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| Image by WOMBO Dream |
Back in September, I searched for important science fiction story writers who were born in the year 1926. On the AI-generated list that I obtained back in September was Lino Aldani. I read his 1963 short story "Good Night, Sophie" (I actually read the 1973 English translation of "Buonanotte Sofia" that is in "View from Another Shore") which depicts a world in which there is a technology that allows for the creation and marketing of artificial "dreams" that can be purchased and used as entertainment.
"Buonanotte Sofia" was originally published in the first issue of an Italian magazine called "Futuro" that was co-founded by Aldani. As described in the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, one of Aldani's preferred story types was "representations of the individual's unease and struggle in the industrial and urban present" and "Buonanotte Sofia" falls into this category of story.
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| Image by WOMBO Dream |
In the absence of any specific science fiction story teller born in 1926 that I wanted to investigate further, I decided to explore Amazing Stories rather than a particular person. The first issue of Amazing Stories was published in April 1926, but apparently the first original story published in the magazine was "The Man From the Atom (Sequel)" by G. Peyton Wertenbaker in the second issue, May 1926. The original "The Man From the Atom" was previously published in the August 1923 issue of Science and Invention (download here). Here (below) is the editorial blurb for "The Man From the Atom":
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| Figure 1. Editor's intodruction to "The Man From the Atom" by Hugo Gernsback (EDITOR). |
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| Image by Leonardo and Mr. Wombo. |
Albert Einstein gave his Nobel prize lecture entitled "Fundamental Ideas and Problems of the Theory of Relativity" on July 11, 1923. Apparently, he missed giving a Nobel lecture in the year that he won the prize (1921) because he was traveling.
Magic or Science? Above on this page, I objected to a story by Aldani in which he made no effort to describe the workings of a magical machine that could for a "few pennies" insert a manufactured dream into a person's brain. "The Man From the Atom" begins in exactly the same fashion, with a magical machine, in this case, crafted by a reclusive SuperGenius™ (professor Martyn), a wearable device that can alter the size of a person, either shrinking you to the size of an atom or growing you larger, indefinitely. This kind of magical shrinking had previously been done by Ray Cummings, so Wertenbaker went to the growth side.
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| by Leonardo & Mr. Wombo |
Time Travel. "The Man From the Atom" is actually a time travel story. Upon growing larger, time passed at a different rate for Kirby, which seemed to strike Hugo Gernsback (see Figure 1, above) as an elegant depiction of Einstein's theory of relativity. After having grown to cosmic size, upon shrinking again, Kirby finds himself in the future, among people who speak an unrecognized language. This mercifully brief mis-adventure is all prequel to the 1926 story, "The Man From the Atom (Sequel)".
Short-cut. As usual for sequel stories in magazines, there is a short summary of the 1923 story right at the start of the 1926 sequel and there is very little to be lost by only reading that summary rather than the original entire text of the story.
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| Figure 2. Interior art by Frank R. Paul manually colorized by me. |
May Telepathy Be With You. In the sequel story, Kirby is on a planet that is populated with telepathic people, one of which (Vinda) makes an effort to learn to speak English. Vinda is the daughter of the local king, who is himself a physicist. Vinda "explains" to Kirby that by growing large again, he can travel even further into the future, into the next repeating cycle of the universe, and find his own place in time, complete with the people he knows, particularly professor Martyn.
Kirby can't wait to return to his world. He takes advantage of the circular nature of Time and travels forward in Time into the next iteration of the universe and discovers that some things are different (for example, in the new universe, the United States is a Monarchy). Having worked hard to get home, Kirby then instantly decides that he is in love with Vinda, so he jumps ahead to the future so that he can be with her again in the next iteration of the universe.
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| Vinda by ImageFX. |
Most of "The Man From the Atom (Sequel)" makes no sense, including the title. While Vinda has the appearance of a normal woman, all of the men on her world are emotionally cold intellectuals who have large heads and shriveled bodies and they view Kirby as a primitive ape man.
Genetic Engineering. Wertenbaker could not be bothered to plainly tell readers what is going on in the story, so I'll assume that Vinda lives on Earth of the far future when the sun has grown large and red. How it is that in the far future human males have evolved into a new form, but human females have retained the same body form from the past remains a mystery. Sadly, in 1926, Wertenbaker had no idea how evolution works.
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| Vinda by WOMBO Dream. |
At the start of "The Man From the Atom (Sequel)" there was interior artwork by Frank R. Paul. I manually colorized part of that line drawing (see Figure 2) and had WOMBO Dream use that as a referenced image, resulting in the image that is shown to the right on this page.
The right hand side of the interior illustration by Frank R. Paul showed Kirby in a kind of spacesuit that protected him from the extreme temperatures of outer space. Kirby was shown while enlarged to a size that allowed him to tower over Vinda. That is one of Kirby's hands on the right hand side of Figure 2, looking like a mitten.
Push-button Magic. Readers of "The Man From the Atom" were told that the magical machine devised by professor Martyn could enlarge Kirby by incorporating atoms from the surrounding air into his body. The enlarger/shrinker device had several wires that attached to Kirby's body and made him grow when a button on the device was pushed. Conveniently, even Kirby's spacesuit grew larger when the "grow" button was pushed.
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| Image by WOMBO Dream |
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| Figure 3. Interior artwork by Frank R. Paul (colorized manually by me) |
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| Image generated by ImageFX. |
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| Image by WOMBO Dream. |
Experts. Near the end of the July 1926 issue of Amazing Stories was "Experts Join Staff of Amazing Stories" by Hugo Gernsback, announcing that Conrad A. Brandt was on the Board of advisors for Amazing Stories. Apparently, Brandt was from Germany, had some knowledge of chemistry and a large collection of speculative fiction. It would be interesting to know just how much Brandt's tastes in fiction influenced what ended up in Amazing Stories. A letter by Brandt in the June 1923 issue of Weird Tales praised "Ooze" by Anthony Melville Rud, a story that had been published in the March 1923 issue of Weird Tales. Brandt described "ooze" as a "semi-scientific story".
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| Image generated by Leonardo. |
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| Image by ImageFX |
Amazing July. The first story in the July 1926 issue of Amazing Stories was the first of 3 parts of a story titled "Station X" which Hugo Gernsback described as "the greatest radio story that was ever written". I can't really count "Station X" as a "new" story since it was first published in 1919 as a 317 page novel. I don't have the patience to read all of "Station X", but it starts with a man (Macrae) who seemingly senses danger in his future, danger which arrives with what at first looks like his death ("Dead!" said the doctor).
Telepathic Aliens. In my own stories (for example, 191988), I enjoy depicting characters as having the ability to receive information from the future. In the case of "Station X", maybe Macrae is in (unconscious) telepathic contact with Martians even on page 1 of the story.
Mind Transfer. However, after several days of seemingly being dead, Macrae's body does not decay. At this point, the story descends into the wonders of hypnosis and Macrae is depicted as having been under the mental control of someone from Venus just before he "died". The 'Station' in "Station X" is a remote radio transmission station in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. I believe the intent of the story is to say that a Venusian speaks to Macrae using the radio equipment at Station X and hypnotizes him.
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| Image by ImageFX. |
All of this silliness from 1919 seems amazingly similar to the goofy plot of Pluribus in 2025. Rather than "explain" the alien invasion of Pluribus in terms of hypnosis and interplanetary mind transfer, we are "treated" to the more modern, but equally improbable, idea that Evil™ aliens need only transmit the sequence of an RNA molecule to Earth in order to turn humanity into an inhuman hive mind.
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| Image by ImageFX. |
Giant Insects. Also in the July 1926 issue of Amazing Stories was "The Eggs from Lake Tanganyika", a short story by Curt Siodmak. In his editorial blurb for "The Eggs from Lake Tanganyika", Gernsback identified "The Eggs from Lake Tanganyika" as "the best scientifiction story so far for 2026". Professor Meyer-Maier brings some gigantic eggs back to Berlin from Africa.
Death to Eggs. Although the natives in Africa repeatedly warned the Professor about giant insects, the Professor ignored the warnings an he allows the giant eggs to hatch in Germany. The giant insects fly off and soon one has sucked the blood out of a horse. Readers are told that the solution to this problem is to inject Lysol into any eggs that are found. Actually, all of the tools of the military are required, but eventually tanks, airplanes and poison gas do eliminate the giant insects that have for a few weeks terrorized Germany.
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| Image generated by Gemini. |
Hugo's Hype for Space. In his editorial blurb for "A Columbus of Space", Gernsback referred to Serviss as "Professor Serviss" and labeled Serviss as a "scientist", which seems to be totally false; as far as I can tell, Serviss never worked as a scientist and never held a teaching position. Gernsback described "A Columbus of Space" as "a scientific masterpiece". Gernsback was trying to excite readers with amazing stories and issues like truth and honesty seemed to be of minor importance when building magazine circulation volume.
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| Image generated by Gemini. |
Page 1 of "A Columbus of Space" has the following: "What is radioactivity? Heaven only knows." We can ask: just how "scientific" is "A Columbus of Space"? Also on page 1 of "A Columbus of Space", readers are introduced to Edmund Stonewall, "the most ingenious man who ever lived", "the greatest human being that has ever appeared on this earth" and readers are told that Stonewall "made the most wonderful invention that ever the world heard of". Yes, dear reader, Stonewall was a believer in the perpetual motion machine (image shown here) of fraudster John Keely. On page 1 of "A Columbus of Space", Serviss mentioned Tesla's "communication with Mars idea".
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| Figure 1. Interior art by Ray Wardell |
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| Figure 2. Made using Figure 1 as a reference image. Image generated by WOMBO Dream. |
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| Figure 3. An ad in Amazing Stories |
Almost as amazing as the stories in Amazing Stories were the advertisements (example, see Figure 3).
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| interior art by Frank R. Paul |
"High Tension" is more of a detective story than a science fiction story. The surgeon (Dr. Carter) takes time out of his busy schedule to murder a Russian spy, but in a good (mysterious) way. A fellow doctor solves the murder mystery and hears Carter's confession and tale about the high frequency electrical stimulation of his brain that makes Carter such an amazing surgeon... just before Carter dies.
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| Image by WOMBO Dream. |
Amazing October. There were no new stories in the September 1926 issue of Amazing Stories. In the October 1926 issue of Amazing Stories was "Blasphemer's Plateau", a short story by Alexander Snyder. For "Blasphemer's Plateau", we are asked to imagine that there is some magical "frequency" of a 'neo-wave' that can switch-on or switch-off any living thing. The story makes no sense and at the end, the "mad scientist" blows everything up, reducing his remote laboratory to ruins.
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| image source |
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| cover art by Frank R. Paul |
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| interior art by Frank R. Paul |
Whodunit? I have to wonder how many of the stories in Amazing Stories that were attributed to people like "K. A. Winter" were actually written by someone else, like Gernsback himself.
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| interior art for "The Lord of the Winds" |
Breaking Wind. "The Lord of the Winds" by Augusto Bissiri is about a weather control device that uses magical electron shunting "tubes" to move the air (see the image to the left).
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| paid advertisement in Amazing Stories |
Horror. The last of the new stories on the December 1928 issue of Amazing Stories was "The Telepathic Pick-Up" by Samuel M. Sargent, Jr. A device is built that allows the telepathic detection of thoughts. Imagine all of the uses to which such a device might be put. In the story, it is used to detect the thoughts of a man who is killed in the electric chair, revealing the "fact" that such people continue to think after being electrocuted.
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| Bacillatorium by ImageFX. |
The AI-generated image that is shown to the right is a tribute to Gernsback's 1911 story "Ralph 124C 41 +". The story features the "Bacillatorium", a decontamination chamber for the home. It uses Arcturium rays to kill bacteria and can also extend a person's total life expectancy to greater than 120 years.
Another "future technology in "Ralph 124C 41 +" was the hypnobioscope. Near the start of this blog post, I complained about Lino Aldani's 1963 story "Buonanotte Sofia" which concerns an imaginary technology that allows for the creation and marketing of artificial "dreams" that can be purchased and used as entertainment. I consulted with Gemini:
Me: What is a "hypnobioscope"?
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| Image generated by Gemini. |
Historical and Literary Origin. In Gernsback’s narrative, the hypnobioscope is a head-worn apparatus connected to a phonograph-like system. It functions by transmitting information directly to the subconscious mind of a sleeping subject, allowing them to acquire vast amounts of knowledge—such as foreign languages or technical manuals—without conscious effort.
Ralph 124C 41+ (1911): Gernsback, the namesake of the Hugo Awards, used the device as a symbol of technological efficiency.
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| The best of all worlds |
Physiological Perspective. From the standpoint of modern medical physiology, the "hypnobioscope" remains largely pseudoscientific. While memory consolidation is a critical function of the sleep cycle—specifically during Slow Wave Sleep (SWS) and REM—the brain's ability to encode entirely novel, complex semantic information while the thalamic "gate" is effectively closed to external stimuli is highly limited.
Me: Evaluate the veracity of this claim made by Hugo Gernsback about the hypnobioscope: "J.A. Phinney, Chief Radioman, U.S. Navy, who, having tried the system himself, in 1923, introduced it at the Pensacola, Florida, Naval Training School. Here one may see naval students stretched out on long benches asleep with casket-like coverings over their heads. The caskets contain two telephone receivers through which radio code is sent to the sleeper. It has been demonstrated that the sleeping student can be taught code faster than by any other means, for the sub-conscious self never sleeps. Students who have failed in their studies have passed examinations after being taught by this method." (source: https://gutenberg.org/cache/epub/60944/pg60944.txt)
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| Alice 212B 423 |
While J.A. Phinney and the Pensacola experiments were real, Gernsback’s conclusions regarding the efficacy and the mechanism of the "sub-conscious" are largely considered pseudoscientific by contemporary standards.
1. The Historical Veracity: The Phinney Experiments
Gernsback was not inventing the event; he was reporting on a series of documented trials. In 1923, Chief Radioman J.A. Phinney did indeed conduct "sleep-teaching" experiments at the Naval Air Station in Pensacola, Florida.
The Setup: Twelve students who were struggling with Morse code were subjected to nocturnal broadcasts of code via headphones.
The Result: Initial reports (often sensationalized in magazines like Radio News, which Gernsback edited) claimed significant success. However, more controlled military follow-ups and later psychological reviews in the 1940s and 50s (notably by Simon and Emmons) failed to replicate these "miraculous" gains under conditions where wakefulness was strictly monitored via EEG.
2. Physiological Critique: The Thalamic Gate and
Synaptic Plasticity
Gernsback’s assertion that "the sub-conscious self never sleeps" is a poetic oversimplification that ignores the thalamocortical gating mechanism.
As a specialist in medical physiology, you recognize that during Non-REM (NREM) sleep, specifically Stage N3 (Slow Wave Sleep), the brain undergoes massive hyperpolarization of thalamic relay neurons. This "thalamic gate" effectively decouples the cerebral cortex from external sensory input.
GABAergic Inhibition: The thalamic reticular nucleus (TRN) releases GABA, inhibiting the transmission of auditory stimuli (the Morse code) to the primary auditory cortex (A1).
Oscillatory Interference: The presence of delta waves (0.5–4 Hz) and sleep spindles represents a state where the brain is preoccupied with internal memory consolidation, not the acquisition of novel, exogenous data.
For a student to "learn" the code, the stimulus must be loud enough to break through this gating mechanism, which typically results in a micro-arousal or a transition to Stage N1/Wakefulness. Therefore, the "sleep-learning" was likely just "learning during periods of sleep deprivation and light drowsiness."
Alice 212B 424
3. Pharmacological Considerations: Cholinergic
Tone and LTP
From a pharmacological perspective, the neurochemical environment of sleep is diametrically opposed to the environment required for Long-Term Potentiation (LTP) and de novo encoding.
Acetylcholine (ACh) Levels: High levels of ACh in the hippocampus and neocortex are essential for encoding new information (the "loading" phase). During SWS, cholinergic tone drops precipitously to facilitate the transfer of memories from the hippocampus to the cortex (the "consolidation" phase).
The Paradox: Attempting to force encoding (via the hypnobioscope) during a period of low cholinergic tone is biochemically counterproductive. Without sufficient ACh to suppress feedback loops in the CA3 region of the hippocampus, the brain cannot efficiently distinguish new external signals from internal "playback."
Glutamatergic Signaling: While NMDA receptor activity is present during sleep for synaptic pruning and strengthening, it is optimized for endogenous signals. External auditory "code" would lack the necessary salience to trigger the molecular cascades (e.g., CaMKII activation and CREB phosphorylation) required for stable memory formation without waking the subject.
Alice 212B 425
4. Semantic vs. Procedural Learning.
However, Morse code is a procedural-associative task. Modern research (e.g., Arzi et al., 2012) shows that humans can perform basic associative conditioning during sleep (like smelling a scent and hearing a tone). But the complex decoding of a linguistic or symbolic system (Morse code) requires higher-order cognitive processing that is absent in the delta-wave dominated brain.
Conclusion
Gernsback’s claim is partially factual in its historical occurrence but false in its scientific conclusion. The "success" of the naval students was likely due to:
Priming: The auditory stimulus provided a "familiarity" with the cadence of the code that reduced the threshold for learning during the day.
Sub-threshold Wakefulness: The "caskets" and headphones likely prevented deep sleep, keeping students in a state of hypnagogia (the transition from wakefulness to sleep), where the brain is still somewhat receptive to environmental stimuli.
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| Alice 212B 426. Image generated by Leonardo. |
Full Citation: Arzi, A., Shedlesky, L., Ben-Shaul, M., Nasser, K., Oksenberg, A., Hairston, I. S., & Sobel, N. (2012). Humans can learn new information during sleep. Nature Neuroscience, 15(10), 1460–1465.
DOI: 10.1038/nn.3193
PMID: 22922782
Study Overview
As a brief refresher for your pharmacological and physiological context, this paper is a seminal work in the field of sleep cognition. The researchers utilized a partial-reinforcement trace conditioning paradigm, pairing specific tones with either pleasant odors (e.g., deodorant or shampoo) or unpleasant odors (e.g., rotten fish or carrion) while subjects were in NREM or REM sleep.
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| Alice 212B 427 |
Implicit Learning: Subjects developed a conditioned "sniff response" to the tones alone, despite having no conscious awareness of the stimuli upon waking.
Persistence: This acquired behavior persisted throughout the night and into the ensuing wake period.
Boundary of Learning: While this demonstrates that the brain can acquire new associative information, it also highlights the limit of sleep-learning, as it did not involve the high-level semantic or procedural encoding (like Gernsback's Morse code) that characterizes conscious learning.
In my own science fiction stories, I imagine advanced nanotechnology that makes it possible to quickly insert information into a human brain: infites, information nanites. For example, in "Plūribus ē Spatium", Tyhry is able to extract infites from her father's femtobot endosymbiont and use the encoded information to activate a piece of alien technology.
Related Reading: 1950 edition of "Ralph 124C 41 +".
More Related Reading: "Station Y" and The Discovery.
Next: the sport Tricursu.
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