What’s that? You tried out NaNoWriMo last month but just couldn’t find the opportunity to sit down and concentrate? Happens to the best of us. Well, sometimes the answers to our most troubling problems lie in the past.
Enter the Isolator helmet. This curious invention from 1925 was brought to the world by Hugo Gernsback in that year’s July issue of Science and Invention magazine, and involved something akin to a diving helmet with an oxygen tank. But this wasn’t for deep sea exploration – this was for desk work!
The Isolator’s main purpose was to block out all the noise – all of the noise – from your surrounding environment, and narrow your field of view to only let you see the page in front of you. The idea was that this would improve your focus, but it may have been slightly overkill. Slightly.
Hugo Gernsback wasn’t just an inventor, of course: he was also the publisher of Amazing Stories, as well as Science and Invention magazine, where these very images come from.
In fact, he’s considered one of the “Fathers of Science Fiction,” and even has a science fiction award named after him that you may have heard of: the Hugo Awards.
