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Read Ebook: Ralph 124C 41+: A Romance of the Year 2660 by Gernsback Hugo
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Ebook has 473 lines and 53642 words, and 10 pages
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
In the meanwhile the book became a sort of museum piece. Early in 1950 the quoted price in the second-hand book market was .00 for a single copy. Left with only two copies of the 1925 edition I myself endeavored to buy a copy for a friend in France, but no copies were forthcoming even at .00!
Authors avowedly never read their own books--I am no exception to that rule. So the other day when I was reading proofs for the 1950 edition, after a lapse of 25 years, I began to ask myself a lot of questions.
After 39 years I could point out a number of minor technical flaws in some of my early predictions, but on the whole I probably could not do much better today. To be sure, I would not think of a gyroscopic propelled space flyer now, but then in 1911 no one was thinking of rocket-propelled or atomic-powered space flyers. In 1911 too, scientists still thought of a universal ether permeating all space. Today we seem to get along very well without it.
This story which plays in the year 2660, will run serially during the coming year in Modern Electrics. It is intended to give the reader as accurate a prophecy of the future as is consistent with the present marvelous growth of science. The author wishes to call especial attention to the fact that while there may be extremely strange and improbable devices and scenes in this narrative, they are not impossible, or outside of the reach of science.
Hugo Gernsback
PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION
Ralph 124C 41+ first appeared as a serial in the author's first magazine, "Modern Electrics," in 1911. This magazine was first devoted exclusively to radio activities. At the time the story was written the word "radio" had not yet come into use. We were at that time still using the term "wireless."
It has been necessary, in view of scientific progress since the time the story was first written, and in order to present the book to a much wider reading public, to rewrite much of the story and to make many changes. Yet, the ideas and conceptions embodied in the original manuscript have been little altered.
The author appreciates that many of the predictions and statements appear to verge upon the fantastic. So was Jules Verne's submarine "Nautilus" in his famous story "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea." Verne's conception of the submarine was declared utterly ridiculous. Nevertheless, the prophecy was fulfilled. In fact, Verne's imagination hit far below the mark in what was actually accomplished by science since the book was written.
Lest you think that the author has gone too far into the realms of pure imagination, place yourself in the position of your great-great-grandfather being told about locomotives, steamships, X-rays, telegraphs, telephones, phonographs, electric lights, radio broadcasting, and the hundred other commonplaces of our lives today. Would he not have condemned such predictions as the height of folly and absurdity?
So with you. You are in the same position with respect to the prophecies in this work as your remote ancestor. Your descendants, picking up this book 750 years hence,--or at the time in which this story is laid,--will ridicule the author for his lack of imagination in conceiving the obvious developments in the first half of the next century.
The scientific conception or vision of the world of 750 years hence, represents the author's projection of the scientific knowledge of today. Scientific progress is moving at an accelerating pace, and if that pace is maintained, it seems fair to assume that the conception herein described will, 750 years hence, be found to have fallen far short of the actual progress made in the interim.
Hugo Gernsback
FOREWORD
BY LEE DE FOREST, Ph.D., D.Sc., D.Eng.
No book in two generations, no book since Jules Verne, has undertaken to do what Hugo Gernsback in the first decade of our century has here so outstandingly achieved.
He is gifted with a mind eternally alert, trained from childhood to observe and think. His unbridled imagination has ever fed on the facts of science and technology which his habit of omniverous reading has been continually storing within his brain. As result of this unusual combination his tireless energies have been directed, since childhood in Luxembourg, to writing popular science in a fashion peculiarly attractive to young men and boys who, like himself, possess a keen interest in all realms of physical Nature.
"Most of the studying was done while one slept," explains Ralph--a statement truly applicable to many a somnolent student's performance today!
Ralph explains, as of the year 2660, the resuscitation of animal life years after the body has been drained of blood. Yet only yesterday a Russian doctor claims to have accomplished this "miracle." His 750-year future has already begun to be realized. Many Utopias are here foretold, such as absolutely permanent non-wearing, metallic highways, where trolley-cars and gas-driven autos are only ancient memories, long obsolete.
He foresaw far better night-illuminated streets than we have yet attained. Let us hope that we must not wait 750 years until cities are "as bright by night as by day"; nor New York's climate, man-controlled, to be "the finest on Earth," with temperatures perennially at 72, sunshine all day, rain for one hour only, every night! In that future we shall have reliable transfer of sun energy into electric by means of photo-electric elements responsive to ultra-violet radiation.
In Musak we already have the wide distribution of music which Mr. Gernsback foresaw in 1911; also our night baseball games, then first foretold. His airplanes launching from roof-tops we partly realize already in our helicopter mail service. But instead of his agglomeration of colored light-beams for direction of aviation we have the far reaching radio beacons, coupled with Loran.
Even today's mysterious "flying saucers" he foretold with nice detail!
Foreseeing the vast increase in global population Ralph has so deftly applied science to plant growth that we shall reap four crops of wheat per year in sun-heated glass houses of county-sized acreage, to feed the new billions. He fears not an overcrowded, 200 million metropolitan New York!
Only today I read of a recent system for using heat from deep earth for house-warming, now being commercialized. "Ralph" described the same arrangement forty years ago!
Here is liquid fertilizer sprayed as a crop accelerator; and plant-root stimulation by means of high-frequency currents, wholesale diathermy applied to farming; and many other improvements in farm procedure which make this book profitable reading for today's science-minded farmers.
The author foresaw a much-to-be-desired manufacture of news-print from the resultant excessive growth of grain stocks, thereby terminating today's wanton destruction of our forests for comic supplements and sexy pulps.
Last year in the Bell Laboratories I witnessed the recording on paper of the complexities of my voice, very much as Ralph described it in 1911 to his A.D. 2660 friends.
But to me the most impressive pages of this strange book are those that outlined with striking clarity the basic idea of radar as we know it today. Although gummed over with reference to imaginary metals, inter-planetary ships travelling at comet speeds, and a very earthy romance, the uncanny foresight of Hugo Gernsback in 1911 into the realities of World War II constitutes perhaps the most amazing paragraphs in this astonishing Book of Prophecy.
FOREWORD
BY FLETCHER PRATT
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.
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 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.
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 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 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 is somewhere up in the nineties.
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 excited. Today it is as possible to do this 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.
THE AVALANCHE
As soon as he recognized the face of Ralph in his own Telephot he smiled and said, "Hello Ralph."
"Hello Edward, I wanted to ask you if you could come over to the laboratory tomorrow morning. I have something unusually interesting to show you. Look!"
He stepped to one side of his instrument so that his friend could see the apparatus on the table about ten feet from the Telephot faceplate.
Edward came closer to his own faceplate, in order that he might see further into the laboratory.
"Why, you've finished it!" he exclaimed. "And your famous--"
At this moment the voice ceased and Ralph's faceplate became clear. Somewhere in the Teleservice company's central office the connection had been broken. After several vain efforts to restore it Ralph was about to give up in disgust and leave the Telephot when the instrument began to glow again. But instead of the face of his friend there appeared that of a vivacious beautiful girl. She was in evening dress and behind her on a table stood a lighted lamp.
Startled at the face of an utter stranger, an unconscious Oh! escaped her lips, to which Ralph quickly replied:
"I beg your pardon, but 'Central' seems to have made another mistake. I shall certainly have to make a complaint about the service."
"The service mistakes are very annoying," he heard her say in perfect English. Realizing however, that she was hardly being courteous to the pleasant looking young man who was smiling at her she added, "But sometimes Central's 'mistakes' may be forgiven, depending, of course, on the patience and courtesy of the other person involved."
This, Ralph appreciated, was an attempt at mollification with perhaps a touch of coquetry.
Nevertheless he bowed in acknowledgment of the pretty speech.
She was now closer to the faceplate and was looking with curious eyes at the details of the laboratory--one of the finest in the world.
"What a strange place! What is it, and where are you?" she asked na?vely.
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