JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

This magnificent piece of outsider thinking by J.T. Lagergren, Man’s Rule on Earth, was published in 1926, and seeks out the secret human-powerly passions that are/were present in people and their surroundings.  Maybe “published” is too strong a word, as my copy is the copyright deposit copy, and there seems to have been no other copies, or copies that I can find, anyway.  (I can find no copies of the work in the massive library database OCLC/WorldCat, and no other works by him, although he did register a number of patents for refrigeration valves and such.)

I’m not altogether certain how the author was going to re-establish what was claimed to be the degeneracies of mankind, except that it involved removing “energial” capacities of water, and to “retrieve the energy being carried away through the rivers”. It also involved a plan to retrieve “high altitude air” and pump it into pressure suits of some sort to release hidden and lost energies, and of course much more, worthy of the pamphlet’s 56 pages, though much of it sounded better of it was done in secret and invisibly.

Here’s an example of the content of the work:

There are diagrams to go with this:

Which is a detail from the following: