File:Everyday Science and Mechanics, November 1934 - 003.jpg

The Letter From The Editor is a short opinion piece, complaining about how the patent office allows some things to be patented -- even genetically manipulated plants, as of 1930 -- but ideas are unpatentable. The idea for the cigar-band: if only it were patentable, some guy would be a millionaire. If only Congress would do something about this travesty...

On one hand, Gernsback has a point: patents are for demonstratable processes or objects, unique enough that they could not be the obvious solution to a problem. The idea for an MP3 player isn't patentable -- but the design and construction is. Recording music or video on a disc isn't patentable, but the process is -- hence the various incompatible formats of disks out there, each side taking the idea and coming up with their own process. So, should we have patent ideas?

It's pretty obvious why a sci-fi writer would want ideas to be patentable...everything speculative in this magazine is an idea, so without detailed instructions and plans for how to build it or how it's supposed to work, Gernsback is left to the realm of copyright. Over the years, numerous writers have seen their works turned into real-life science, with little more than a footnote credit in Wikipedia about the first proposal of such a device.

Gernsback may not have really noticed this, but scientists -- those wily people who get patents while sci-fi authors do not -- do wrestle with unpatentable ideas. Those tended to end up in published papers, like science journals and master's theses, and thus their ideas entered the public discourse, free to be used by any innovative scientist in need of an idea. The idea-people aren't being left-out, because idea people, whether fact, fiction, or somewhere in-between, end up publishing ideas that others can use for their own benefit. Fiction writers, sadly, have nothing but their ideas to go on.

We do learn, however, where Gernsback's throne lives: 29 Worthington Street, in Springfield, Massachussetts (Google Maps). Gernsback was a publisher of numerous pulpy magazines as Continental Publications: science, mystery, horror, fiction and fact. His presses spent all day and night, a stone's throw from the Connecticut River, producing ideas that others might use for their own benefit.

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