Pseudoman, Akkad
Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author.
Pseudonym of US inventor, academic and author Edwin Fitch Northrup (1866-1940), whose sf novel Zero to Eighty: Being my Lifetime Doings, Reflections, and Inventions: Also my Journey Around the Moon (1937) comprises the slightly wooden memoirs of "Kad" Pseudoman, whose early life incorporates some elements of the Edisonade – he discovers a gold mine in the West from which he profits mightily; he creates various Inventions, usually to do with Transportation; and he saves a country from its enemies, though the country is not America but Switzerland – but who mainly concerns himself with technical and pictorial accounts of the building of an electric-pulse gun, a tube 200 kilometres long whose muzzle is located at the top of Mount Popocatapetl, launching a Spaceship in which Pseudoman circumnavigates the Moon in 1961 (see Hard SF). The memoir ends with a visit to the Lenin Underground Village, a vast Keep built two kilometres Underground beneath Moscow as an exercise in the engineering of Utopia.
Among the actual inventions for which Northrup shared major credit was the high-frequency induction furnace; he was a Professor of Physics at Princeton University from 1910 to 1920. [JC]
Edwin Fitch Northrup
born Syracuse, New York: 23 February 1866
died Princeton, New Jersey: 29 April 1940
works
- Zero to Eighty: Being my Lifetime Doings, Reflections, and Inventions: Also my Journey Around the Moon (Princeton, New Jersey: Scientific Publishing Company, 1937) [hb/Peter Keenan]
links
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