Tesla, Gernsback, and the birth of the science fiction genre

Talk given by Miriam Seidel at Philcon, Cherry Hill NJ 11/16/18

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1. DOUBLE PORTRAIT 

This idea started with an intuition I had while I was working on the libretto for an opera about Nikola Tesla, Violet Fire. I found it really intriguing when I learned that Gernsback and Tesla had a continuing relationship, and that Tesla and his work had been featured in Gernsback’s early publications. To put the idea conservatively, I believe that Nikola Tesla, and his inventions and ideas, had a profound influence on Hugo Gernsback during the period that Gernsback felt was formative to his understanding of science fiction—the 20 years or so before he launched Amazing Stories.

2. YOUNG HUGO

I’m going to start with a little introductory biography for both Gernsback and Tesla. Many of you are probably familiar with all this, but I think it’s a good place to begin.

Hugo Gernsback was born in 1884 in Luxembourg, to a well-to-do Jewish family. He was well educated, going to boarding school in Belgium and then to University in Bingen, Germany. While in school he invented a new form of dry battery.

3. YOUNG HUGO 2, CERTIFICATE

This certificate is really great. It dates to 1898, when Hugo was 13, and declares that he is an “aspiring electrician,” who successfully installed an electric doorbell in the Convent of the holy Elias vom Burge. Huge thanks to Mathias Rehnman for the translation. Interestingly, Gernsback later said that he first heard of Tesla and his inventions at about that age.

After University, in 1904, he moved to the US, to make his fortune with his battery. Apparently he’d also read a lot of Westerns, which may have bolstered his dreams of America. Instead, he started an electric parts company in New York. His first publication was the company catalog, followed by several electronics magazines. (1908–1926)

4. AMAZING STORIES COVER

Gernsback had been publishing science fiction stories, or what he then called “scientifiction,” in the pages of Modern Electrics, his first real magazine, and then in its successor, the Electrical Experimenter. It wasn’t till 1926 that he began publishing Amazing Stories, now famous as the first science fiction magazine. Gary Westfahl, who’s written several books about Gernsback and his legacy, dates the beginning of the science fiction genre to the debut of Amazing Stories in 1926. This was soon followed by Science Wonder Stories and Air Wonder Stories. Gernsback had a long publishing career and put out dozens of other magazines over the next decades, including Amazing Detectives, Everyday mechanics, Radio Craft and many other radio magazines, Foto-craft, French Humor, Moneymaking, New ideas for everybody, Sexology, and Superworld comics. In his later years he was happy to acknowledge his role in the development of the genre. He died in New York in 1967.

5. NIKOLA TESLA

Nikola Tesla was born in 1856 to a Serbian family in what’s now Croatia, and he died in New York City in 1943 at age 87. He also received a fine European education, in Graz, and then Prague, and got his first job in Hungary at the Budapest Telephone Exchange.

6. YOUNG TESLA

This is Tesla as a young man, in 1879. Two years later, he made his first and most important breakthrough, discovering the means to generate alternating current with a rotating magnetic field, far superior to any other electrical generator. In 1884 he immigrated to the US, and began working for Thomas Edison in New York. He did not last long with Edison, and from then on he worked for himself.

7. TESLA’S MAJOR BREAKTHROUGHS

Here’s a very brief listing of Tesla’s major breakthroughs. Each of these represents a whole area of new technology, rather than a single invention.

• The alternating current dynamo, based on the principle of a rotating magnetic field. This and his high-frequency transformer made possible the worldwide electric grid that transformed modern society.
• Radio and wireless transmission in general, including wireless transmission of energy. Tesla was the actual inventor of radio, not Marconi.
• Teleautomatics or as we call it, robotics. An outgrowth of his work in wireless transmission. He demonstrated the first remote-controlled vehicle in 1898, and had many patents relating to that.
• Basic computer circuitry, an outgrowth of his work in robotics. His patents date to 1903. They predate any later work in certain basic aspects of computer logic.
• Early research in other areas including x‑rays, cosmic rays, fluorescent light, electrotherapy, etc.

8. TESLA IN COLORADO SPRINGS

In 1899, Tesla worked for a year in Colorado Springs at a lab he built, where he experimented with his magnifying transmitter, producing extremely high voltages with extremely low current. His goal was to work out a technology that would allow the transmission of electrical signals and energy over long distances using the earth’s atmosphere and also transmitting through the earth.

This photo also shows his brilliance at self-promotion, in that it was created as a double-exposure to show him calmly reading a book in the midst of this explosion of electric power. He was always seeking publicity to help get financial support, as his experiments required a lot of funds.

9. TESLA AND MARK TWAIN

This is such a great photo. It dates from 1894, and shows Mark Twain, or Samuel Clemens, visiting Tesla’s New York laboratory—looks like he’s completing the circuit for a wirelessly charged light bulb. You can see Tesla to the left. Another example of Tesla’s desire for publicity.

10. WARDENCLYFFE

This project was to be the culmination of Tesla’s lifework, a massively ambitious plan to transmit not only signals but also electrical energy across long distances. This tower, which Tesla named Wardenclyffe, was built on Long Island and was intended to be one of a global network of transmitting towers. We can see it as a planned global communications network predating the internet. But Tesla’s main backer pulled out and it never went online. The project began in 1901, and the tower was demolished in 1917.

11. OLD TESLA

Portrait of Tesla as a seer. After the failure of Wardenclyffe, Tesla continued to work, but became known as a kind of futurist, making predictions in the popular press, some of which featured potential applications of his ideas. In his last years he was kept from dire poverty by a pension given to him by the Yugoslav government, and he spent a lot of time in the parks feeding pigeons. He died in 1943.

12. TESLA LECTURE DRAWING

This drawing of Tesla giving a lecture takes us back to his early fame. In the 1880s and 1890s, Tesla was a rock star, and electrical invention was rock n roll. He was often featured in the pages of the many electrical magazines of the time, including the Electrical Engineer, the American Electrician, the Electrical Review, and Electrical World, to name a few; his announcements were carried in the popular press, and he traveled in New York’s high society.

Getting back to Hugo Gernsback, remember he was born in 1884, so he was about 30 years younger than Tesla, and during this period he was a child in Luxembourg. However, he reported having heard about Tesla and his achievements by his early teens.

13. ELECTRICAL EXPERIMENTER – INTERVIEW & EDITORIAL

So when Gernsback came to the US and started Modern Electrics in 1908, and then the Electrical Experimenter in 1913, he was a little late to the party. But hey, he was in the same city as Tesla. it wasn’t long until he featured an interview with Tesla, in 1915. This was followed by an editorial about Edison and Tesla, which was occasioned by the premature news that they were going to share the Nobel Prize, which didn’t happen.

In the editorial, Gernsback makes clear his opinion of the relative scope of Edison’s and Tesla’s achievements. He says: “Without wishing to minimize Edison’s tremendous amount of work, the fact is well known that he is not so much an original inventor as a genius in perfecting existing inventions.
“In this respect Tesla has perhaps been the reverse, for he has to his credit a number of brilliant as well as original inventions….”

And famously, at another time, Gernsback said of Tesla: “If you mean the man who really invented, in other words, originated and discovered—not merely improved what had already been invented by others, then without a shade of doubt, Nikola Tesla is the world’s greatest inventor, not only at present, but in all history.”

14. ELECTRICAL EXPERIMENTER – COLO SPRINGS & WARDENCLYFFE

I see this as the beginning of a man-crush of mythic proportions on the part of Gernsback. Hugo had begun as an aspiring inventor. He was knowledgeable enough to understand the scope of Tesla’s achievements, and he had a vivid imagination that was fueled by Tesla’s tendency to make large-scale extrapolations for his ideas. On Tesla’s side, I believe he must have responded warmly to Gernsback’s appreciation, AND he was always happy to pursue opportunities to publicize his work, as I’ve said.

Over the next several years, Tesla contributed five articles to the Electrical Experimenter. And the magazine churned out articles on Tesla’s Greatest Hits, as it were. Here are two of those articles: one on his experiments in Colorado Springs in ultra-high frequency transmission, and one on his World Broadcasting System. You can see how the illustration gives the Tower an eerie, mysterious, dramatic appearance. Sadly, the Tower was destroyed the following year, in 1917, by the US government.

15. ELECTRICAL EXPERIMENTER – TELEAUTOMATICS, TESLA COILS

Here are two more of those articles covering Tesla’s achievements. The first one is about his work in Teleautomatics or Robotics, and illustrates the radio-controlled boat he had built and successfully demonstrated in 1898. The other article shows several high-frequency Tesla coils, one of them in action.

MY INVENTIONS

16. The peak of Tesla’s and Gernsback’s collaboration was Gernsback’s commissioning Tesla to write his autobiography, which appeared in six installments in the Electrical Experimenter in 1919. This was later published in book form with the title My Inventions.

17. MORE ARTICLES – SOLAR ENERGY, LIGHT THE OCEAN

But wait, there’s more! Right into the 1920s, Gernsback and his writers turned out more articles that showed the fertile ground provided by Tesla for speculation about future technologies. Here are two: one on solar energy, and another one in which Tesla announces that his new wireless transmission system would allow him to send light out over the ocean to make shipping lanes safer.

18. COLD FIRE

This one shows Gernsback having some fun—he interviewed Tesla about his experiences using his body to conduct high-frequency circuits from his oscillating coils, then he attempted to reproduce the effect on himself. The caption says “Every home will soon be equipped with a huge Tesla coil.”

19. HELLO MARS!

This is an example of Tesla’s work being wildly overinterpreted, as it often was in the popular press too. While he was in Colorado, Tesla had picked up some signals that he said were extra-planetary in origin. They were in fact cosmic rays, and he was the first to detect them. But Gernsback and others, already enchanted by the idea of intelligent life on Mars, just ran with the idea that we were getting signals from Mars.

20. THE MAGNETIC STORM

This “article” shows a lot of different pieces coming together. It’s called The Magnetic Storm, and it appeared in 1918. So this was the last year of World War I, but also the year that the US entered the war. We can also read between the lines in this story a strong emotional investment by Gernsback, who was culturally German, in finding a way to Beat the Huns.

It’s presented as an article, but it’s a science fiction story! And it features Nikola Tesla, and a spunky young inventor, “Why” Sparks, who is a transparently Mary Sue-ish stand-in for the kid inventor Gernsback once saw himself as. Basically, young Sparks comes up with a way to send a kind of electromagnetic pulse behind enemy lines, which will disable all German electric devices and communications networks. Tesla congratulates the young inventor for his brilliant idea. Hello! Tesla’s IN the science fiction story. I’d also like to point out the probably deliberate resemblance of the illustration to Tesla’s Colorado Springs laboratory.

21. TWO EE COVERS

Here are two covers from the Electrical Experimenter that also suggest the transition I’m talking about. The first one, showing a German submarine being knocked out by a magnetic ray, was the cover for the issue with The Magnetic Storm story, and I think you can see a suggestion of some of the later “war in space” covers on Amazing Stories. The other one is another take on Tesla’s “cold fire” electric bath, but dates from March 1925 – a year before the debut of Amazing Stories.

22. AMAZING STORIES COVER

And here we come to the debut of Amazing Stories, in April 1926. This is the cover of the first issue. There’s a striking similarity between ship images on this and the Electrical Experimenter cover we just saw. This may just be a case of the same artist adapting some earlier work to a new purpose – but it’s at least analogous to the process of adaptation and re-use in the content between the two magazines. Also, notice the authors: H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, and Edgar Allan Poe. Gernsback was very aware of the literary precedents he wanted to build on.

23. MODERN ELECTRICS COVER

Going back for a second—I want to touch on Gernsback as a science fiction author. This is a cover from Gernsback’s first magazine, Modern Electrics, in 1912. It’s an illustration for Gernsback’s first, and most well-known work of science fiction, or, RALPH 124C 41+. It was serialized in the magazine in 1911–1912.

24. RALPH 124C 41+ 

And then it was brought out as a novel in 1925. As fiction, it’s pretty basic, but it does include a number of interesting predictions, including solar panels, picture-phones, centrally charged electric cars, and thought recorders.

25. BARON MUNCHHAUSEN’S NEW SCIENTIFIC ADVENTURES

And this one ran as a serial in the Electrical Experimenter. He adapted the old story of Baron von Munchausen to his new purpose, having Munchhausen travel to the Moon instead of to Russia. As SF, everyone agrees it was pretty bad. It seems that Gernsback’s fiction was just a sort of skeletal framework for the delivery of his scientific ideas and predictions.

26. TO MARS WITH TESLA

On the other side, in terms of this Tesla/Gernsback Science/Science Fiction relationship, it seems that Tesla himself, not just his inventions and predictions, entered the world of science fiction very early. This is the cover for a boy’s magazine, Golden Hours, featuring the story “To Mars with Tesla.” This is from 1901. It actually features a showdown between Tesla and Edison’s fictional nephew.

27. TEXT – TESLA IN POPULAR CULTURE

As we know, Tesla has continued to develop as a kind of science-wizard persona in popular culture through a continuing stream of books, movies, games, and music. He’s become a touchstone of Steampunk.

The Prestige (novel by Christopher Priest and film)

Goliath, novel by Scott Westerfeld / Steampunk

The Invention of Everything, novel by Samantha Hunt

Numerous graphic novels

TV: Murdoch Mysteries

Films: The Secret of Nikola Tesla, The Current War, The Prestige

Named after Tesla: Tesla, the rock band Tesla, Tesla Boy

Online: “Why Tesla was the Greatest Geek Who Ever Lived,” theoatmeal.com

Music: Melissa Dunphy, Laurie Anderson, Phil Kline/Jim Jarmusch

28–31.  VIOLET FIRE

At this point, I’ll mention the opera Violet Fire, which I wrote the libretto for. It’s a kind of dreamlike treatment of Tesla’s life—I thought that opera was the best medium to express the weirdness of his life, or, to put it another way, how he lived on the border of real life and science fiction / fantasy himself.

29. DOVE

The opera builds out from the his relationship with a white pigeon, a story you may have heard. When Tesla was older, he befriended a white pigeon, and he told a reporter about a mystical vision he had of an extremely powerful light when she died. So I made the pigeon a singing character in the opera.

30. BELGRADE

The music is by Jon Gibson, and the opera was performed here in Philadelphia at Temple University, and later had a full production in Belgrade as part of the celebration of Tesla’s 150^th anniversary in 2006.

31. FINALE

Then it traveled to New York, where it was part of the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival.

32. REPEAT SLIDE 1 – HG & NT

So I’m going to try and bring this home now. To review, we have

• A relationship between two pioneers in their fields
• With Tesla having a turn of mind that always extrapolated ideas out to the greatest scale of possibilities—not being just an inventor, but someone who projected the implications of his inventions into the future, especially when they manifestly didn’t fit into the present—this grand-scale way of imagining things resonated with Gernsback’s own way of thinking, so that we might even call Tesla a muse for Gernsback.
• As a side-note, on my personal real life-or-science fiction dial, the electrification of the globe falls more into the science fiction side. This could have been one of Tesla’s bizarre predictions. It’s just that it happened, so we take it for granted. So even his projects that WERE realized have a speculative-fiction feel, not to mention some of his other, unrealized ideas like splitting the earth by using magnifying resonant frequencies, or drawing electricity down from the ionosphere.
• On the Gernsback side, we have a man who was a minor inventor, but a man who thought big, who was inspired by scientific progress and possibilities, and saw the possibilities of science fiction as a new field even though he couldn’t write it himself. BUT he was a visionary in that he saw that this new genre could be a place for the kind of speculation that he loved.

33. TESLA DEATH MASK

I saved this for last: When Tesla died in 1943, someone alerted Gernsback, and he arranged for a death mask to be made of Tesla. He then had it mounted on this nifty base, and kept it in his office till he died.

34. GERNSBACK WITH TESLA DEATH MASK

Here we have a kind of double portrait of Gernsback and Tesla, taken by the great photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt for a profile of Gernsback in Life Magazine in 1963. This is my favorite in the series of photos—it looks like Hugo’s leaning in for a whispered aside with Tesla. Or maybe some thought transference.

So we end here with Gernsback near the end of his life, and Tesla already beyond the living, yet at least in Gernsback’s mind, two kindred spirits, still together, who shared an paradigm-shifting orientation toward the future. And who in my mind, shared in the project of creating a literary genre oriented toward the future as well.