The story so profoundly affected him that he literally developed a fever, which may have been psychosomatic in nature. He raved about fantastic places, strange creatures, and life on Mars. This continued into the night, and the following day Gernsback was sent home from school in a state of delirium. This experience profoundly affected his subsequent intellectual pursuits. An accomplished technician, scientist, and inventor, Gernsback was never satisfied with the limits of existing scientific knowledge; he was enamored with pursuits of the imagination. By age thirteen he was accepting installation jobs for telephone and electrical communications systems, forms of communication that were in their infancy. In
Explorers of the Infinite (1960), Sam Moskowitz relates how "the mother superior of the Carmelite convent in Luxembourg City obtained a special dispensation from Pope Leo XIII, so that Gernsback could equip that institution with call bells." He then busied himself with a variety of projects, including the invention of a new form of battery. Moskowitz notes that this battery was similar to the present-day layer battery. When both France and Germany refused him patents, the young entrepreneur took his accumulated savings from his electrical-installation work and left for the United States in February 1904.
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