I’m increasingly convinced, as any good biographer should be, that J.A. Etzler was a prophet, a futurist par excellence in a time when futurists were not employed by Nokia. He foresaw, to greater or lesser degrees, plastics, concrete, solar thermal power, synthetic fibers for clothing, apartments with elevators, and pumped storage to smooth out renewable energy intermittency… Not to mention gigantic floating islands powered by the tides and waves. The Seasteading Institute would be proud.  My notes will be deployed later this afternoon about his various visions — one might even all them lucid dreams — of the world.

But first, here’s some more links and citations about this forgotten tech visionary, as much for your benefit as for mine.

(I’ve uploaded PDFs of firewalled academic papers; if individual authors would like to see their papers taken down, please let me know. Otherwise, in the spirit of open access, they are presented complete.)

By or on Etzler:

• Etzler patent, “Navigating and Propelling Vessels by the Action of the Wind and Waves” April 1, 1842. This “naval automaton,” as he called it, is pictured above. This is probably his least interesting invention to me, but it sure looks interesting.
• The Great Delusion: A Mad Inventor, Death in the Tropics, and Utopian Origins of Economic Growth by Steven Stoll, a Fordham history professor and just released last year. This recent biography of Etzler is on its way from Amazon to my house, so I can’t offer any guidance about it just yet. My first thought, though, is that I’m not sure I like framing Etzler as a deluded inventor. If we held their engineering skills against most visionaries, they’d come up lacking. Still, this book looks fascinating — and I’m glad to have found a kindred spirit.
• Paradise (to be) Regained by Henry David Thoreau, a lengthy review of Etzler’s work, which had been suggested to him by Emerson. There’s much to be said about this particular work — and it will probably form the basis for a big chunk of my chapter on Etzler. In it, we already find the fundamental tension present in today’s environmental debate. Namely, can change come from one person after another deciding to care more deeply for the environment or will the restructuring of society require great technological progress? Of course, this being an age of synthesis, the answer is that it will take both societal rethinking, which slows the technological momentum of old systems, and creates space for technologies to find new applications and financing.
• “J. A. Etzler, An American Utopianist” in the American Journal of Economics and Sociology, October 1956, by W.H.G. Armytage, the late British historian of technology
• “John Adolphus Etzler, Technological Utopianism, and British Socialism: The Tropical Emigration Society’s Venezuelan Mission and Its Social Context, 1833-1848” in The English Historical Review, April 1986, by Gregory Claeys, historian of political thought at Royal Holloway, University of London
• John A. Etzler and his plans for paradise by Gertrude Eagle, an out-of-print master’s thesis from the University of Miami, 1943
• “‘The American Myth’: Paradise (To Be) Regained” in PMLA, December 1959, by Frederic Ives Carpenter, a once-eminent English professor and critic at the University of Chicago
• “Spatial Thinking in the Bridge Era: John Augustus Roebling versus John Adolphus Etzler” by the late Brooke Hindle of the Smithsonian Institute, a history of science and technology heavyweight who succeeded Daniel Boorstin as head of the National Museum of History and Technology, now known as the National Museum of American History.
• Emigration to the Tropical World by Etzler. After failing to find funding and success in America, he decided to try his luck in even warmer climes.
• “John Adolphus Etzler: Scientific Utopianism during the 1830’s and 1840’s” by P.R. Brostowin, apparently his Ph.D. dissertation at New York University, 1969

Broader pieces that mention Etzler or provide historical, political, and technological context:

• “Technology and Democracy, 1800-1860” in The Mississippi Valley Historical Review, March 1957 by Hugo A. Meier
• “Democratic Statecraft and Technological Advance: Abraham Lincoln’s Reflections on ‘Discoveries and Inventions’” in The Review of Politics, Summer 2001, by Eugene F. Miller
• “Master Mechanics and Evil Wizards: Science and the American Imagination from Frankenstein to Sputnik” in The Massachusetts Review, Winter 1992, by Glen Scott Allen, most noted for his work on Don DeLillo and other postmodernists. This work lists Etzler has a kind of spring for the stream of tech-heavy utopian literature that rushed out towards the end of the nineteenth century, including the megaclassic, Looking Backward:
• Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy, a hugely influential utopian novel released in 1887
• History of American Socialisms by John Humphrey Noyes, first published in 1870
• American Wilderness: a new history by Michael L. Lewis, a professor at Salisbury University, Oxford University Press, 2007. Lewis locates Etzler’s technomessianism within the framework of Ordinance of 1785, which created a survey to slice up the American interior into 640 acre chunks. He writes, “So, at the same time that backwoods settlers burned, planted, and hunted to change forests into farms, the United States extended its legal boundaries over the same land, changing it into real estate.” He also notes that Etzler’s invented machine — the Satellite, a sort of all-purpose machine for plowing, threshing, and moving buildings — failed.
• Technological Utopianism in American Culture by Howard Segal, a University of Maine historian of technology currently writing a new book called “The Wave of the Future: High-Tech Utopias”
• “The Chartist Land Colonies of 1846-1848” in Agricultural History, April 1858, by W.H.G. Armytage positions Etzler’s work as one that was repurposed by agrarians in England
• “The Millennium, the West, and Race in the Antebellum American Mind” in the Western Historical Quarterly, October 1972, by Klaus Hansen, a professor of history at Queen’s
• “The Politics of Rediscovery in the History of Science: Tacit Knowledge of Concrete before its Discovery“ presented at the 2005 annual meeting of the American Sociological Association by Chandra Mukerji… This is kind of a sideways link to Etzler. I got interested in it because he describes a sort of concrete construction technique that seemed to predate the modern era of concrete. It turns out that it was just after Etzler’s era that the use of Portland cement became widespread, or so the story goes. Mukerji describes the use of concrete as far back as 1670 and argues that concrete was never forgotten at all, it just went uncataloged in the preferred scientific language of the day. “The practice of making concrete seems from the archival record to have remained part of the tacit knowledge of artisans in the Roman world, and it did not need rediscovering at all,” she writes. “What constituted its 18th century “discovery” was its articulation as formal chemical knowledge, and reveals more about the accounting practices in scientific discovery than about concrete.
• Two Subtexts of Paul Auster’s Ghosts, Marku Salmela’s master’s thesis from the University of Tampere that looks at Etzler, among other things, 2001