This month in 1920, the magazine Electrical Experimenter had a feature on (no surprise) an electrical experiment.
But this one was really something: a sort of multiplatform musical translator known as the physiophone.
This was the invention of Hugo Gernsback, sometimes called “the father of science fiction” and the namesake for the Hugo Awards.
We featured him on the show once before because he predicted telemedicine long before it actually happened.
And he happened to be the publisher of Electrical Experimenter magazine, a great platform to share his own projects.
This project started years earlier, when “One evening I accidentally touched the two wires of the secondary terminals of the telephone coil and was quite surprised to get a smart and disagreeable shock.”
He had been trying to send music long-distance by hooking an old-timey phonograph to an electrical network.
After the sound traveled some distance, his apparatus turned the electric impulses back into sound.
But, in thinking back on that old experiment, Gernsback concluded that he could also just share the sound in its electric form.
With the right interface, he thought Deaf people would be able to experience the music by feeling the physical impressions (though unlike the lab accident that inspired the invention, its electric impulses were not “smart and disagreeable.”)
Gernsback called the contraption that carried this out the physiophone, and according to his magazine, the physiophone’s test subjects not only could feel the rhythms and the flow of the music, it made them want to get up and dance!
We don’t have physiophones at concert halls today, but many venues do have ways to make musical performances more accessible to Deaf fans, from sign language interpreters performing in real time to haptic suits that vibrate along with the music.
So really this was all just one more way that Hugo Gernsback predicted the future.
It’s National Library Week, and if you want to celebrate in a big way, then you may want to head to Kansas City.
The south facade of the central library there looks like a giant bookshelf, with 42 “titles” each standing 26 feet tall.
Though you can’t check those “books” out, even with a library card.
This Invention From the Grandfather of Science Fiction Was Promoted as Music For the Deaf (Paleofuture)
Here’s The Story Behind the Kansas City Public Library’s Giant Community Bookshelf (Kansas City Library)
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