Hugo Gernsback, skeptical crusader - magazine publisher of 1920s-1930s

Throughout the 1920s and 1930s magazine publisher and "father of science fiction" Hugo Gernsback used his popular publications to fight a one-man war against pseudoscience. Virtually every issue of magazines such as Science & Invention contained debunking articles, tests on claims for psychic abilities and extraordinary medical devices, and offers of substantial cash awards to anyone who performs a successful demonstration.

When Poptronics, a magazine published by Gernsback Publications, recently published an article expounding the bizarre theory that the great pyramids of Egypt are in fact giant radios, Hugo Gernsback would surely have been at best astonished and at worst horrified. Long before Randi and CSICOP, the Luxembourg-born editor and founder of a seemingly endless line of popular magazines had waged a long--and for the most part solo--war against pseudoscience of all kinds, from astrology to medical quacks, spiritualism and every other sort of "humbuggery." He used the power of his immensely popular magazines to advance his crusade and was always willing to put up considerable amounts of cash to back his beliefs.

Gernsback was born in 1884, emigrating to the United States when he was twenty, bringing with him an abiding passion for anything dealing with electronics and radio. By 1906 he was marketing a home radio set and two years later founded Modern Electrics, the first of a long line of magazines to bear his name as editor or publisher. It was in this magazine that he serialized his science fiction novel, Ralph 124C41 + (1911-1912), a dreadful story from a literary viewpoint-it is really litde more than a catalog of the scientific and technological wonders Gernsback expected to find in the twenty-seventh century--famous for its accurate description of radar. Modern Electrics evolved into Electrical Experimenter, which featured the regular installments of "Baron Munchausen's Scientific Adventures," written anonymously by Gernsback. Convinced that science fiction was the ideal medium by which science education could be painlessly sugar-coated for his readers, Gernsback made certain that science fiction stories and se rials were included in most issues of Electrical Experimenter and its successor, Science & Invention. Stories included continuations of the Munchausen series as well as reprints and original stories by authors such as Ray Cummings, Clement Fezandie, and Abraham Merritt. After seeing the enthusiastic response to a special "scientific fiction" number of Science & Invention (August 1923), Gernsback announced his plans for a new magazine devoted entirely to scientific stories, to be called Scientifiction. It was not until nearly three years later, however, that this project got off the ground and the first issue of Amazing Stories appeared. It was the first magazine to exclusively publish what was to be later known as science fiction. Although by today's standards most of the fiction published in the old Amazing is almost unbearably creaky, didactic, and, in far too many instances, almost illiterate, they were almost all written under Gernsback's ironclad dictum that science fiction's first duty was to be educati onal, with all other considerations secondary at best--if they were considered at all. The magazine was fabulously popular.

Part and parcel of Gernback's intense interest in getting the fundamentals of hard science across to his readers was his no less enthusiastic campaign against pseudoscience. He took on astrology; spiritualism, perpetual motion machines, and, especially, medical quackery. Page after page, even whole issues, of Science & Invention and its sister magazines were devoted to deflating pseudoscientific medical claims, such as the debunking of "Dr." Rogers's "neurophonometer." Rogers immediately retaliated by unsuccessfully suing Radio News for a million dollars. Gernsback also took on Dr. Abrams "of Electronic fame" [see "The King of Quacks: Albert Abrams, M.D." by J.D. Haines, SKEPTICAL INQUIRER, May/June 2002] and Dr. Farnam's "Radio Health Energizer."

Gernsback provided a feature article for the October 1928 issue in which he exposed "The Jonaco Swindle." Manufactured by Gaylord Wilshire's Jona Company, the Tonaco treatment, using an electromagnetic "belt" (which resembled, in Gernsback's words, "a horse collar more than anything else"), was supposed to magnetize the iron in the wearer's blood to the end that everything from acidosis to vertigo was cured. Highly successful, the Iona company had offices in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Portland, Denver, and Kansas City. It even published the I-On-A-Co News, a four-page newspaper.

The device itself was simple enough, consisting of a buckram rim about eighteen inches in diameter, wrapped with 3,411 feet of cotton-covered copper wire, all in turn covered with tape, felt, and an imitation leather sleeve. When plugged into a ordinary wall outlet, a small lamp held near the belt would glow by means of the current induced by the big electromagnet. "The gullible person," Gernsback said, "is supposed to think that this shows a mysterious action." Once the belt was plugged in it was placed around the waist of the patient, where the magnetic effect was supposed to cure just about anything. The Ionaco belt was not limited to human sufferers; it had its veterinary uses as well.