Ray Cummings

Ray Cummings (1887–1957) was an American writer regarded as one of the founding figures of pulp science fiction. Before turning to fiction, he worked from 1914 to 1919 as a personal assistant to Thomas Edison. His best-known work, The Girl in the Golden Atom, serialized in 1919 and expanded into a novel in 1922, imagines a miniature world existing within the atoms of ordinary matter, blending ideas from H. G. Wells's The Time Machine with earlier microcosm fiction; the book is remembered for its observation that "time is what keeps everything from happening at once," a line often misattributed to later physicists. Cummings wrote prolifically across pulp magazines through the 1920s and 1930s, including the Tarrano the Conqueror and Explorers into Infinity series, and later contributed anonymous comic-book scripts, including Captain America and Human Torch stories, for Marvel's predecessor Timely Comics.