Electrical Experimenter
&
Science and Invention |
Hugo Gernsback
published a magazine initially called "Electrical
Experimenter" beginning in May 1913. The
change in title in 1920 to "Science and Invention"
was intended encouraged
scientific curiosity and amateur scientific
experimentation. Much of the focus of the
experimentation in the magazine was on radio
construction and design, but it also included any
new technological advance that was noteworthy to
inventors. Readers possessing scientific curiosity
were rewarded by articles detailing the principles
of physics that could be observed in everyday life,
speculative articles on forthcoming technologies,
and even “scientifiction” stories about conflict
resolutions facilitated by inventive prowess and
problem solving.
The last "Science and invention" was issued in
August of 1931. The magazine appears to have been
reborn in late 1931 with yet another title, "Science
and Mechanicas"
Today, Gernsback is considered by
many to be the father of the Science Fiction genre,
and by starting the Science Correspondence Club,
also becomes the earliest organizer of science
fiction fandom in the United States.
History
From "Newsstand
1925" (unedited and may contain inaccuracies)
Science and Invention was originally called The
Electrical Experimenter and published by the
Experimenter Publishing Company from May 1913 to
August 1929; the title changed from The Electrical
Experimenter to Science and Invention in August
1920. It was published and edited by Hugo Gernsback,
an electrical engineer who started publishing and
editing his first magazine, Modern Electrics, only
five years earlier. Modern Electrics was an
overnight success. Gernsback, who had moved to New
York City from Luxembourg in 1904, first became
successful after starting his own business, the
Electro Importing Company, which imported and sold
high quality electrical components from Germany. The
Experimenter Publishing Company, a subsidiary of the
Electro Importing Company, and its subsequent
publications under the direction of Gernsback were
the result of the experience he gained while
publishing a catalog listing the Electro Importing
Company’s products. Gernsback also felt that there
was a “general ignorance of technology amongst the
American public” and set out to correct this
imbalance by publishing a periodical that would
disseminate technical and scientific information to
the public.[1]
The first issue of Modern Electrics was published in
April 1908 in a 6 x 9.5 inch format on 36 pages of
quality paper stock for ten cents. It is hard to
gauge whether the public’s ignorance of general
scientific principles was reduced by the publication
of Modern Electrics but clearly the magazine was an
immediate success: “The first issue of 8,000 copies
sold out, as did the second issue of 10,000.
Circulation rose from 18,000 the first year, to
30,000 after two years and 52,000 by the third.”[2]
Gernsback sold his share of Modern Electrics in 1913
and began publishing The Electrical Experimenter the
same year.
The Electrical Experimenter began publication in May
1913 in an 11 x 8.5 inch format on quality paper
stock. At sixteen pages, it boasted that it
contained no advertisements, and cost five cents.
The page count was a significant reduction in
content compared to recent issues of Modern
Electrics which ran about one hundred and twelve
pages per issue with advertisements. By March 1915
the magazine had begun to accept advertising and the
page count increased from sixteen to thirty-two
pages and the cover price was changed to ten cents.
Shortly after this increase another twelve pages
were added in June 1915. By the late twenties the
page count had increased to 95 pages and the cover
price was 25 cents (Ashley, Lowndes 34).
Science and Invention is best remembered for its
speculative articles, scientific fiction
serializations, and for encouraging its readers to
become amateur electrical experimenters. The
distinction of “electrical” in front of the word
“experimenter” is an important one. Gernsback’s
dedication to electrical experimentation was a
substantial one. As a professional experimenter and
electrical engineer he made a living in this field.
One must remember that the profession of electrical
engineer did not command the widespread professional
respect it does in the early twenty-first century.
According to Gernsback, electrical experimenters
like Edison or Tesla or Marconi, whether they became
wealthy or not, were more admired for an invention
or device's ability to generate income than they
were respected by the established scientific
community. Even as late as August 1920 this was an
issue that Gernsback felt needed to be addressed. He
states in the editorial to the first issue of
Science and Invention that “[i]t matters little that
Jules Verne or Nikola Tesla are a hundred years
ahead of the times--the scientists scoff and laugh
unbelievingly . . . because the real scientists are
as backward as in Galileo’s times” (qtd in Ashley,
Lowndes 54).
In all three of his scientific magazines Gernsback
was well-known for speculative articles that
predicted advancements in technologies such as
wireless data transmission as well as predicting the
country’s future reliance on sources of power such
as solar energy. The majority of the pages in the
July 1925 Science and Invention are dedicated to
experimentation and advances in radio, science, home
improvement, and other technologies and several of
these are in the format of diagrams and schematics
for everything from hub cap lights to teaching
swimming on land to how to build an automatic
fisherman. There are also contests to invent uses
for everyday materials such as inner tubes, as well
as articles dedicated to debunking the tricks of
psychic mediums, crossbreeding flowers to create new
colors, presenting interesting facts about Earth’s
atmosphere, explaining the planet’s gravitational
field, presenting movies at home with sound,
scientific magic tricks, and on and on. Contests and
prizes were a popular feature of Science and
Invention and in the July 1925 there are prizes of
more than $28,000.00 for two of Gernsback’s favorite
subjects and one for submissions along with the
$1000.00 in monthly contest awards. Although Mike
Ashley and Robert Lowndes express some skepticism
about Gernback’s practices of paying his fiction
writers in a timely fashion in general, it seems
that the majority of the content in July 1925 in
Science and Invention came from monthly
contributions.[3]
Gernsback wanted Science and Invention to be read by
“scientists and inventors, most especially by the
amateur scientist and inventor whom Gernsback
regarded as his main market” (Ashley, Lowndes 45).
The “amateur” market here logically included the
youth of America, and Gernsback’s editorial
directive for most of the scientific fiction that
appeared in his publications is quite clear. He
intended to educate and inspire his audience, to
promote the use of science and invention to increase
the presence of scientific technology in the
American public. Capturing the imagination of young
Americans would be the ideal way to promote such a
goal and the scientific fiction in his magazines
would have fed the established appetite for the type
of fantastic adventure fiction that had been
appearing in pulp magazines since the late
nineteenth century. Gernsback’s fiction was written
for scientists and this usually involved selecting
one or more scientific principles and building a
story around them, as opposed to the way fiction and
adventure pulps had been putting the “fiction first,
with a strong fantastic element and a smattering of
science” (Ashley, Lowndes 45). This “Gernsbackian”
approach to fiction has attracted the skepticism,
typically presented in texts that seek to canonize
or historicize the convergence of scientific
principles and fiction. According to Gary Westfahl,
the more recent studies of Science Fiction display a
tendency to speak of Gernsback more “sympathetically
than earlier studies of the genre” that tended to
label Gernsback as “the man who had instructed and
encouraged authors to write bad science fiction,
[and] who had published and praised the bad science
fiction that resulted from his efforts.”[4]
Regardless of the qualitative assessments of stories
Gernsback published, Westfahl has precisely argued
the irrelevance of such assessments by stating that
Gernsback “had an impact on all works of science
fiction published since 1926” and that the affect of
this impact “had influenced perceptions of the works
published before 1926 now acknowledged as science
fiction” (Westfahl 3).
Regarding the fiction presented in Science and
Invention it is necessary to point out that although
the words “science-fiction” were used in 1851 by
William Wilson in his book A Little Earnest Book
Upon a Great Old Subject, it is not until the 1920s
that the words scientific fiction, scientifiction,
and finally science fiction became formally attached
to a genre of literature with particular motifs
(Ashley, Lowndes 147). Also of significance is the
fact that it is Hugo Gernsback that initiates the
practice of this formality. The fiction and
serializations that first appeared in the April 1911
issue of Modern Electrics and subsequently in The
Electrical Experimenter and Science and Invention
can be classified less as adventure stories than
what Ashley and Lowndes call the “scientific problem
story” and the “scientific mystery story” (Ashley,
Lowndes 49, 59). These stories are the direct
precursors to Gernsback’s first all-fiction magazine
and the first magazine dedicated to the genre of
science fiction: Amazing Stories. Within two years
of its revolutionary appearance in April 1926,
Amazing Stories put science fiction on the map
forever. The competitive spirit of American magazine
publishing would create a deluge of competitors and
imitators by the early 1930s. Gernsback himself
would be one of Amazing’s first serious competitors
with his new magazine Science Wonder Stories (June
1929 - April 1936) because of bankruptcy proceedings
in February 1929 that resulted in the loss of
publishing rights for the magazines he had created
(Ashley, Lowndes 132). The last issue of Science and
Invention Gernsback edited was the April 1929 issue.
Most of the staff on the Experimenter magazines was
kept intact with the obvious exception of upper
management and so Gernsback’s associate editors
Thomas O’Connor Sloane and Joseph H. Kraus took over
the editing and publication of Science and
Invention. The magazine’s final issue was the August
1931 issue after which it was sold to Popular
Mechanics and absorbed into that magazine.
Legacy
Science and Invention was not the first of
Gernsback’s publications which contained a
scientific fiction story; that distinction goes to
his first magazine, Modern Electrics. It was most
certainly not the most technical publication or even
the most scientific. Those distinctions go to Modern
Electrics, Radio News, and Practical Electrics which
changed its title to The Experimenter in 1924.
However, it was the Gernsback science periodical
that, until the publication of Amazing Stories, was
the most reliant on the possibilities of the future
impact of electricity: the wondrous inventions, the
amazing possibilities for humankind, the far away
places that the human race will discover. |
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