
as something of an expert. By the time he was
a teenager, the local Carmelite convent hired him to install
buzzers in their building. This was a bit of a
sticky situation aation though, because Gernsbach had turned thirteen after

(05:04):
the Mother Superior of the convent had hired him, he
was suddenly considered to be a man in the eyes
of the church, and according to him, that meant he
was not allowed to enter anymore. But the Mother Superior
got a special dispensation from the Pope to allow the
young Hugo to do the work, and that permission letter
from Rome became a prized possession throughout his life. I

(05:26):
have always wondered, having heard this story many times in
relation to him, if he forged that letter. Yeah, I
had a question being for real, Yes, because his wife
even talked about it after he had passed, and how
she still had it and it was something you loved.
And part of me is always like, is she hanging
onto a like a fake document that she but I

(05:47):
don't know. Uh. Hugo was educated by private tutors. As
we said, his family was very comfortable financially, and he's
often referred to as having received a technical education in Luxembourg.
He actually did y poorly when he was enrolled in
an industrial school as a teenager, and his performance at
college and bing in Germany was similarly underwhelming. But he

(06:09):
was an avid reader throughout his youth and enjoyed applying
his technical knowledge to speculation about the future and problem solving.
He told the story that a translated copy of Mars
as the Abode to Life by Percival Little sent him
into just the delirium when he read it at the
age of nine, and that set his imagination so ablaze

(06:32):
that the family called a doctor to watch him while
he talked endlessly about the creatures and technology that could
possibly be on the Red planet. But this story and
many of the others about his youth are solely from
Gernsbach himself, and so they're hard, if not impossible, to substantiate. Yeah,

(06:54):
and then you know he was a storyteller. Uh. In
nineteen o four, at the age of nineteen, Hugo moved
to the United States, shortly after his father died. His
father had never really understood his son's drive to pursue
a career in the emerging field of electrics. He kind
of hoped he would go into wine like he did.
But once there was no longer a disapproving patriarch in

(07:15):
the picture, Hugo made his move and shipped off to
New York. He changed his name to the americanized Gern's
Pocket and eventually became a naturalized US citizen. He had
always had a fascination with the US and US culture
that was driven in part by reading popular American authors
like Twain and Poe. Additionally, European patent offices hadn't granted

(07:37):
him various patents he had applied for, and he was
hoping to do better with patenting his inventions in North America.
He was very aware of personal presentation and he cultivated
a style for himself that was distinctive and conveyed a
sort of eccentric European aristocrat persona. He was known to
wear a monocle that he didn't need. He always had

(08:00):
very formal, beautiful suits, then the occasional opera cape. He
was also very charming and witty, and that added this
other layer of a lure. Yeah, he definitely was good
at putting together like the man he wanted to be.
He was also multi lingual, so people just automatically like
gave him a certain degree of of like cloud. He's

(08:20):
just amazing European genius. He is said to have worn
a formal three piece suit even on the boat crossing
to land at hoboken Um. Hugo's intention in the States,
in addition to those patents, was to parlay his electrical
and battery knowledge into a career, and he first approached

(08:40):
Packard Motors and showed them a battery that he had
designed for use in automobiles. His original design needed to
be tweaked to work, but he did get a contract
with Packard and he used that money that he yearned
on that job to go into business for himself under
the company name Electro Importing Co. Which had a storefront
at sixty nine West Broadway. One of the first radio

(09:01):
sets offered to the general public was a design of
Hugos that he created in his early years as a businessman.
This was the Talimco Wireless. That particular invention, which guaranteed
that it would work up to one mile, was written
up in Scientific American in nineteen o five. That article
was written by CERN's back himself under the pen name

(09:23):
Huck after the Twain character. This tiny radio was ahead
of its time enough that it wasn't all that useful.
There weren't many radio stations in operation yet for it
to actually pick up. It was also considered suspicious enough
that police insisted on a demonstration of the device to
make sure that he was not making fraudulent claims. Yeah yeah,

(09:47):
like yeah, but how do we know if it works
if there's no radio station. Hugo got married for the
first time in nineteen o six to a woman named
Rose Harvey. They had a daughter in nineteen o nine,
but that marriage did not last. He started a magazine
called Modern Electrics. In this featured articles largely written by
gurn's Back himself, often under alias is that touted the

(10:11):
technology used than many of his inventions. It was an
outgrowth of his earlier electro importing catalog, which he started
in nineteen o six. Over time, this expanded to include
wider coverage of radio and other tech that home enthusiasts
were eager to learn about, as well as letters to
the editor from subscribers. Girls Back employed numerous freelancers to

(10:35):
work on this magazine, as well as getting his company's
staff to contribute. He worked on inventions and experiments with
his brother Sydney, as well as his collaborators Louis Coxhall
and Harry Winfield, and Modern Electrics included articles that tracked
their progress and music experiments. In some cases, he would
be describing the development of a product that he would

(10:56):
then sell, often through the magazine, which has led to
some modern criticism that it was sort of a long
haul sales mechanism. Yeah. Yeah, He was definitely not shy
about being his own hype man anyway. He was very
willing to write up his work and praise himself under
other names. The growing popularity of Modern Electrics magazine led

(11:18):
Gernsbach to delve into a new creative space as he
hustled to assemble enough material for each issue. So the
story goes that in April nineteen eleven, he was coming
up short on his magazine, so to fill pages, he
decided to write a piece of fiction, and that was
the birth of a character that on page is Ralph

(11:39):
one to four c four one plus sign and it's
meant to be read as it plays out in the
pages of the book, or as the story as one
to four see for another. Ralph was an astronaut living
in the twenty seven century. The story begins in sixty
The story was very much pulpic shin right down to

(12:01):
the damsel in distress trope. This was alice to one
to be four to three, but it was also filled
out with futuristic detail that was rooted in Hugo's knowledge
of science and technology. The opening description of the character
sets the tone for the whole work. Quote. His physical superiority, however,
was nothing compared to his gigantic mind. He was Ralph

(12:24):
once to foresee for one plus one of the greatest
living scientists and one of ten men on the whole
planet Earth permitted to use the plus sign after his name.
Ralph's adventures were fairly formulaic, but this story really captivated readers,
and while Gernsbach may have initially thought he was just
filling out the page count to modern electrics, it turned

(12:46):
out he had started a new feature series, and one
that was extremely popular. He had closed that initial story
on a suspenseful cliffhanger, so it was pretty natural to
keep going, which he did for eleven more installments. The
writing isn't spectacular. An amazing aspect of these stories was
the way they wave science and inventive ideas into the

(13:07):
narrative story. One installment includes a diagram and description that
is essentially radar, well before these systems were in use. Quote.
A pulsating polarized ether wave, if directed on a metal object,
can be reflected in the same manner as a light
ray is reflected from a bright surface. By manipulating the
entire apparatus like a searchlight, waves would be sent over

(13:31):
a large area. Sooner or later these waves would strike
a space flyer. A small part of these waves would
strike the metal body of the flyer, and these rays
would be reflected back to the sending apparatus. Here they
would fall on the Actina scope, which records only the
reflected waves, not direct ones. From the intensity and elapsed

(13:52):
time of the reflected impulses, the distance between the Earth
and the flyer can then be accurately estimated. Another prescient
description in the series pre dates video chat by decades,
but describes exactly that he wrote quote. Stepping to the
telefot on the side of the wall, he pressed a
group of buttons, and in a few minutes, the face
plate of the telefont became luminous, revealing the face of

(14:14):
a clean shaven man about thirty, a pleasant but serious face.
As soon as he recognized the face of Ralph in
his own telefonte, he smiled and said, Hello, Ralph. The
twelve part series was collected into a novel for publication,
but not until that was fourteen years after their serialized release. Yeah,
that's still in print today. You can get it very,

(14:36):
very easily, and you can usually get a pretty inexpensive
E reader edition if you are curious. But again, this
is not where you go for great literary writing. Next up,
we're going to talk about Girl's Box continuing work in radio,
and we will do that after we pause for a
sponsor break. While Hugo Gernsbach continued to write fiction after

(15:03):
Ralph one to four See for one plus, most of
his publishing efforts were in electric and radio journalism and
advocacy for years. As the wireless radio community grew, Gernsbach
formed the Wireless Association of America in nineteen o nine
and published a directory of operators called the Blue Book
once a year so that people could connect more easily

(15:24):
to one another. He also wrote a lot about best
practices that would keep them from interfering with government radio
stations and suggested ways that radio frequencies could be allocated
and managed. He thought government regulation was only going to
be problematic, writing that the creation of a wireless telegraph
board to regulate quote is of no practical value whatsoever

(15:46):
un American, and will keep down the progress of a
young and useful art, which in time may develop into
an as yet undreamed of asset of the nation's power.
Wireless telegraphy and telephony in a country of vast distances
as America, is a very valuable means for cheap transmission
of intelligence, and it is the duty of the government

(16:07):
to encourage it and not to pass a resolution to
throttle it, like England and Germany have done, in which
two countries the art is almost unknown. On the one hand,
this sounds like discussions about internet regulation happening today. On
the other hand, we definitely need radio bands that emergency

(16:31):
services can use that are not overrun with other traffic.
So Hugo would later claim that his writing on these
issues which suggested a number of common sense measures that
could be self regulated by users, uh, which I feel
like is optimistic, But that was used word for word
in the Wireless Act of LVE. But that's really not accurate.
His concepts are all there, but the act itself is

(16:54):
not in his words. But the start of World War
One really put an end to amateur wireless broadcast activities
so that naval operators were the sole users. This was
an issue that caused just a great deal of chagrin,
and that all played out in the pages of Gerns
Box periodical. Yeah, he was left a little bit kind

(17:15):
of um scrambling to figure out what he was going
to do, since suddenly all of the people that were
buying his magazine to build things and to to talk
about what they were working on weren't allowed to build
or work on those things anymore. Uh Guern's box sold
Modern Electrics in nineteen to the publisher of Electrician and
Mechanic magazine, and it eventually became part of Popular Science

(17:38):
Monthly after many changes and shifts, and then he started
a fresh magazine called The Electrical experiment Er, and this
was similar in tone to Modern Electrics, but it was
also a lot more focused on building the community of
the readership. Subscribers were encouraged to submit their own designs
for prizes, and there were how to sections for setting
up a homework area, aggregation and discussion of all the

(18:02):
latest developments in the electrical field. There was also a
column for helping readers get their inventions patented, with a
Q and a element where a reader could send in
a question along with a dollar and get advice on
their invention and their application for patent. The Electrical Experimenters
more carefully plotted out contents yielded a growth and readership

(18:23):
to a hundred thousand subscribers. As the magazine continued to
expand through its combination of practical advice and speculative technological ideas.
Gernsbach also hired illustrators to help readers imagine what the
future might look like if some of them mentioned ideas
were implemented. The Electrical experiment Er eventually changed names to

(18:46):
Science and Invention, covering not only the at home, grassroots inventor,
but also including stories that covered work in science and
engineering at the corporate level. Science and Invention became influential
enough that other publications around the world started picking up
their articles and stories for reprint. To maintain the connection

(19:06):
to that independent home inventor demographic, he launched a new periodical,
Radio Amateur News, which later shortened to Radio News, and
he would continue to launch new titles in response to
the changing times to keep growing his readership and offer
niche information to his long term audience. He always maintained
that the most exciting work was being done in what

(19:29):
we today would call open source or even crowdsource style,
with the sharing of ideas, rather than behind the doors
of research and development divisions at corporations, writing quote, everyone
knows that the more people who are working on an art,
the more rapid the progress will be in the end.
In one Gerns Black married his second wife, Dorothy Cantrowitz.

(19:50):
Information on Dorothy is pretty sparse. This marriage was not
his last, and it's not really clear how it ended.
In guns By founded a radio station w r n
Y under the auspices of his publishing company, experiment Or Publishing,
and this was an experimental station. Hugo and his collaborators
would test new media and technology on the station and

(20:13):
then keep track of how the station's listeners reacted. The
station would later broadcast early television broadcasts and was one
of the first broadcast entities to regularly broadcast television signals
on a schedule. These are very short. He published schematics
for a receiver for these broadcasts in his magazine so
enterprising readers could order their supplies, put them together, and

(20:37):
then watch these short like five minute daily programs on
a screen about the size of a postage stamp. He
also introduced television magazine to capitalize on interest in the
new medium. In he Go launched his first magazine venture
with the strictly fiction focus. On April six, the first
issue of Amazing Stories came out, and in it in

(21:00):
Sboch laid out his aspiration for the periodical quote. At
first thought, it does seem impossible that there could be
room for another fiction magazine in this country. The reader
may well wonder, aren't there enough already with the several
hundred now being published. True, but this is not another
fiction magazine. Amazing Stories is a new kind of fiction magazine.

(21:23):
It is entirely new, entirely different, something that has never
been done before in this country. There is the usual
fiction magazine, the love story and the sex appeal type
of magazine, the adventure type, and so on. But a
magazine of scientifiction is a pioneer in its field in America.

(21:45):
By scientifiction, I mean the Jules Verne, H. G. Wells,
and Edgar Allan Poe type of story, a charming romance
intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision. And he used
this new platform to both draw readers in with established
content like worked by Jules Vernon H. G. Wells, and
to test out new stories and new writers. And because

(22:08):
of all of this, Hugo Gernsbach is often credited with
inventing the science fiction genre, and Isaac Asimov even called
him the father of science fiction. But that's not because
Gernsbach wrote the first works in the space, because he
absolutely did not, and really he's not considered a literary genius,
but because he was the first person to group such

(22:28):
stories together and kind of try to create a genre
of them. Although it was all fiction, Amazing Stories had
a lot of the community crowdsourcing character of Gernsbach's nonfiction magazines.
There was still a busy letter column which often was
home to ongoing back and forth among readers and with
the publisher, and readers were invited to suggest plot ideas.

(22:51):
Amazing Stories was very, very popular, but Gernsbach was not
really great with money. He was known to have problems
with his writers when it came to paying them in
a timely manner or to rate that they felt was fair.
He also underpaid his staff, both under his electric standard
under his publishing compared to industry standards, but he did

(23:11):
give himself and his brother very comfortable salaries, and his
paper supplier eventually took legal action against his company, experiment
Or Publishing, for non payment. According to HP Lovecraft biographer
Els breg to Camp, Lovecraft and other writers referred to
Gernsback as Hugo the Rat. After Experimenter was declared bankrupt

(23:32):
by the court, it went into a receivership. The staff remained,
but Hugo and his brother were forced out. Amazing Stories
has continued on over the years, passing through multiple hands
of ownership and sometimes switching to an online only publishing model.
In response to losing his position of power and Amazing Stories,
Gernsbach launched two competing magazines with similar content. In they

(23:56):
were called Science Wonder Stories and Air Wonder Stories. We'll
talk about the ongoing debate of what readers wanted out
of these publications. After a quick pause for a sponsor break,
Science Wonder Stories and Air Wonder Stories merged into one

(24:18):
publication under the name Just Wonder Stories. In n and
not all readers were comfortable with this change. One road
end quote. Your aim, I take it is to make
the title more catchy to that class of magazine addicts
who are already reading sappy stories, slushy romances and so
on ad nauseum. I believe this is a mistake. It

(24:39):
will attract a type of reader to whom s a
means sex appeal and not scientific adventure. Just in case
you thought for even a moment the fandom ire with
some invention of the modern world. Uh, you can see
that there is an element of worry that women might
invade this clubhouse. In that complaint, there were some women
readers that were done coumented, but not very many comparatively,

(25:02):
And this idea that taking the science off the title
might invite ladies is actually reinforced even by the supporters
of the new name uh, some of whom even suggested
that it might be great that the name changed drew
in more women to the material within. From the start
of Amazing Stories, there were also always discussions and disagreements
among Gernsbach, the various writers who contributed to the magazines,

(25:24):
and the readers about how much fiction versus how much
real science should be included in scientifiction literature. Gernsback's weigh
in was that quote the ideal proportion of a scientifiction
story should be seventy percent literature interwoven with twenty five
percent science. He was pretty flexible on how he applied

(25:47):
those definitions and what can be considered scientific fact or
something that should be characterized as fiction. He wrote several
essays about it, sort of working through the ideas himself
the way one might tackle an electrical problem to be solved,
He sort of landed at a place where in order
for something to be labeled, in his view as scientifiction,

(26:09):
it had to have an element of prediction to it.
Gernsbach also wanted stories that educated the public about science
and made it appealing to people who might not want
to necessarily study engineering or astronomy or another scientific field. Yeah,
he felt like it was, you know, an ultimately an

(26:29):
educational tool. Gersbach was also a fan of practical jokes.
In three, he ran an April fools Day article about
a new invention from westing Mouse. There was a tiny
handheld radio. He included detailed diagrams to this fictional mouse
sized device, but readers who did not catch the joke
apparently harangued Westinghouse about the product, to the point that

(26:51):
the company got a little bit miffed at Hugo. Also
in n three, Gernsbach, ever on the lookout for expansions
to publishing holdings, started a magazine called sex Oology. It
would eventually also be called sex Ology Together, and then
sex Ology. Today, sex Oology is often cited as a

(27:12):
precursor to magazines like Playboy and play Girl, but it
was much tamer. It discussed sex in a way that
shared a bit of DNA with Gerns box other magazines.
In terms of taking an analytical approach, doctors are all.
The articles and sex and sexuality were discussed in a
way that made clinical knowledge of human sexuality something accessible

(27:34):
to the average reader. It was definitely intended to appeal
to people as a way to demystify sex and improve
readers sex lives, but with a foundation based in science,
though that science was of its time and largely very
outdated by today's standards, so outdated um troublingly outdated. The

(27:56):
articles and sex ology tackled a wide range of topics,
sometimes really only tangentially related to sex. In one issue,
for example, there's an article on the scientific possibility of
creating babies to the parents specifications, another on how alcoholism
affects a marriage, and an examination of lesbianism as an

(28:17):
identity that is woefully ignorant. If you go reading it,
just no upfront, it will probably make you really angry. Uh.
An article that was titled love Stimulants in that issue
may sound kind of salacious, but the opening paragraph is quote,
most people have exceedingly erroneous ideas about magical medicines that
will influence the other sex and give vigor, and then

(28:38):
it kind of breaks down, like the reality of what
has been sold as an aphrodisiac and how it is
largely quackery. Uh. There is also a statement in the
periodical that reads, quote, the policy of this magazine is
that no questionable advertising of any kind will be accepted,
no quack medicine, and no contraceptive advertising will be printed.
The only acceptable form of advertising is that of educational

(29:01):
sex literature. Still, even though it had a lot of
those kind of caveats to protect itself, it was a
controversial publication and at times there were even issues just
getting it sent through the mail to subscribers. In ninety six,
Hugo started sending an unusual alternative to Christmas cards. He
started printing a mini magazine each year that he would

(29:23):
send out to all the scientists he knew. It would
include predictions of future inventions that often stimulated the minds
of its recipients and would eventually come into fruition, though
not for decades in many cases. For instance, he wrote
in one about what he called language rectified telephony, which
was a communication which would translate languages between two speakers

(29:46):
in real time. Like apps you might find out a
phone today. He also predicted the future importance of computer
driven diagnostic equipment in the medical field, and some things
we haven't seen yet, like flying cars to east traffic.
Flying cars is kind of a go to many of
these holiday many magazines included the hopeful line quote, never

(30:08):
forget for an instant that all man's greatest inventions are
still to come. This annual publication became so popular that
Gernsbach was often contacted by scientists he did not know,
and he knew a lot of famous scientists, but others
that he had not even heard of. In some cases
asked to be added to his holiday lists, and there
were even pleased for back issues, but Gernsbach had to

(30:30):
keep his list limited and he had to set up
a no back issues policy. Through the publication of Sexology,
Hugo Gernsbach met the love of his life, Mary Hanscher.
Mary was hired onto the magazine as an assistant editor,
and in nine fifty one h Go and Mary were
married in Chicago. Notable trivia regarding their wedding they were

(30:52):
married by a judge in Chicago. That judge Hugo Friend
had presided over the nineteen Black Socks scandal trial, which
took place in According to an interview Mary gave later
in life, Hugo was an adoring and romantic husband who
sent her flowers every single week. They also traveled together extensively,

(31:13):
and they really lived a very privileged life. Yes, she
mentioned that, like he always made sure that she had
staff so she didn't have to do anything she didn't
want to. Uh. He clearly really did treat her, uh
like the most important thing on earth. Girls. Black, as
we've said, was an inventor. He came up with myriad
ideas for future technologies, but while some got to the

(31:35):
finish line, most of them really didn't ever come to
fruition as products. It's sort of a funny twist of
fate that he started publishing to bolster his sales of
electric equipment, and it ended up being that the publishing
was what actually took off. Among his ideas were a
submersible amusement device that was sort of a cross between
a ferris wheel and a roller coaster, with riders and

(31:56):
sealed pods that could dunk underwater, and locations like boardwalk
amusement parks. He also came up with a product he
called an isolator. This was a giant helmet that looks
almost like a sleeker diving bell with an airline and
eye windows. It was meant to isolate the wearer from
noise and distractions that could concentrate and get more work done.

(32:18):
It looks like it might make you claustrophobic and sweaty
if you've seen a picture of it. It reminds me
of that knitting pattern of like the sweater that would
just extend like a turtleneck up past your head and
then totally encompass your computer monitor so you could focus
on that no thank you. The claustrophobe in me just

(32:40):
gets real twitchy looking at pictures of the isolator. Um
He also championed this idea of a monument to electricity
being built, a one thousand foot tall replica of a
generator that would, like the Pyramids, stand quote for practically
all time, and he thought it would be a great
boon to everyone's happy us to devise a scientific test

(33:01):
series that would determine marriage compatibility. Then this test series
involved a physical attraction test, a sympathy test, a body
odor test, and a final test of nervous disorders and
according to gernsbox uh plan for this. If science were
to give the hopeful couple of failing grade, in Gernsbok's mind,
they should be denied a marriage license. By the time

(33:25):
he died, Gernsbach held eighty patents. One of those was
for an asophone, which used bone to conduct sound, and
that technology has been used as the basis for hearing
aid designs. As he got older, journalists would often report
on Hugo's predictions. Some of these got very yikes E.
In a hurry, we mentioned that his magazine Sexology predicted

(33:46):
that humans would engineer the babies they wished to have.
That was a concept he continued to talk about right
into the nineteen sixties. But one of the most cringe
e predictions that he made in nineteen sixty three was
that Kimma Janetta Cysts would offer a method quote to
control the amount of melanin produced in the body, and
he suggested that by nineteen seventy two, black people would

(34:08):
be offered the option to change their skin to a
lighter tone if they wished. Yikes, yikes, yikes on bikes.
I just I was reading that was just like, this
is so horrifying. Uh, Mixed in with that troubling couple
of predictions was one that was actually spot on, and
that was the prediction of pocket computers. Gernsbach described quote
a personal electronic computer so small it could be carried

(34:31):
in your pocket and capable of it giving it to
us your quote, almost instant answers to almost any complex
business problem. He also described a technology he called ray
FAR radio automated facsimile reproduction. He thought that a technology
to send newspapers over radio waves was not far off,
and that ray FAR would enable newspaper staffs to thrive

(34:54):
as they expanded their reach and instantly transmitted stories. Yeah,
he thought, like of everyone at home will want to
get these newspapers and print them out and then read
them at home. That way close, but not quite. Yeah,
we're gonna read them on our handheld pocket computers that
bring us both solutions and problems. Right. Gernsbach died on

(35:15):
August nine, ninety seven, at the age of eighty three,
and he willed his body to Cortnell University for scientific
and educational use. Do you know if he like had
opinions on the awards ceremony that became named after him.
I didn't find any direct ones. I saw one thing

(35:36):
that I couldn't substantially and I couldn't find it on
the Hugo Awards site. It started when he was still
alive and was named for him, but was not his project.
And there was like one line that I saw somewhere
that said that he was given an honorary Hugo in
nineteen sixty, but I didn't find corroboration on it. It
may be out there, but it huh. Well, I feel

(36:00):
the ongoing years and years of chaos and drama involving
the Hugo Awards, like outside the scope of this episode
for hundred percent. Uh. Yeah, he's um. He's a chaotic
and dramatic figure on his own. Yeah. Uh. It's interesting

(36:23):
to see people sometimes refer to him as like this
genius prophet and other like he's kind of like P. T. Barnum,
you guys, Yeah, yeah, and everything in between, and all
of it is true, um or not. But uh, that
is Hugo, who I have equal parts of love and

(36:45):
chagrin over. I have to admire anyone who dresses that snazzy,
but then he says gross things on occasion. I just
had flashbacks to every fan convention I've ever been to. Right, Yeah,
I have fun and delicious and also silly, which seemed

(37:07):
like the right tone. Listener mail for this one. It
is from our listener Carl, who writes a Dear Holly
and Tracy. Listening to her a pick use episode reminded
me of one of my favorite memories of working in
a public library. Shortly after we bought our first house,
we hosted a murder mystery party for my library colleagues.
The theme for the mystery was Ancient Rome, and I

(37:27):
went down a rabbit hole searching for authentic recipes. I
know that I must have found Derek Coquinadia because I
remember serving dates stuffed with nuts and drizzled with honey.
But you mentioned in the episode, I remember thinking that
our new neighbors must have wondered what they were getting
into when librarians and togas started showing up at our door. Uh.
And they even made a T shirt for the event,
which he sent us a picture of and he still has,

(37:48):
which I love anybody who's organized, um a party that
has T shirts that go with it? It says at
two librarious Uh, I love it. Um. I always love
a themed get together to begin with. So anytime you
can do all of the stuff and have both uh
fun costumes and food that are connected to a theme,

(38:13):
you're doing it right. If you would like to write
to us and share your theme party experiences, you can
do that in History Podcasts at iHeart radio dot com.
You can also find us on social media and you
can subscribe to the show easy peasy. You can just
do that on the I heart Radio app or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows. Stuff you Missed in

(38:37):
History Class is a production of I heart Radio. For
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