Nerd Culture in the 1920's and 30's

[zaika]

Did it exist? How does one research what made someone a nerd back then, and what would they be into back in the day? I'm thinking...paths of study, entertainment, interests. Sci-fi, latest scientific discoveries, goth/horror/macabre...what are some good resources for finding these sorts of things?

I hope I've made sense.

 

[JimWagner]

20's and 30's geeks (and I don't believe they were called that nor considered to be such back then) would have been into building their own wireless sets. They would have read things like The Radio Boys, or the Tom Swift books for their technology kicks.

 

[Bustercat]

I imagine this type of reading was a staple.

http://blog.modernmechanix.com/category/impractical/

 

[zaika]

oh wow....thank you so much!! fabulous leads. i can see what i'll be obsessed with in the coming months.

 

[JimWagner]

If you really are interested, and have a Kindle, a lot of the Radio Boys books are available for free on Amazon in that format. Just search on Radio Boys and you'll find them. Same for the Tom Swift books.

I haven't looked on Amazon for other series like those, but I'm betting there are quite a few of those old books that have passed into the public domain available there for free.

Enjoy.

 

[mike]

I know that early sci-fi fans, back in the mid 1920's when it was still called Scientifiction, had Amazing Stories and various similar magazines run by Hugo Gernsback. These magazines gave golden era fans their fix of new and classic stories of far away worlds and incredible technology. The fan letter columns in these pulp magazines led to international penpals and communication networks spanning the entire globe. This eventually led to the 1st World Science Fiction Convention, or World Con, which coincided with the '39 World's Fair in NYC. Ray Bradbury & Forrest J Ackerman were in attendance among 200 or so others. It's since grown tremendously but the early years retains a magic that tops everything else.

Backing up, the concept of a fan letter column as a place of community was reused over and over through the decades. I know the Famous Monsters Magazine letter column served the same function in the 50's-70's. Today, that need is filled on sites like this.

Here's Forry at the 39 World's Fair/1st Worldcon dressed as Raymond Massey from the '35 film, Things to Come:

 

[JimWagner]

And that establishes cosplay as nothing new under the sun.

 

[zaika]

oh, this is just too exciting! thank you all for responding.

 

[Edward]

I should imagine some of them must have been reading the original steampunk literature - Verne, etc. Also, Lovecraft was alive and writing into the early 30s - his last, I believe, in 1935, two years before his death. Much like Wagner, while producing interesting art, Lovecraft seems to have had some rather distasteful views about the superiority of the Aryan race etc.... I can see the quasi-intellectualisations of such prejudices appealing to self-styled intellectuals back in those days (this pre Hitler, remember, and at a time when people in general held views that might today be considered a little, well, less than acceptable. Lovecraft's wider fame came, as I understand it, mostly after his death, but he had a following in the 20s and 30s... prime cult-material, which would have been ideal for proto-geeks. Perhaps also Poe?

 

[mike]

And in my opinion, the first 20th Century punks were the Dadaists & perhaps the Futurists prior to WW1. All of which communicated via manifesto newsletters and often wound up relocating to various spots on the globe to form productive communities. Didn't Jayne County, the Cramps, Dead Boys, etc... do the exact same thing?

 

[dhermann1]

Rent all the original Nancy Drew mysteries from 1938 & 1939. Her boyfriend, Ted, is a first class nerd.
BTW, for you early TV fans, Frankie Thomas, who played Ted, was later Tom Corbett, Space Cadet, in the very early all live TV series that ran from 1950 to 1955.

 

[vitanola]

Yes Radio Boys (all three series) The Moving Picture Boys, of course Tom Swift, Alfred Morgan's "Things a Boy Can Do With Electricity', Gernsback's Amazing Stories, Bernarr McFadden's publications ("The Graphic" perhaps excepted) "soft' novels, such as those of Harold Bell Wright, and (if terribly fey) Kathleen Norris.

 

[V.C. Brunswick]

There's a publisher called Lindsay Publications (do a Google search) that reprints some of these books such as The Boy Electrician by Alfred P. Morgan and Harper's Aircraft Book (1910) by A.H. Verrill, as well as other vintage technical books. I just received their latest catalog. One of the books I plan to get is:

The Voice of the Crystal by Pete Friedrichs

From the Catalog:

BUILD a crystal detector... BUILD headphones... BUILD capacitors... and all and everything else you need to create a functioning radio.

Chapters include the gallows headphone, the tin can headphone, the cigarette lighter headphone, the boom detector, the paper tube condenser, practical variable condensers, the roofing metal condenser, the crank coil, thoughts on simple tuners, thoughts on antennas and grounds and much more.

Pete built, wrote, illustrated, amd published this remarkable how-to book. It's wall-to-wall experiments, photographs, diagrams, and hints and tips. There are more ideas here than you'll have time to explore.

Mr. Friedrichs also wrote a companion volume called Instruments of Amplification which explains how to build crude, homemade vacuum tubes and even transistors from scratch.

 

[Lone_Ranger]

This thread needs a theme song!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V83JR2IoI8k

 

[cbrunt]

Ah Thomas Dolby... I consider myself lucky that his video Blinded Me with Science was one of the first, if not the first music videos I recall seeing!! Loved it then, as now!

This is a great thread, though I've got nothing more to contribute...:eusa_doh:
Clint

 

[MrNewportCustom]

Were not "nerds" and "geeks", as we call them today, known back then as "Eggheads"?


Lee

 

[Fletch]

The Futurians, of New York in the late '30s, were the first s-f organization to really have a life of their own. They included several then and future s-f writers and editors. They were largely members of the Depression Left, and like that movement, were the product of a lot of abortive groupings, subgroupings, splits and snits.

I seem to remember reading that they had a commune of sorts where several lived, which made them more like bohemians in my book, but their earnest, somewhat naïve political outlook qualified them as nerds (even tho nerd wasn't even a word yet).

 

[Idledame]

In one of the Thin Man movies there's a nerdy young man who is into the study of psychology. And then anyone who knew nothing about the music and dance of the day, who maybe was into opera and ballet instead would have been "all wet, a flat tire, a pill, pickle, drag, rag or oilcan or even a Mrs. Grundy". All would be the equivalent of "a square". By the way, while looking at the slang on the sites listed at http://www.ats-group.net/dialect/language-slang-20s.html I came across the phrase "face stretcher" for an older woman trying to look young. That's even more appropriate today isn't it?

 

[Idledame]

Somewhat off topic, but the words nerd and geek are really recent. This is from Wikipedia:

The first documented appearance of the word "nerd" is as the name of a creature in Dr. Seuss's book If I Ran the Zoo (1950), in which the narrator Gerald McGrew claims that he would collect "a Nerkle, a Nerd, and a Seersucker too" for his imaginary zoo. The slang meaning of the term dates back to 1951, when Newsweek magazine reported on its popular use as a synonym for "drip;" or "square" in Detroit, Michigan.[3] By the early 1960s, usage of the term had spread throughout the United States and even as far as Scotland.[4][5] At some point, the word took on connotations of bookishness and social ineptitude.

The word geek Formerly, the term referred to a carnival performer often billed as a wild man whose act usually includes biting the head off a live chicken, bat, snake or bugs. The 1976 edition of the American Heritage Dictionary included only the definition regarding geek shows.

 

[docneg]

Here's Forry at the 39 World's Fair/1st Worldcon dressed as Raymond Massey from the '35 film, Things to Come:

Wow! Thanks for that photo. I had the good fortune to meet the Ackermonster not long before he died. He talked about seeing Things To Come. Very cool!