Television Eyeglasses - Text 3
In 1960, in an interview with the daily newspaper Post-Standard, Gernsback went further, imagining a kind of television connected directly to the brain by means of what is known today as a “direct neural interface”:
Today’s television receivers may one day be replaced by devices that will “tickle” the brain, breaking right through to man’s inner consciousness. At least that’s what electronics trailblazer Hugo Gernsback believes. Brain tissue conducts electricity. What would be more logical then, asks Gernsback, than the development of a “superceptor” whose impulses would create images directly in the mind, like dreams, instead of lighting up a television screen? And three UCLA scientists have suggested that with the introduction of such a receiver, everyone in the family would be able to tune in his individual program – with eyes open or closed, whichever he prefers.[6]
Gernsback filed a number of patent applications[7] – some of them promising (such as the “apparatus for landing flying machines” or the “hydraulic fishery”), and others less so (such as the “combined electric hair brush and comb,” the “illuminated electric mirror,” a “postal card” and the “depilator”), but most mere improvements on existing technology – but few gave rise to lasting inventions. His best ideas were perhaps his most speculative and least practical to carry out, which he formulated in his editorials and fictional texts. These remained extrapolations from recent technological developments, but apart from the technical and economic constraints of his day they were made in complete freedom. We can see why, in a 1953 editorial in the first issue of the magazine Science-Fiction Plus, Gernsback was able to recommend a reform to patent law to enable science fiction authors also to file patent applications, at least provisional ones, for their ideas, for technology they merely imagined.[8]
Others, however, found a way to make this idea of television eyeglasses a reality. As early as 1943, Henry John de Neville McCollum filed a patent application for an analogous device, a “stereoscopic television apparatus” made up of two miniature cathode tubes installed in a simple pair of eyeglass frames so that “a plurality of people can simultaneously and with equal facility view an object that has been transmitted by stereoscopic television”.[9]
