Let's dispel one myth before we go any further.  Gernsback may have been a wild enthusiast for new technologies with a 14-year old's  imagination that never deserted him, but his magazines weren't all raving nut-fests of odd gadgets.  His evangelism for radio had a strong practical side and he was well aware that his readers had a very strong nuts & bolts interest in radios as radios.  You were as  likely to see this sort of thing on the cover of a Gernsback radio magazine as the death-ray stuff.

This was the meat and potatoes of Gernsback's radio magazines: page after page of schematics of radio circuits or "hook ups."  Radio was so new in the early decades of the last century that for many enthusiasts the only way to listen in was to build their own sets.  Finding the best circuits soon became a minor mania.  It was a bit like the chaps today who are really into building their own PCs, only instead of hard drives and motherboards, they argued about valves and condensers.

I remember in my younger days working on circuits not very different than this and repairing old valve radios.  Seeing a schematic like this and then comparing it to a modern computer chip is a very sobering experience. 

Of course, you can't fix a chip with a soldering iron.

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