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. 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.