In , WRNY aired some of the first television broadcasts. During the show, audio stopped and each artist waved or bowed onscreen. When audio resumed, they performed. Gernsback is also considered a pioneer in amateur radio. Before helping to create science fiction, Gernsback was an entrepreneur in the electronics industry, importing radio parts from Europe to the United States and helping to popularize amateur "wireless". In April he founded Modern Electrics , the world's first magazine about both electronics and radio, called "wireless" at the time.
While the cover of the magazine itself states it was a catalog, most historians note that it contained articles, features, and plotlines, qualifying it as a magazine. In , Gernsback said that he estimated , people in the U. In , he founded a similar magazine, The Electrical Experimenter , which became Science and Invention in Gernsback's short story "The Cosmatomic Flyer", under the byline "Greno Gashbuck," was cover-featured in the debut issue of Gernsback's Science-Fiction Plus in Gernsback provided a forum for the modern genre of science fiction in by founding the first magazine dedicated to it, Amazing Stories.
The inaugural April issue comprised a one-page editorial and reissues of six stories, three less than ten years old and three by Poe , Verne , and Wells.
His idea of a perfect science fiction story was "75 percent literature interwoven with 25 percent science". Fans began to organize, and became aware of themselves as a movement, a social force; this was probably decisive for the subsequent history of the genre. He also created the term "science fiction", though he preferred the term "scientifiction". There is some debate about whether this process was genuine, manipulated by publisher Bernarr Macfadden , or was a Gernsback scheme to begin another company.
A year later, due to Depression-era financial troubles, the two were merged into Wonder Stories , which Gernsback continued to publish until , when it was sold to Thrilling Publications and renamed Thrilling Wonder Stories. Gernsback returned in —53 with Science-Fiction Plus.
