I was flipping through the November 1950 issue of Marvel Science Stories this afternoon (as one does on a lazy Saturday), and while the content by the likes of A. E. van Vogt, Gardner F. Fox, and A. Bertram Chandler was intriguing, what interested me most was the back cover ad.

“Most Bald People Could Have Saved Their Hair Had They Acted in Time,” we’re told, with random italicization that doesn’t seem to make any sense. But what’s fascinating is the identity of the celebrity endorser doing the telling—”Rocco, Personal Barber of the late Thomas A. Edison.”

That’s right—the barber to the inventor known as the Wizard of Menlo Park claimed that a formula called Sayve is “the best Science can do to SAVE YOUR HAIR.”

One question, though. (more…)

I’ve long known that science fiction had a Thomas Edison connection, in that Ray Cummings, who wrote the classic novel The Girl in the Golden Atom, had worked for a time as Edison’s assistant.

But it turns out that there’s a second Edison connection, as I’ve just learned from the introduction to Bison Book’s Miles J. Breuer collection The Man with the Strange Head and Other Early Science Fiction Stories, which states that “it is worth noting that Gernsback’s associate editor, T. O’Connor Sloane, was Edison’s son-in-law.”

Interesting, but apparently not accurate. Wikipedia tells us that it was Sloane’s son who was Edison’s son-in-law, and not Sloane himself. And even though Wikipedia is known to be wrong from time to time, this wedding announcement from the December 3, 1912 issue of The New York Times backs them up. So unless T O’Connor Sloane married Madeleine Edison after his son John Eyre Sloan died or divorced her, the assertion Michael R. Page makes in his introduction is incorrect.

Regardless of that, I find it fascinating that two Edison associates played such important roles in the creation of early science fiction. I think a neat alternate-history story could be written about that.

And come to think of it, there’s actually at least one more connection SF has with Edison, in that since the SCI FI Channel is owned by General Electric, a company which more than a century ago was known as the Edison General Electric Company, I’m actually employed by the corporation Edison himself founded.