The curious patents of Hendricus G. Loos

What’s up, Corporate Torsos fam?

Those of you who have been with me since the beginning of this project (circa 1996) know I’ve had to update the tech multiple times since starting to write Corporate Torsos Need Not Apply, my near-future cli-fi conspiracy action-adventure comedy.

Why, you ask? Is it because you took 24 years to finish it?

Nah. Couldn’t be.

A lot of the “predictions” came true over the years. (I’m not very visionary, younger me probably got them out of Popular Science.) Other things changed dramatically in ways I never saw coming. Turns out, that’s just what happens when you take 24 years to write one book.

In trying to base the fiction on fact, I’ve come across lots of interesting tidbits in my research. But nothing has stuck with me more than Hendricus G. Loos.

The intelligentsia at Quora can’t decide whether he’s a real person or a pseudonym, though this obituary suggests the former.

In my novel Corporate Torsos Need Not Apply, one of the major plot lines is that human behavior is being purposefully altered via electromagnetic field manipulation. When I started writing, I couldn’t find a whole lot of publicly available info to substantiate the possibility of this. But that was back in 1996. Fast forward a couple of decades: I wondered again, but this time, with Google.

And my search easily popped up Hendricus G. Loos and his patents.

His most recent US patent, 6506148, is for Nervous system manipulation by electromagnetic fields from monitors.

Did Loos create and use it in real life? Maybe the dark web knows. My lazy google searches sure don’t pick up any more than what’s in this blog.

Don’t worry, science is on top of it. Scientists are hard at work studying the effects of electromagnetism on rats (they’re just like humans) and humans and publishing the results in obscure journals so that yours truly can extrapolate the results to horrific fictitious effect.

But I can’t update the tech in this lone little novel any longer.

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Author’s note: Corporate Torsos Need Not Apply: 10,000-Year Flood Special Edition will go on sale 31 Dec 2022.

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