Paradigm Lost: Nikola Tesla's True Wireless Page 24

confirmation by the observed bending of light are carefully described in the January 1920 issue by an unusual person for the era: a female astronomer, Isabel M. Lewis, M.A., who was a regular contributor and the first woman astronomer to be hired at the U.S. Naval Observatory.⁷⁸ The magazine also published pure science fiction stories, such as “At War with the Invisible” appearing in the March and April 1918 issues, which described a war between the planets Mars and Earth in the 21^st century.⁷⁹

Science Fiction, Nostalgia for the Future

Unfortunately, a magazine mixing techno-euphoria, future studies, science fiction and real science is playing dangerous games: the boundaries became diffuse. The March 1918 Electrical Experimenter has an article by Gernsback starting on page 743 entitled “Can Electricity Destroy Gravitation?” The author asserts it can, and describes the work of a Prof. Francis E. Nipher of the Saint Louis Academy of Science. The professor’s experiment is described thusly: He suspends a small lead ball from a string. It is placed in proximity to a very heavy lead ball that rests on a bench. The small ball and string are seen to be deflected toward the heavy ball because of the force of gravitational attraction — a straightforward replication of the famed Cavendish experiment of 1797–8.⁸⁰ The professor then passes a direct current through the large ball. Nothing has changed. But then he applies an AC current, et voilà, the small ball moves away from the large one, thereby proving that gravity has been weakened by electricity.

Anyone with a modicum of knowledge of electromagnetic theory would see what was happening here. The AC creates a time varying magnetic field that induces eddy currents in the small ball. These currents interact with the magnetic field to push the small ball away from the large one. The clue that Faraday’s law of induction and the induced current serve as the explanation should have been the failure of the experiment to work with a direct current. The gravitational field, like DC and its resulting fields, is static. A direct current cannot induce a voltage or current in a neighboring circuit, while alternating currents have that ability. Eddy currents were well understood by 1919. One wonders how much real science Gernsback knew; it is no surprise that he permitted another paper based on dubious physics to be published the next year: Tesla’s “The True Wireless.”

The Electrical Experimenter morphed into another Gernsback magazine: Science and Invention, in 1920.⁸¹ This publication, although it did in some ways live up to its title, increasingly carried science fiction and proved so successful that Gernsback was able to introduce more magazines (e.g., Amazing Stories, Wonder Stories) that were wholly devoted to the science fiction genre, and he is best known as a publisher of science fiction. At least one historian has suggested that many of the ideas in Gernsback’s science-fiction stories promoted Tesla’s “still unrealized ideas” for inventions.⁸²