Tesla Begins 'My Inventions' Autobiographical Series in Electrical Experimenter

Hugo Gernsback's Electrical Experimenter magazine begins serialising Nikola Tesla's autobiographical series 'My Inventions' in its January 1919 issue. The multi-part series, written by Tesla himself, becomes the single most-cited Tesla autobiography source and includes the famous passage on his childhood eidetic visions: 'The theory I have formulated is that the images were the result of a reflex action from the brain on the retina under great excitation. They certainly were not hallucinations.' Gernsback would go on to coin the term 'science fiction' and edit Amazing Stories from 1926; the editorial sensibility that hosted Tesla's late writing was the same that would seed American pulp science fiction and, through that, the postwar UFO and contactee culture.