This is a book of historic importance, which belongs on the shelves of a variety of types of people, though not for the usual reasons why a fictional work is a must. No one will ever compare Ralph 124C 41+ with the novels of Marcel Proust or even those of Robert Louis Stevenson. The story is the simplest kind of romantic adventure tale and characters are not particularly significant as such. What matters is the view from the windows as the train runs through the landscape. For it is a book of prophecy, one of the most remarkable ever written. It has long since been a gold mine for nearly every writer of science-fiction during a generation. No author laying his story in the future would think today of doing without Mr. Gernsback's three-dimensional color television, and very few without his satellite city circling the Earth; and no reader would think of questioning the feasibility of these devices.
The very method employed in the book, that of supplying the people of the future with technical inventions which are the logical outgrowths of those currently in use or logically developed from currently accepted principles—this method has become fundamental in science-fiction. Indeed,[Pg 20] it may be said to constitute that new art; and in a very proper sense, Ralph 124C 41+ may be called the first science-fiction story ever written.
This will doubtless bring some protest from the admirers of Mr. H.G. Wells. But a little thought will show that, in spite of some arresting and rather wonderful pictures of the future, and some extremely ingenious scientific devices described, Mr. Wells was not really writing science-fiction. There is nothing known to science out of which the time machine could be developed; Wells simply tells us that it was built and goes on with his story. The invincible balloon-battleships in The War in the Air are flatly contradictory to logic; even when the book was written, everybody knew that hydrogen is inflammable. Heat dissipates in air far too rapidly to allow the heat-ray camera of the Martians in The War of the Worlds to be built; and a very brief consideration will show that the construction of the antigravity plates in The First Men in the Moon would be child's play beside the problem of constructing the screens which temporarily kept those plates from working.
It is the same all down the line, and with Jules Verne as well—whose passengers in the moon-shell would be killed at the moment of firing. The fact is that Wells, himself enough of a scientist to use technical terms correctly, was afflicted with low scientific morality where fiction was concerned. He tried to be a prophet in the domain of sociology, but he was not really interested in the progress of physical science. As long as he could get his characters into a situation by means of a plausible-sounding device, he was quite willing to flim-flam the reader about the practicability of the device and the soundness of the principles involved.
Mr. Gernsback, on the other hand, founded the school[Pg 21] of fiction in which the technical plausibility of the surroundings is at least as important as the literary plausibility of the characters. For that matter, the reader is besought to show some interest in what can be done for us by the chemist, the inventor, the electrician, and even the meteorologist. It has often been pointed out that these technicians cannot change human nature, but Mr. Gernsback indicates that they can put human nature into a position where it can hardly avoid changing itself. World government is not an impossibility in an atmosphere where any person on the planet can be instantly in visible communication with any other, and where the barrier of language can be thrown down during a night's sleep.
Thanks to the rules he set for himself (and also, no doubt, to his wide acquaintance with that region in which all the sciences are applied to the practical service of man in the form of inventions) Mr. Gernsback has been rather astoundingly successful in predicting actual developments. Ralph 124C 41+ was written in 1911. The writer's most famous hit, of course, is radar (p. 152), which no one else had come near to conceiving at the time. Yet his description will do as a fair working description of radar as it is today. The device here called "the hypnobioscope" (p. 49) for teaching during sleep, has not been developed to the extent described in the story, but works in a limited fashion and is obviously capable of extension. On p. 116 artificial silk and wool are produced by a process so much like that currently used in the manufacture of rayon and nylon that one wonders whether Mr. Gernsback has a share in the patents. Rustproof alloy steel (p. 103), magnesium alloys in light-weight construction (p. 29), televised opera performances (p. 86), vending machines[Pg 22] (p. 89), packing in paper-thin sheets of metal (p. 89)—are all things we know about today but which only Hugo Gernsback could have conceived in 1911.
In addition, there are a number of items where the essential correctness of the concept may be concealed from the reader by the terms employed in this book—for it is not granted to prophets to foresee what words will be employed when inventors designate their products. The "glass" furniture (p. 25) has been made good in the form of plastics—which are, technically, glasses. Fluorescent lighting appears on p. 30 under the name of "luminor." The electric elevator (p. 43) has not turned up as an elevator, but its mechanism is used to drive the electric torpedoes which sank much of the Japanese merchant marine during the war. Newspapers are printed on microfilm on p. 46, and the trans-Uranium elements show up on p. 53. Baseball and football are played at night on p. 80 and paper is made from straw on p. 104. A device which is essentially the radio-direction-finder is on p. 120, and on p. 128 there is a recording mechanism which differs from today's wire-recorders only in employing a strip of paper scanned by light, and which has since been built. This by no means exhausts the list, but it would detract from the reader's enjoyment not to allow him to make some discoveries for himself.
To be sure, there are certain inaccuracies. The underearth tube from France to New York does not seem a good engineering proposition today. Nobody understood the nature of radium emanation in 1911 and neither did Mr. Gernsback. But the percentage of accurate judgments (one cannot call them guesses, when they are so numerous and so close to the mark) is somewhere up in the nineties.
[Pg 23]
Which leads one to the thought that this book perhaps has an importance beyond that as a literary and historical curiosity. Not all the predictions have been fulfilled or placed beyond fulfillment; and if research had proceeded along the lines of (for instance) Mr. Gernsback's suggestion for radar, we might have had that device a good deal earlier. In Ralph 124C 41+ the weather is under complete control. We seem to be edging in that direction, but maybe a little more push is needed—the kind of push that could be supplied by a book like this. Medical research has now caught up with Gernsback by deciding that thought in the human brain is accompanied by electrical manifestations; on p. 48 this concept has advanced to the point where thoughts can be recorded on a tape in the form of interpretable graphs, and it may become true in practice if someone works on the problem. The idea of draining off all the blood from a living body for purification and then replacing it (transfusion also ranks as a Gernsback prediction) is today far from fantastic. It is the standard and only treatment for RH newborn infants.
Yet perhaps the most interesting of all the predictions is that regarding space flight. (Incidentally, the physical and psychological effects of space travel are worked out with a care that would be worth the attention of some current science-fiction writers.) In the days of Ralph 124C 41+, this is not accomplished by means of the rockets everyone is talking about at present, but by using a gravity neutralizer.
But be it noticed that this is not the mysterious metal of H.G. Wells. Gernsback does it in a technically explicable and plausible way, by means of a metal grid, electrically (or electronically) excited. Today it is as possible to do this[Pg 24] as it was to build a radar set in 1911; that is, not at all. But the new formula of Dr. Einstein, at last integrating gravity with other manifestations, makes it seem probable that it is not beyond hope to screen gravitation from a selected area; and when that happens, Mr. Gernsback's educated imagination, which has preceded the normal human mind to so many things on Earth, will have led the way to the stars.
New York, May 1950