Tom Swift was the hero of a juvenile series of scientific-invention novels produced by the Stratemeyer Syndicate, constituting a central example of the importance and persistence of the edisonade in boys' fiction, and written under the house name Victor Appleton, most being the work of Howard R. Garis. Tom Swift was the most commercially successful and is still the best remembered of all the boys' sf series of the period. During 1910-1938, beginning with Tom Swift and His Motor-Cycle (1910), 38 titles appeared, all but the last three by Garis, and featuring such inventions as the "photo telephone" and the "ocean airport", the technical difficulties of utilizing which were emphasized. These stories created a potential readership for Hugo Gernsback's magazines.