Edmond Hamilton

“ From then on, Helen was enthusiastic.
Carter persuaded Helen to put on the learning-cap.
So next week, we hung out a sign and advertised in the newspapers. Carter had written the ad, and it was a good one.
"Do you want to know more?" it asked. "Do you yearn to learn? But are you repelled by the dreary prospect of months and years of study?
"Electro-Education is the answer! Study, classrooms, schools, are now obsolete. We guarantee to bestow on you in a few hours enough higher education to pass any university's graduation examinations." ”

“ And still Carter wasn't satisfied.
"What we have got to avoid is saturation of the market, Pete," he told me. "As soon as everyone is full of knowledge, they will quit buying education."
"Well, there will still be the new generation of students each year and that brings in a big, steady profit," I said.
"That's not enough," he said in his determined way. "What we need is repeat business, like the movie industry gets. I'll work on that."
And he did. He got big new advertising campaigns planned, that kept the public needled by successive waves of advertising. ”

“ I'm a modest kind of a guy. I'd figured on profits, on maybe even a chain of education-shops some day, but I hadn't figured on what EE rapidly became.
It didn't grow—it exploded. Within a month, Carter had branches started or underway in every big city in the country. He'd bought up a factory to turn out the EE apparatus. We trained our own operators. It was simple, since we just ran an EE tape to teach them.
Our advertising plastered the newspapers, the billboards, the radio. We made the whole country EE conscious, overnight. One of our best ads was:
WHY GO TO COLLEGE FOR KNOWLEDGE? ”

“ To learn a subject like Sanskrit, for instance, requires tens of thousands. The scanner can put these new neural connections in your brain in a flash, by projecting a pre-determined pattern of electronic impulses."
"Can it be done?" I asked him.
"We proved it could be done!" Carter told me. "Doctor Kindler knew French, and I didn't. The scanner first scanned his neural patterns, isolated those having to do with word-meanings, and recorded them on a moving tape. Then we ran the tape back, reversing the scanner so it would repeat that pattern of electronic impulses on my own brain. ”

“ Carter said. "And that's what Doctor Kindler has been working on for years. I worked with him, of course," he added hastily. "The discovery is as much mine as his.
"You see," he went on, "we invented a scanner that can change the labyrinthine neural-connections of the brain by tiny electronic impulses, just as you can rewire that generator's coils. With it, we can set up any desired neural paths in an instant by applying just the right electronic impulses at the right points in the network.
"Any ordinary set of facts requires thousands of new neural paths in the brain. ”

“ Scientific discoveries don't interest me so much, but millions interest anybody.
"What is the thing?" I asked. "Some new kind of rig for atomic power?"
"No, no, it's nothing like that," Carter muttered. "It deals with the mind. I could revolutionize the world with this thing if I had money enough to develop improved apparatus."
"Won't the university put up the dough for the stuff you need?" ”

“ Lots of young lawyers, for instance, would decide they'd rather be doctors. They'd simply come in and have their legal knowledge erased, take on a full course of medical subjects, and hang out a shingle. ”

“ The taxpayers didn't want to keep up the schools. The parents didn't want to, when their kids could learn it all so easy by EE. And the kids themselves sure were wholehearted for EE from the start.
The result was that the State set up, instead of schools, EE dispensaries in which our own operators gave the kids their stuff. Every kid had to go to school—one hour a year. He got his year's work shot into him by tape, and that was that. And the State paid us a set fee for every pupil. ”

“ Carter explained that there was a limit to that. "The potential neural paths in each brain are limited in number. We found that the average person has a neural index that will allow him to absorb the equivalent of a Ph.D. education from the tapes, but not much more."
He added quickly:
"But there'd be a chance for repeat business even so. The scanner can erase this new-found knowledge from the brain, by using a neutralizing electronic impulse. Then the student can learn entirely new subjects." ”

“ When a man reached his neural capacity we had to erase to put new knowledge in, of course. We'd had a few sad experiences with guys who wanted to know absolutely everything and who went batty from too much EE. To avoid trouble with the law, our operators were strict on that now. ”

“ We couldn't restrict office to adults, when our own kids were ten times smarter than we were.
Half of Congress is under ten years old these days, and the big offices are mostly filled with kid geniuses. I hear there's a twelve-year old out in California that they're grooming for President.
What gets me, though, is this:
These kids of ours still keep piling new knowledge into their brains with EE. Now, twenty or thirty years from now, what are their kids going to be like? ”

“ And he'd decided to call our firm the "Electro-Education Company."
Carter rented a small building up in the Bronx, and there we put up the apparatus that he assembled from the stuff I bought.
"How about those learning-tapes, Carter?" I asked him at the end of the week. "We've got to be able to sell people more than just French."
He grinned at me. "I've got a lot of tapes on every subject, all ready. You see, some of the best scientists and scholars in the world are on Gotham University's faculty. Under pretext of X-raying their brains, I used the scanner to make tapes of everything they know." ”