Paradigm Lost: Nikola Tesla's True Wireless Page 23

with ads for radio hardware, e.g., Murdock headphones and audio interstage transformers as well as Grebe and De Forest radios. Mainly, it carried stories of new inventions, especially those with an electrical basis, such as a new radio compass, a method of abolishing smoke electrically, new electric stoves, and quack medicine — anesthesia via electricity and an electrical cure for tuberculosis using the Tesla coil.⁷⁷ Much of the magazine was given over to what we would now call “techno-euphoria” — a belief that technology would bring us wonderful things in the not-too-distant future. One example was the Thought Recorder, shown in Fig. 13.

The author of the article is none other than Gernsback himself. He imagines a man in an office who is connected to a halo on his forehead. The halo is supporting an Audion amplifier tube that detects and amplifies the man’s thoughts. They are then sent to an instrument on his desk that converts his thoughts to an inscription on a moving tape. The latter is supplied to the man’s secretary who is capable of reading the information on the tape and who can now write letters or memos based on what the boss has been thinking. The article appears in the same issue as Tesla’s, and Tesla, in an introduction, gives some measured support to the idea. Interestingly, Greenleaf Whittier Pickard, a distinguished electrical engineer who helped develop what we would now call the crystal radio, circa 1904, also comments and employs the term “Hertzian waves,” illustrating how commonly the phrase was used.

The Electrical Experimenter does seek to explain legitimate recent advances in the sciences. For example, Einstein’s special and general theory of relativity and the general theory’s