This Above All, To Thine Own Tube Be True

Hugo Gernsback, publisher of Radio-Electronics magazine, has a new idea. In his March issue, he presents his conception of a Multiplex Video receiver --a television set that enables viewers to watch all channels at the same time.

To appreciate a Hugo Gernsback idea, one must first know something about Hugo. He is 79. He is a member of the American Physical Society and a friend of people like David Sarnoff and Lewis Strauss. He coined the word television. He thought of radar roughly six months before bats did. From weightlessness to squeeze-package food, he described the problems of space travel as early as 1929. Every Christmas he puts out a pamphlet called Forecast, and in it he has not only predicted some inventions that have already come to be (like the telescoping ramps that hook up to jets at air terminals) but many more for the future. This past Christmas, for example, Hugo told the world that by 1972 all Negroes can have all-white children if they wish, merely by agreeing to let chemigeneticists toy with their enzymes.

Freedom of Choice. As Gernsback inventions go, the new multi-eyed TV set is of modest flair. It is a conventional set with built-in satellites, intended to solve the problems of TV critics, network executives who want to scout the opposition, watchers of election returns, and families engaged in intramural brawls over who wants what channel. In the middle of Gernsback's new set is the big traditional eye, and flanking it are vertical rows of small, 3-in. screens, as many as are necessary to cover all channels that broadcast in the owner's area. This, more or less, is how it will work:

Arthur T. Telefiend turns on his new set. On the small screens, reading from the top down, he sees a hockey game, a Looney Tune, a guy looking out over Marlboro Country, George C. Scott, 800 yds. of Ronzoni spaghetti, four waltzing mice, and a lecturing professor. What will he choose?

If he wants the hockey game and his wife wants Scott, according to Gernsback's plan, he presses a button that centers the hockey on the big screen; meanwhile, Mrs. Telefiend puts on a set of earphones that tune in to Scott. The children have additional ear phones with which to make their own choices. Everybody is happy.

For a while.

Something Missed. But now, out of the upper right-hand corner of his eye, Arthur Telefiend sees a man about to fall from a precipice in a show that his eldest son is watching. If Arthur changes channels on the large screen he will risk missing something in the hockey game, so he tears the earphones off the boy's head in an attempt to hear what is being said on the eaves of doom. The precipice man is still wobbling there when Arthur's peripheral vision picks up George C. Scott, who is walking with set jaw, lips in motion, toward a mad parolee with a gun. What are the lips saying?

Arthur Telefiend attacks his wife, tearing out seven pin curlers before he finally locates the earphones and hears Scott say: "I'm your friend, Marty. You must believe me, I'm your friend. Just hand me the gun, Marty." But Marty isn't about to hand over the gun right away, and meanwhile the man on the ledge has fallen but is now hanging on with one hand. Arthur grabs the earphones back from his son. He hears shallow breathing and a low groan. He is missing something. A fight has broken out in the hockey game and the scoring light is on. How did they score? Arthur rips the precipice plugs out of his ears. The game announcer is talking about stainless blades. Scott now has the revolver. Why is he pointing it at himself? The man on the brink has returned to safety. How?

Arthur rushes the new Multiplex Video receiver. He ducks his shoulder and catches it just under the knobs with a crunching body check. Both Arthur and the Multiplex crash into the wall, breaking through the sheet rock, snapping two studs, and bringing down a piece of the ceiling. Arthur is out cold. The set is out of commission. The big eye is dead. But Hugo Gernsback is already back at the drawing board.

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