Smug in this deception, Gurn plans his next move – kidnapping heiress Sandra Stowe while on a horse riding expedition.   Ambushing her and companion, D.A. Preston Cole, Gurn and his men capture the heiress, leaving Cole unconscious.  Recovering, Cole finds Gurn’s spectacles and returns with them to his office where he shares his finding with his clerk Larry Jordan.   Jordan slips away with the glasses and adopts his identity as Air Wave.  Using advance radio tuning capacities, he finds that the spectacles let him eavesdrop on Gurn again, learning that he has laid a trap a nearby foundry.   Air Wave further hears that once Stowe has signed her ransom letter, Gurn expects to kill her to remove evidence.

Arriving at the foundry after summoning the police, Air Wave engages Gurn’s men.  He soon learns that the trap Gurn has planned in a device to neutralize static, overwhelming Air Wave’s radio sensors and disorienting him so he could be knocked out.  Unobserved, Sandra Stowe steals next to Gurn’s device and inactivates it, allowing Air Wave to arrive.  A melee ensues,  with Gurn using considerable physical prowess to battle Air Wave.  Eventually, gaining the upper hand, he flings Gurn in his device, causing it to explode.  The remainder of the gang flee into the arms of the waiting police, who enter the building to find that both Air Wave and Gurn have disappeared (Detective Comics #61).

Gurn was not dead and had retreated to a hideaway in a nearby slum. Realizing the human subordinates were unreliable and Air Wave a greater threat than he had originally appreciated, he decided to use his science for a different solution – a mechanical body to commit crimes directly.  Creating a robotic suit, Gurn went on a spree of robberies  and was dubbed a “Machine Man” by the press.  He taunted the police, ineffective against his armor, by inviting them to summon Air Wave.  Monitoring police radio traffic, Air Wave heard of Gurn thrashing several cops and threatening murder until he used a belt microphone to broadcast voices off Gurn’s armor suggesting he was surrounded.  Fooled, Gurn fled with Air Wav in hot pursuit.

Catching up with the mechanical villain, Air Wave engaged in fisticuffs only to be thwarted by tear gas released by Gurn’s armor.  The arriving policy interrupted Gurn before he could kill the hero, who fled to commit more crime.  Finding an armored car, Gurn tears it open and takes off with its contents to a construction site to lay a trap for Air Wave. Gurn climbed up the frame of the building and as the hero closed in, Gurn seemed to slip and fall.  Knowing Air Wave’s ethics would drive him to stage a rescue, Gurn lured him close enough to fling him off the girders to be his death below.  Air Wave executed a last-minute save, using his magnetic skates to draw him to the metal frame of the building and return to where Gurn was waiting.  Enraged by his failure, Gurn charged Air Wave but lost his balance, crashing to the street below.  His robot body cushioned his fall but was destroyed in the process, leaving Gurn easy prey for the police and vowing revenge on Air Wave (Detective Comics #65).

The further activities of Professor Gurn are unrevealed.