Word: gernsback
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This was only one of many suggestions which Hugo Gernsback sent out for Christmas in a parody of one of his own magazines, Radio-Craft. Other Gernsback ideas in the burlesque publication included a "radiotronicar" which would hop over cross traffic, an electronic "evil eye" to paralyze burglars, and an electronic production line for inducting draftees...
...Hugo Gernsback is widely and affectionately known among U.S. inventors as a bottomless well of incredible notions. For more than 30 years fantasies have come in such profusion from his brain that there is hardly a modern invention he cannot claim to have anticipated. The father of pseudo-scientific fiction, he has started a number of pulp magazines such as Amazing Stories, Wonder Stories, etc. As a radio magazine publisher, he has given laboratory workers some suggestive ideas. Gernsback himself has patented some 80 inventions, none of which, his admirers are proud to say, has ever proved of the slightest...
Without the faintest notion how they might be built, he predicted radio loud speakers, chain broadcasting (in 1909), visible radio waves (now accomplished by the cathode-ray oscilloscope), television (his friends credit him with coining the word). In one of Gernsback's first science fiction stories (1911), a character futuristically named Ralph 1240 41+ drained a dog's blood, filled its veins with a mythical preservative called "Radium-K bromide" and three years later restored the dog to life by pumping blood back-a fantasy which Gernsback claims has been fully validated by recent Soviet dog-reviving experiments...
Scientifiction, which deals almost exclusively with the world of tomorrow and life on other planets, was inspired by Jules Verne's and H. G. Wells's fantasies. Father of pseudo-scientific magazines was a shrewd, fat old man named Hugo Gernsback, an old-time radio fan, who in 1926 started Amazing Stories. It zoomed like a moonward rocket. Today the magazines in this prosperous publishing group (chiefly controlled by the big pulp firms of Street & Smith, Standard Magazines and Ziff-Davis), average about 150,000 readers apiece (sometimes much more), make a good living for many a shamo...
...York Edison Co. in 1929 when he protested a staff cut. For a short period later on he was president of the American Interplanetary Society, which propagandized the cause of sending rockets to the Moon. In 1932 he edited the only two issues of Technocracy Review, worked for Gernsback Publications through the summer...