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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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. 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. 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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 History Class is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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. 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. 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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 History Class is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.