Hugo Gernsback was born on August 16, 1884, in Bonnevoie, an area southeast of Luxembourg City, Luxembourg.
Ever since he was very young, Hugo Gernsback read the works of authors such as H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, and Edgar Allan Poe, as well as articles written by scientists about the possibility of extraterrestrial life. In 1904 he emigrated to the USA, where he started using the knowledge of electronics he had already accumulated. He was first of all a technology pioneer, an inventor who at the end of his life held 80 patents.
Hugo Gernsback started producing electrical materials and to sell them distributed a catalog to potential customers. In 1908, the catalog was transformed into the magazine “Modern Electrics” with which Gernsback began his career as editor he extended in time by opening many other magazines. Over the years, however, he kept on developing electronic products, founded the radio station WRNY, and was a pioneer of amateur radio.
In the 1928 photo published in the magazine “Radio News”, Hugo Gernsback is watching television on an experimental apparatus of the time.
In the magazine “Modern Electrics”, Hugo Gernsback also started publishing stories of the genre he Initially called “scientifiction”, including his novel “Ralph 124C 41+”, serialized between 1911 and 1912. This novel has now only a historical value but contains accurate predictions on technological developments that actually occurred in subsequent years.
In 1926, Hugo Gernsback founded “Amazing Stories”, the first magazine dedicated to the genre he called “science fiction”. He also published the addresses of the fans who wrote letters to the magazine, which also contributed to the birth of fandom allowing people to get in touch and organize.
Because of financial problems, in 1929, Hugo Gernsback lost ownership of “Amazing Stories” but created two other magazines, “Science Wonder Stories” and “Air Wonder Stories”, which a year later were merged into “Wonder Stories”, which kept on being published by him until 1936, when he sold it.
In 1953 for the first time, the Hugo Award was awarded for the best science fiction works of the year. Initially, the official name was “Science Fiction Achievement Awards” but the nickname Hugo became so common that in the ’90s, it became the official one. In 1960, Hugo Gernsback received a special award as “The Father of Magazine Science Fiction”.
The second novel by Hugo Gernsback, “Ultimate World”, was written in 1958 but was published only in 1971, posthumously as he died on August 19, 1967, in New York. Over the years, various magazines had become more important than his one in the field of science fiction but Gernsback started that movement, crucial for the development of this genre. For this reason, he’s considered one of the fathers of science fiction.
