THE IMPACT OF SCIENCE-FICTION

ON WORLD PROGRESS...

 

By Hugo Gernsback

 

Address Read Before

10th World Science Fiction Convention,

Chicago, August 31, 1952.

 

An imperceptible revolution has quietly taken place during the past 25 years—a revolution prob­ably unparalleled in man's history. The revolution is the terrific impact of Science-Fiction on the world and world progress. Curiously enough, the agency responsible for Science-Fiction—the authors, the pub­lishers, and the readers, seem little aware of this revolution and the real meaning and import of the dynamic force that carries it forward.

Let me clarify the term Science-Fiction. When I speak of it I mean the truly, scientific, prophetic Science-Fiction with the full accent on SCIENCE. I em­phatically do not mean the fairy tale brand, the weird or fantastic type of what mistakenly masquer­ades under the name of Science-Fiction today. I find no fault with fairy tales, weird and fantastic stories. Some of them are excellent for their entertainment value, as amply proved by Edgar Allan Poe and other masters, but when they are advertised as Science-Fiction, then I must firmly protest.

Twenty-five years ago, before Science-Fiction had become an organized and recognized force—the broad smoothly-flowing literary river it is today—we had but a weak trickle of occasional stories and here and there a book or two. It was a rarity when an author wrote more than one or two Science-Fiction stories. Rarer yet were series of Science-Fiction books, such as those of the masters Jules Verne and H. G. Wells.

The truth is that in the early, formative years Science-Fiction was hardly considered respectable! Most people, including newspaper and magazine editors, considered Science-Fiction as a crackpot en­deavor. It just was not considered serious at the time. Our big newspapers and mass circulation magazines thought it beneath their dignity to print such "nonsense." Indeed, most authors had the same conviction. I well remember when, in 1911, I first started to print Science-Fiction stories regularly in some of my maga­zines. Most authors approached on the subject agreed to do a few stories, provided I did not use their real names!

Little by little this feeling changed. Then, after I had brought into life the world's first Science-Fiction magazine, "AMAZING STORIES," in 1926, suddenly Science-Fiction became respectable! The intelli­gentsia, scientists, professors of various types, became regular readers—even the nobility, to wit Lord Mountbatten, and others, enrolled in the ranks.

For the first time in history there had been created a pleasant vehicle on which you could ride into the future uninterruptedly for practically no money at all.

If you were an engineer, or an industrialist and had imagination, Science-Fiction often gave you valu­able hints or stimulated your imagination sufficiently so you could derive material benefit from it. A number of inventions, processes, machines thus came to life thanks to Science-Fiction.

Inventors, manufacturers, and others understand­ingly do not like to admit that a Science-Fiction story sparked them into activity, on the road to a new in­vention or a new machine, but it is an established fact that a host of Science-Fiction ideas have been suc­cessfully translated into paying realities.

There is often a considerable lapse of time be­tween a Science-Fiction idea and its fulfilhnet1t: Thus it took Jules Verne's submarine, The Nautilus, so vividly described in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, 27 years to become an actuality. H. G. Wells's public (i.e., Broadcast) Loud-speakers, so exactly portrayed in his novel, When the Sleeper Wakes, in 1899, came into general use only 25 years later. Radar, ac­curately predicted in all its technical elements in my novel RALPH 124C 41+ in 1911, did not become a reality till about 27 years later. Many similar ex­amples can be cited where important inventions, processes, and trends accurately predicted in old Science-Fiction stories are commonplace today.

Frequently, too, technical predictions were made where the author thought only of a single use for the idea or device. Years later the identical idea may be used for an entirely different—and much more im­portant purpose. I will give only one illustration here. In my former magazine, "SCIENCE & INVENTION," for February 1925, I described a fanciful device called "The Radio Teledaetyl." In reality this was a tele­doctor—a doctor who visits his patients via radio and television. In front of the doctor are two articulated levers which he can manipulate like hands. The patient would have a similar device in his house (or in the hospital). The distant teledactyl is watched by the doctor from his office by 2-way television. It is operated by radio. Thus he can palpate the patient on any spot of his anatomy, take the patient's tempera­ture, listen to his heartbeat, take his blood pressure, and so forth. The doctor, in short, now has acquired distant hands.

Nowadays the identical device is used not by medical doctors, but by doctors of physics. You have seen pictures of this improbable gadget many times, where atomic scientists handle "hot," that is, deadly, atomic substances, at a distance—usually separated from the lethal radiations by thick glass walls. By means of the mechanical hands, the physicist can make the most delicate experiments, pour dangerous liquids from a bottle into a test tube, and do anything he could do with his own hands. Recently television has been added to the telehands so a direct view of the experiments is no longer required. Now the physicist can be miles away, yet see exactly what he is doing with his distant, disembodied hands.

Some day a very learned psychologist will write an important book on the complex mental processes of inventing. The resume will probably show that the inventor's mind absorbs all types of outside stimuli, experiences, and impressions which are then sorted and finally crystallized into an invention. In this process, many things that the inventor saw and heard in the past ideas which he acquired while reading books, magazines, newspapers, technical writings of every kind, and so on—are used by his analytical mind. The end result        the invention—is therefore mostly a distillation of the inventor's outside im­pressions, plus his native ingenuity. Or as Edison put it more realistically: "An invention is ten per cent inspiration and ninety per cent perspiration!"

This brings me back to the vital role which the Science-Fiction author plays and has played in the past. Frequently he is the one who has furnished un­told inspirations for the modern technical world in which we live. In fact, it is he who is often the actual inventor. Unfortunately, being only an author—which is his real métier—he is rarely interested commercially in his brain child. Worse yet, he does not believe in his heart that the idea is workable, or will ever be practical. So he hardly ever patents the idea, no matter how good it looks on paper.

Nor could you ever make him believe that five, ten, or thirty years later someone who read his original story will remember the idea, lard it with a few of his own, patent it and start a new billion dollar in­dustry on it. Nevertheless this sort of thing happens continuously.

This sort of thing is so intimately woven into the warp and woof of the thing which we call "progress of civilization" that no man in his right senses would ever think of doing anything about it.

Once in a rare while, some of our great men will speak out. I quote the late and illustrious Dr. Michael Pupin, Professor of Electrical Engineering of Colum­bia University, and a famed inventor in his own right: "To discover the need for an invention and to specify it, constitutes 50 per cent of the invention itself."

By this measure hundreds of authors have and will be deprived of the just fruits of their labor till someone does something about it. Nor is the amount, lost forever by our authors, a trifling one. At the pres­ent time it certainly cannot be less than between 50 and 100 millions of dollars a year for the United States alone. It will be much more a generation hence.

Perhaps what is needed is a patent reform. Today you cannot patent most mere ideas. Even if you can specify all the technical elements, a patent is not necessarily granted. The fundamental requirement for a patent is that it must be new and it must work. Frequently, skeptical patent examiners do not believe that a certain device described in a patent application will function. That is why they ask for a model—or else you must convince the Patent Office somehow that the device or process actually works.

Unfortunately many Science-Fiction authors are so far ahead of their times that most of their devices are impractical at the time they describe them.

Thus, Jules Verne's submarine, which he described minutely in 1870, could not have been pat­ented, simply because at that time science and tech­nology had not caught up with it—it could not have been built successfully in the seventies.

Nor could I have patented dozens of inventions now in everyday use and technically described at great length in RALPH 124C 41+ in 1911. To name only a few: Radar (page 152), the radio direction finder (page 120), the Voice-Writer (page 128). The reason: in 1911 none of these inventions were workable we had no modern vacuum tubes at the time nor ampli­fiers nor many other instrumentalities to actually operate and demonstrate these devices.

Accordingly, I believe that our patent laws should be revised so that ideas which appear feasible and technically sound to a qualified board of technical examiners will be given a "Provisional Patent." Let us assume that such a patent has a life of, say, 30 years. If, during this period the inventor cannot demonstrate the workability or feasibility of the device, the Provisional Patent will lapse. A regulation patent can then be applied for. The Provisional Pat­ent will be the basis for the final patent.

A further, and most important point, is complete­ly overlooked by both Science-Fiction authors and publishers today. It is, and has always been, the func­tion and habit of the Patent Office to search all available pertaining records and the public prints, for the originality of the invention to be patented. Often the Patent Office will cite a magazine article which describes the identical device submitted by an inventor for a new patent. In that case the inventor will not be able to get the sweeping patent claims he could obtain, had he not been thus anticipated.

Now the point I would like to make is that I am quite certain that the Patent Office today does not routinely scan all the Science-Fiction stories which appear either in the Science-Fiction press or in gen­eral magazines. Why should it?

The remedy? It is exceedingly simple. Let author and publisher get together and agree that on advice from author that his manuscript contains a new and feasible idea the publisher will then print the story or book with a distinguishing mark or design.

I recently devised such a design—a five-pointed star resting on top of a sphere. The center of the sphere shows the letters SF. The symbolism: The star, is a light, on top of the world. In other words, Science-Fiction enlightens the world.

One final point: As the Father of Science-Fiction, I would like to make a serious plea. Science-Fiction has grown up to a stature no one would have believed possible 25 years ago. Today it is a force to reckon with. The public at large is beginning to take Science-Fiction seriously. People look to it confidently because they know that for the first time in the history of mankind through the medium of Science-Fiction ­man can now gaze into our future world with all its wonders—not with an uncertain look here and there
but with steady insight, month in and out and for all the years to follow.

For that reason, let us treat Science-Fiction with the seriousness and the dignity this great endeavor is everlastingly entitled to.