A man in a New York office in spring 1925 sat down to write and strapped on a wooden helmet lined with cork and felt. Three small glass panes limited his vision to the paper in front of him, while a baffle at the mouth allowed breathing but swallowed sound. After about fifteen minutes the air became thin enough to cause drowsiness, so a tube connected to an oxygen tank supplied additional air. The device was called the Isolator. Hugo Gernsback, an inventor and science fiction publisher, published the helmet’s design in July 1925 and argued that long, concentrated thinking is difficult due to interruptions from noise, movement, and even one’s own mental distractions. He built prototypes aiming to improve efficiency and reduce these disturbances.
"Perhaps the most difficult thing that a human being is called upon to face is long, concentrated thinking. Lawyers preparing arguments, inventors working through a problem, playwrights trying to plot - all of them, he argued, needed conditions almost no working space provides. Even if the window is shut, street noises filter through, and distract your attention. Some one slams a door in the house, and at once your trend of thought is disturbed. A telephone bell or a door bell rings somewhere, which is sufficient, in nearly all cases, to stop the flow of thought."
"Even if supreme quiet reigns, he wrote, you are your own disturber practically fifty per cent of the time. The wallpaper, a fly on the wall, a window curtain in the wind - any of it was enough to break the line. The Isolator was his attempt to engineer the conditions out. The first prototype was fairly successful at about 75 per cent efficiency; the second, built around an air gap rather than solid wood, aimed for almos"
"It was called the Isolator. What he actually built The man was Hugo Gernsback, the Luxembourg-born inventor and publisher widely credited as one of the founding figures of American science fiction. He published the helmet's design in his magazine Science and Invention in July 1925, and made the case for it himself."
"The helmet was lined inside and out with cork, then sheathed in felt. Three small panes of glass that were set in front of his eyes limited his vision to the sheet of paper in front of him. A baffle at the mouth let him breathe but swallowed the sound. After about fifteen minutes the air inside grew thin enough to make him drowsy, so he ran a tube to an oxygen tank on the floor beside his chair."
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