The Hugo Awards for great science fiction were named for Hugo Gernsback. He founded the first science fiction magazine, Amazing Stories, in 1926 and went on to publish and edit several other magazines. Gernsback wrote extensively on technology, imagining the gadgets of the future, many that came to be in one way or another, and many that were possible, but that no one really wanted.
In the above image, Gernsback illustrated long distance medical care, in which the doctor can see and even feel a patient without making a house call. This was in 1925, before we even had television! Today we have telemedicine, in which a patient consults a doctor by internet, and also long-distance surgery in which a surgeon manipulates robotic instruments on a patient in another country. However, Gernsback also imagined devices to get more work out of employees, like a helmet that kept distractions away and an electric cage that would wake an office worker who started to doze off. You have to worry about the poor folks who worked on his magazines. Read about seven of Gernsback's weirdest visions of a technological future at Gizmodo.
(Image credit: Science and Invention/Matt Novak)
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