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 (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.