There’s a good reason the Hugo awards are given for writing Science Fiction and not Romance.

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The Future: Electronic Mating

A look into the more rational marriage choice of the future, by a science expert on things-to-come.

By Hugo Gernsback

Marriage still remains man’s greatest gamble. The world’s divorce rate constantly accelerates at a dizzying rate. Clearly there is something seriously wrong with our customs and our approach to marriage—it cries out for radical reform.

People rarely speculate why so many of our most dazzling “sexy” beauties of screen and theater shed husbands like a pair of gloves, and why other famous and exquisitely beautiful women, with the most alluring anatomies, never marry at all.
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The Murderous Automobile

By HUGO GERNSBACK

IT is odd that automobile engineers, as a whole, for many years have concentrated on mechanical improvements of the automobile, but have done practically nothing toward improved design of cars, in the matter of reducing the hazards of the occupants, as well as of pedestrians.

It is true that we now have better brakes and so-called safety glass, but these are about the only points to which automobile engineers have paid serious attention. Read the rest of this entry »

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The Theatre of the Future

By HUGO GERNSBACK

THE “legitimate” theatre, as it is constituted at present, is doomed to extinction. The motion pictures, which for fifty cents give the public an excellent two-hour entertainment, are too strong competition for the legitimate theatre where seats cost from $2.50 upwards. Yet, up to now, there has been no way to sell seats in the legitimate houses cheaper, for obvious reasons. Read the rest of this entry »

Tesla was a genius, but he was an engineer, not a scientist.

Faster Than Light!

By HUGO GERNSBACK

IT may come as a shock, to most students of science, to learn that there are still in the world some scientists who believe that there are speeds greater than that of light.

Since the advent of Einstein, most scientists and physicists have taken it for granted that speeds greater than 186,300 miles per second are impossible in the universe. Indeed, one of the principal tenets of the relativity theory is that the mass of a body increases with its speed, and would become infinite at the velocity of light. Hence, a greater velocity is impossible. Read the rest of this entry »

Sadly these quack cures are still ridiculously popular.

Also, despite all of his fantastical ideas, Hugo Gernsback was an excellent debunker.

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Scientific Frauds

By HUGO GERNSBACK

IT would seem that, in this enlightened age, the public should be sufficiently educated not to fall prey to the multitude of scientific quackeries which still abound.

With the public pretty well accustomed to science, there would seem to be no excuse for these latter-day swindles which are still being practiced all over the country; but, strange as it may seem, there is still a great amount of business being done by various individuals and companies who make a specialty of thus exploiting the public.
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This is a pretty well reasoned piece, though it would have been so much better if the last line had been: “Ergo, Godzilla”.

We Change But Little

By HUGO GERNSBACK

IT is a curious fact that the average layman has an idea that we change biologically during the course of a few generations.

Nothing could be more erroneous. The changes that take place in the characteristics of the normal human being within the course of such a small time interval— geologically speaking—as 5,000 years, are insignificant.

It should always be remembered that even a stretch of 5,000 years, which we human beings may consider long, represents only a couple of hundred generations; which is much too short a space of time to get any positive results, one way or another. Read the rest of this entry »

This would make for some pretty awesome car chases.

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The Air Police Patrol

By HUGO GERNSBACK

THE automobile, as a quick get-away instrument in crime, has assumed vast proportions during the past decade. Notorious gangsters and their henchmen are always using high-powered automobiles and, unfortunately, they are often able to outwit local police and state troopers after the crime has been engineered. Read the rest of this entry »

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The Flame Tank

By HUGO GERNSBACK

LAYMEN still labor under the erroneous conception that war is far more frightful in modern times, and that it kills more of the combatants than formerly. Quite the contrary is true. In ancient war, when hand-to-hand fighting was the order of the day, as, for instance, in the old Roman times, casualties were far and away greater than they are in modern warfare. Read the rest of this entry »

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Berlin to New York in less than One Hour!

By HUGO GERNSBACK

IT is a curious failing of human natrue that it is inclined to pooh-pooh new and scientific ideas, particularly if they deal with high speeds. If you had told that master of extravagant imagination, Jules Verne, at the time he wrote his story “Around the World in Eighty Days,” that in 1931 flyers would circle the earth in nine days, he probably would have taken it as a good joke. Nevertheless, facts speak for themselves; and the circumnavigation of the globe has actually been accomplished in nine days. That it will soon be circled in twenty-four hours, no one now doubts.
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Millions in Gadgets

By Hugo Gernsback

THE American people spend more than $100,000,000 a year, in amounts from 5c up, on gadgets manufactured in this country—not counting the huge importations from abroad. Here is a field of invention, and unlimited new business possibilities, always open to the ingenious.

YOU will not find the word “gadget” in many dictionaries; perhaps for the reason that most dictionary compilers consider the word to be slang. Yet, the word “gadget” is well known to everyone, and is used in everyday language in connection with some article that has a practical use and, usually, can be bought at a low price.
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Radium – Boon or Menace?

By HUGO GERNSBACK

Member, American Physical Society; Member, American Association for the Advancement of Science.

RECENTLY the press reported the case of a wealthy man who died from the direct use of radium, in a way that made it necessary for the authorities to step in and investigate the so-called “radium cures”. The victim, Eben M. Byers, an iron manufacturer, died in a New York hospital from the effects of radium absorbed by drinking “radithor”, a radioactive water manufactured by the Bailey Radium Laboratories, East Orange, New Jersey. Read the rest of this entry »

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The “Dynamic Control” Ocean Liner

By Hugo Gernsback

THE tendency at the present time in airplane building is toward constantly increasing size. It is probably realized by all who have concerned themselves with aircraft that the larger machines are not very far in the future. From the earliest Wright airplane, which weighed approximately 1/2 ton, to the present record holder, the DOX, which weighed fifty tons, took a period of some 26 years. The 10,000 ton airplane, projected on a like time-scale, would, therefore, make its appearance not later than the year 1952. However, with the nature of the present-day technique, it is quite possible, at this moment, that the 10,000 ton plane will be here much sooner.
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