Reading science fiction like it matters since 1989.
The relationship between Hugo Gernsback and Nikola Tesla is hidden in plain sight in the pages of Gernsback’s early publications. Yet the influence of the older inventor on the younger publisher and writer has never been closely examined, and it can shed new light on the emergence of modern science fiction. To put it 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 twenty years or so before he launched Amazing Stories.
Hugo Gernsback (1884–1967), a writer, publisher, and sometime inventor, is credited with a generative role in the birth of the science fiction genre as the publisher of the first English-language magazine devoted to science fiction, Amazing Stories. The inventor Nikola Tesla (1856–1943) is credited with pioneering a number of new scientific fields through his breakthroughs in alternating current, radio, robotics, and even computer circuitry.
Both men were born in Europe—Gernsback to a prosperous Jewish family in Luxembourg and Tesla to a Serbian family of clerics in Croatia—and then emigrated to the United States, and both settled in New York. Both men had received fine European educations: Tesla studied at the Realschule in Karlstadt, the Polytechnic Institute in Graz, Austria, and the University of Prague; Gernsback attended boarding school in Belgium and then studied at the University in Bingen in Germany.
Gernsback idolized Tesla. He said he had heard of Tesla as a young teenager in Luxembourg during the first flush of Tesla’s fame in the 1890s. Tesla had come to New York after his discovery in 1882 of the rotating magnetic field, a breakthrough that made the development of alternating current possible. By the 1890s, he had gained international fame for this as well as for his experiments in wireless transmission. News of his work spread through the mainstream and scientific press and through lectures in the US and England. Tesla’s role in electrifying the Columbian Exposition, held in Chicago in 1892, burnished his celebrity as well.
Meanwhile Gernsback, still a youth in the Benelux countries, was inspired to offer his services to neighbors setting up electric doorbell systems for them. The Carmelite convent in Brussels memorialized his achievement with a certificate of appreciation, dated 1898, dubbing the 13-year-old Hugo Gernsbacher an “aspiring electrician.” [Thanks to Matthias Rehnman for translation.] Gernsback later wrote of this formative time, “While studying abroad I read every scrap of [Tesla’s] work I could lay my hands on. I performed most of his high-frequency experiments, and the more I saw of his work the more imprest [sic] I became.” While in university, Gernsback invented an innovative, high-amperage dry-cell battery. It was with the hope of developing it for commercial use that he emigrated to the U.S. in 1904 at the age of 19. (He may also have been influenced by his dreams of life in America, nourished by the Westerns he had read as a youth; he signed the first article he published in the U.S. as “Huck Gernsbacher.”)
After patenting his battery, Gernsback sold it to the Packard Motor Company and used the proceeds to start up the Electro Importing Company with a store in New York’s Radio Row neighborhood, now part of the Tribeca area of Manhattan. The company sold electrical components imported from Germany but most notably gave Gernsback a springboard into publishing. What began as the company catalogue in 1908 quickly morphed into his first journal, Modern Electrics. It carried both technical articles and examples of what Gernsback called “scientifiction,” including his own twelve-part serial, later published as the novel Ralph 124C 41+. With healthy circulation, the magazine continued till 1914.
Gernsback first met Tesla while he was editor of Modern Electrics when Tesla was about 50 years old; Gernsback was in his 20s. Though he had revered Tesla already, Gernsback was still impressed. He later wrote, “I was fascinated with the tall, gaunt man, then about 50 years old. His extraordinary face, with his deep set blue eyes, proclaimed the intense thinker—the philosopher.” In the same article, published in the January 1919 issue of the Electrical Experimenter, Gernsback offered his own, somewhat hyperbolic declaration of Tesla’s greatness:
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.... His basic as well as revolutionary discoveries, for sheer audacity, have no equal in the annals of the intellectual world.
He went on to offer a cogent summary of Tesla’s achievements and their significance and some reasons why, even then, Tesla wasn’t as widely known as Gernsback believed he should be.
The two men met several times over the next few years. By this time, much of Tesla’s major work was behind him. He had overseen the creation of the first large-scale hydroelectric power plant at Niagara Falls in 1896. In 1898, he had demonstrated the first-ever remote-controlled vehicle, a 4-foot-long, steel-hulled boat. He had completed a year of experimentation on high frequencies in Colorado Springs in 1899, where he built a magnifying transmitter, producing extremely high voltages. He had also begun work on his World Broadcasting System.
Tesla’s research in Colorado Springs served as groundwork for his planned World Broadcasting System. This project was to be the culmination of Tesla’s life work: a massively ambitious plan to transmit not only signals but also electrical energy across long distances with a global network of transmission towers. With the backing of J.P. Morgan, he was able to begin construction of the first tower, called Wardenclyffe, on Long Island’s North Shore. It’s not too much of a stretch to view it as a planned global communications network predating the Internet. But Morgan withdrew his support, and the tower never went online. The project began in 1901, and the tower was demolished in 1917. Tesla was devastated, not only personally but also financially, by Wardenclyffe’s failure.
After the destruction of Wardenclyffe, Tesla continued to work, but he became known more as what we would call a futurist. Reporters sought him out for dramatic predictions, 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. He died in 1943.
At every point in his career, Tesla showed himself to be a master of self-promotion. He wooed members of the press and celebrities including Mark Twain, inviting them to his laboratory for staged demonstrations. Tesla needed strong financial backing in order to pursue his often extravagantly large-scale projects. A famous photograph of Tesla in Colorado Springs, sitting calmly reading a book next to his magnifying transmitter as it emits cascades of lightning-like currents, was actually a double exposure, staged for maximum publicity value.
So when Gernsback met with Tesla and proposed articles covering his work, Tesla undoubtedly appreciated the appearance of an enthusiastic young man representing a new media outlet. Earlier in his career, in the 1880s and 1890s, Tesla had often been 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 contributed his own writing to Century magazine, edited by his friend Robert Johnson.
Yet Gernsback’s first meeting with Tesla occurred at a difficult time in Tesla’s life. He had been forced to mortgage the Wardenclyffe property to pay back rent, and the project’s future looked bleak. In 1916 he would be forced to declare bankruptcy. Tesla, always open to further publicity, must surely have hoped that Gernsback’s interest might help to turn around his business fortunes. And Gernsback, although late to the party in terms of Tesla’s celebrity and achievements, was happy to oblige. He effectively replaced Modern Electrics with a new magazine, the Electrical Experimenter, begun in 1913. Gernsback ran an interview with Tesla in 1915. This was followed by an editorial about Edison and Tesla, which was occasioned by the premature and incorrect news that they were going to share the Nobel Prize.
In the editorial, Gernsback makes clear his opinion of the relative scope of Edison’s and Tesla’s achievements: “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....”
From this point on, Gernsback’s epic devotion to Tesla is closely documented in the pages of the Electrical Experimenter. Hugo had begun as an aspiring inventor. He was knowledgeable enough to understand the scope of Tesla’s achievements, and his vivid imagination eagerly fed on Tesla’s tendency to extrapolate his ideas into large-scale, even global-scale, potential applications. On Tesla’s side, I believe he must have responded warmly to Gernsback’s appreciation. And a new avenue for publicizing his work would have been very welcome.
Over the next several years, Tesla contributed five articles to the Electrical Experimenter. And the magazine churned out articles on Tesla’s inventions, offering a virtual retrospective of his accomplishments till then. They included illustrated pieces on several high-frequency transformers or Tesla coils; on his experiments in Colorado Springs in ultra-high frequency transmission (“Currents of Ultra-High Frequency and Potential,” February 1914); on his work in Teleautomatics, as he called it, or remote-controlled robotics, illustrating the radio-controlled boat he had built and successfully demonstrated in 1898 (“Tesla’s Early Work with Radio Controlled Vessels,” June 1916); and on his World Broadcasting System (“The Tesla High Frequency Oscillator,” March 1916).
The collaboration between Tesla and Gernsback reached its peak with 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, and it’s Tesla’s only autobiography.
Gernsback and his writers turned out more articles that explored the fertile ground provided by Tesla for speculation about future technologies. For example, “The Utilization of the Sun’s Energy” (March 1916) explored possibilities of solar energy. In another article, Tesla announces that his new wireless transmission system would allow him to send light out over the ocean to make shipping lanes safer (“Tesla Has Wireless to Light the Whole Ocean,” April 1915).
In a later article (“‘Cold Fire’: Charging the Body with High Frequency Currents,” November 1919), Gernsback took a lighter approach. He interviewed Tesla about his experiences using his own (carefully grounded) body to conduct high-frequency circuits from his oscillating coils and reported on undergoing the experience himself. The caption on the somewhat fanciful accompanying illustration describes the cleansing effects of a “dry bath” with a Tesla coil, and declares, “Every home will soon be [equipped] with a huge Tesla coil.”
With his usual brio, Gernsback didn’t hesitate to overinterpret some of Tesla’s experimental findings. Gernsback claimed to have been inspired as a child by Percival Lowell’s theories about Martian “canals,” and remained obsessed along with much of the public by the idea of intelligent life on Mars. While Tesla was in Colorado, he had picked up some signals that he identified as extra-planetary in origin. They were in fact cosmic rays, and he was the first to detect them. Tesla never associated them with inhabitants of Mars. But in the article “Hello Mars! Shall We Ever Be Able to Signal Mars Intelligently?” (April 1920), the author refers to Tesla’s work to buttress the plausibility of his speculations.
“The Magnetic Storm,” a story that appeared in August 1918, shows Gernsback’s syncretizing imagination at work. It’s presented as reportage, but it’s actually an up-to-the-minute science fiction story involving secret technology used against the Germans during the last year of the Great War, a spunky young inventor named “Why” Sparks and Nikola Tesla. The US had just entered the war months before, and armistice would come that November. Reading between the lines, one can see how Gernsback, who was culturally German, might have been eager to prove his patriotism toward the US by writing a story about how to “Beat the Huns.”
Sparks, the young inventor in the story, is a transparently wish-fulfilling stand-in for the kid inventor Gernsback once saw himself as becoming. In the story, young Sparks comes up with a way to send a kind of huge electromagnetic pulse—a strikingly Teslian idea—behind enemy lines, which will disable all German electric devices and communications networks. Tesla, a benign mentor figure here, congratulates the young inventor for his brilliant idea. The accompanying illustration seems to bear a deliberate resemblance to Tesla’s Colorado Springs laboratory.
This story entangles Tesla and his ideas in such a striking way with Gernsback’s own imagination and with his impulse to create “scientifiction” stories that it can be seen as offering a kind of Rosetta Stone, a blinking-neon key to the origins of Gernsback’s vision of science fiction.
In 1920, The Electrical Experimenter’s name changed to Science and Invention. It continued to run articles on scientific advances and their potential, on radio construction, contests for inventions, and serialized science fiction by various authors until 1931. It wasn’t till 1926 that Gernsback began publishing Amazing Stories; critics such as Gary Westfahl, who has written several books about Gernsback and his legacy, date the beginning of the science fiction genre to the debut of Amazing Stories in 1926.
The authors featured in that first issue—including H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, and Edgar Allan Poe—signaled that Gernsback was very aware of the literary precedents he wanted to build on. Wells and Verne, at least, fell in line with Gernsback’s vision of the new genre as one where a story is built around a selected scientific principle as opposed to the fantastic adventure fiction already appearing in other fiction magazines, both pulp and “slick.”
Although Gernsback himself had written science fiction, none of it appeared in the pages of Amazing Stories. In fact, he doesn’t seem to have written any fiction after 1918. His two novels, Ralph 124C 41+ (1925) and Baron Münchhausen’s Scientific Adventures (1928) had both originally been published in serial form in his magazines. The first installment of twelve to make up Ralph 124C 41+ came out in Modern Electrics in 1911. Its story takes place in the Swiss Alps and in space. It incorporates an impressive number of predictions of future technology including Helio-Dynamophores (solar panels), picture phones, and centrally charged electric cars. The hero, whose last name is a punnish wordplay for “one to foresee for one another,” saves his love interest by averting an avalanche using a remote beam of energy—again, a very Teslian conceit. Although the book went through several editions, critics have not been kind in judging its literary merits.
Gernsback’s only other book-length fiction, Baron Münchhausen’s New Scientific Adventures, also originally ran as a serial in The Electrical Experimenter from May 1915 to February 1917. In the story, he adapted the fictional persona of Baron von Münchausen known for exaggerated tales of his own exploits. (Gernsback followed the spelling of the historical Baron.) Updated from its original eighteenth-century setting, Gernsback’s hero travels to the Moon and to Mars via spaceship rather than being blown to the Moon by hurricane in a sailing ship. Although top-heavy with exposition, the story has a surprisingly playful, metanarrative structure with a teasingly unreliable narrator, I.M. Alier (read as “I Am a Liar”), recounting the stories told to him by the confirmed liar, Münchhausen. Gernsback may have wanted to give his wild imaginings a protective cloak of conditionality as cover against ridicule for predictions that seemed crazy at the time. It’s also tempting to speculate on the reasons why Gernsback, who clearly identified with his main characters, would choose Münchhausen here. Did he enjoy seeing himself as a kind of Barnum, a carnival huckster brazenly lying while waving the shills into his tent? Or did he play with a liar’s persona as a cover for guilt over betraying pure science and its narratives for speculative fictions?
In any case, by the time Gernsback debuted Amazing Stories he seems to have set aside the ambition to be a writer in the new genre he envisioned for the role of identifying, shepherding, and promoting the writing of others. And what of Tesla’s role in offering a template for imagining the future? Gernsback never made that connection explicit. But his devotion to Tesla and his legacy lasted till the end of his life, and he memorialized it in a distinctly concrete way. In 1943, Gernsback received word that Tesla, aged 86, was close to death. He arranged to have a death mask of the inventor made and a sculptural bust produced in electroplated copper from the plaster mask. He then commissioned an artist to create a pyramidal base with Tesla’s greatest accomplishments depicted on each facet.
This miniature monument to Tesla sat in Gernsback’s office until his own death in 1967—an exemplar of futurism and a silent companion for his private musings. In 1963, the noted photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt conducted a photo shoot of Gernsback for Life magazine. One of the photographs acts as a symbolic double portrait of the two men. It shows Gernsback standing next to the bust of Tesla, leaning in familiarly, caught in what appears to be a casual remark to the inventor. However staged it may have been, the moment encapsulates the intimacy and intensity of Gernsback’s feelings toward Tesla.
Tesla’s ideas and inventions—their global and sometimes cosmic scale and their engagement with higher (invisible) frequencies and frictionless transfer—inspired others in addition to Gernsback. As early as 1901, several years before the two men met, an adventure serial appeared in the boy’s magazine Golden Hours. “To Mars with Tesla” by Weldon B. Cobb featured Tesla as a character along with his fictional nephew Young Edison as a sidekick.
Since fictional appearances like this that emerged during his life, Tesla has continued to evolve into a kind of science-wizard persona in popular culture through a continuing stream of books, movies, games, and music. Tesla or his more or less mythologized persona has become a touchstone of steampunk in novels such as Scott Westerfeld’s Goliath, in literary novels including Samantha Hunt’s The Invention of Everything, and Andrei Codrescu’s Messi@h, and in numerous graphic novels. In film and TV, he has appeared in the movie The Prestige (based on the novel by Christopher Priest) and The Current War; the Canadian TV show Murdoch Mysteries featured Tesla on one episode. In addition, numerous books, games, and films use a “secret invention” by Tesla as the MacGuffin to power their plots. More than one opera has been inspired by Tesla, including Violet Fire with music by Jon Gibson and a libretto I wrote. (Violet Fire received its world premiere in Belgrade on Tesla’s 150th anniversary.)
Tesla’s inspirational role for Gernsback spanned many years and was grounded in a long-lasting personal relationship. It went beyond the puppy love of Gernsback’s early years and his young inventor’s fantasy of being mentored by Tesla (as evidenced by “Why” Sparks). Gernsback remained open to Tesla’s remarkable turn of mind, which always extrapolated ideas out to the greatest scale of possibilities—not simply producing inventions but projecting their implications into the future especially when they so obviously didn’t fit into the present. Even his projects that were realized—the worldwide electric grid, controlling machines at a distance—have a speculative fiction feel once we rub off the patina of familiarity. And that’s without considering some of his other, unrealized ideas like splitting the earth by using magnifying resonant frequencies or drawing electricity down from the ionosphere. This grand-scale way of imagining things resonated with Gernsback’s own way of thinking so strongly that we can fairly describe Tesla as a muse for Gernsback.
On Gernsback’s side, we have a man who was a minor inventor, a minor writer, but a gifted promoter, a man who had a gift for thinking big, who was inspired by scientific progress and possibilities and who saw the potential of science fiction as an arena for the public imagination. In that “double portrait” by Eisenstaedt, we see two kindred spirits, connected beyond the grave, who shared a paradigm-shifting orientation toward the future and shared in the project of creating a literary genre oriented toward the future as well.
Mir Seidel lives in the Philadelphia area.
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