Reading H.P. Lovecraft’s 1929-1930 story “The Mound”, I became intrigued by this passage:

As time progressed, he noticed an increasing tendency of the people to resort to dematerialisation as an amusement; so that the apartments and amphitheatres of Tsath became a veritable Witches’ Sabbath of transmutations, age-adjustments, death-experiments, and projections. With the growth of boredom and restlessness, he saw, cruelty and subtlety and revolt were growing apace. There was more and more cosmic abnormality, more and more curious sadism, more and more ignorance and superstition, and more and more desire to escape out of physical life into a half-spectral state of electronic dispersal.

What could he have meant by the word “electronic” in 1929? Did he somehow foresee people shut in our homes trolling each other on social media all day? What kind of electronics did they actually have in 1929? Radio and movie theaters, I suppose, both relatively novel. But according to my researcher Gemini (not fact checked by me), what was meant by the word at the time was literally having to do with electrons or atoms.

By 1929, the electron had been discovered for about three decades (J.J. Thomson, 1897), and the late 1910s and 1920s saw a massive boom in the physics of subatomic particles, X-rays, radioactivity, cathode ray tubes, and atomic models.

In the late 1920s, popular science and early pulp science fiction (such as Hugo Gernsback’s Amazing Stories, launched in 1926) transformed “electronic” into a buzzword representing cutting-edge, futuristic, atomic-level physics.

In sci-fi literature of the late 1920s, “radio” or “wireless” was usually associated with communication, while “electronic” was used to describe advanced energy rays, subatomic physics, disintegration beams, and futuristic power sources.

“Wireless” – how about that?