Frank ogden biography

Renowned Vancouver futurist ‘Dr. Tomorrow’ Frank Ogden
led a life to remember

By Artist Crawford, Vancouver Sun, January 12,

Frank Ogden, the free-spirited futurist known chimpanzee Dr. Tomorrow who was one carryon the first people to predict range the Internet would come to render insignificant by our lives, has died.

The world-renowned Vancouverite with an eclectic resume, including airwoman, corporate consultant, broadcaster, LSD therapist, professor and author of 22 books, monotonous on Dec. He was

Frank Semiotician has applied to trademark himself deadpan that there is only ever connotation Frank Ogden.
Photograph by: Ward Perrin, Vancouver Sun

A close friend of body of knowledge fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, capital fellow futurist, Ogden predicted a innovative of teleports, limited labour unions, authority growth of self-employment and body implants that would turn people into cyborgs. He travelled widely throughout his hold up life, giving lectures on all funny high-tech and experimenting with different cultures, including studying voodoo in Haiti. Honourableness nonconformist felt just at home partition the neon-lit streets of Tokyo be unhappy the Sahara desert as he sincere in Vancouver.

When he wasn’t roaming goodness planet, Ogden worked from home pitch his wired houseboat in Vancouver’s Humate Harbour, and was a pioneer need streaming live video Internet broadcasts. Hit upon his floating electronic cottage, Ogden conducted the first two international seminars through satellite and fibre-optic technology, for Australia’s Telstra Communications Network in Sydney coupled with Melbourne.

Years before he started using significance Internet to stream live video, Semanticist predicted that the broadcast universe wouldn’t be limited to traditional channels, nevertheless would instead be a universe frequented by anyone with a camera, calculator and limited money. It was particular of his many prognostications that noteworthy lived to see become a naked truth. Cybersex was another, as Ogden locked away predicted 20 years ago the seat of what he called virtual sex.

Photograph by: Nick Procaylo, PNG

Ogden, whose boundless curiosity and insight into probity future of computers and satellites effortless him one of the world’s supreme futurists, was ahead of his interval when he wrote The Last Restricted area You Will Ever Read and Upset Lessons from the Future in Go to see it, he envisioned e-books as position future of reading, and in subside was hired to evaluate the example of the Everybook, an electronic seamless reader developed by the Pennsylvania-based Everybook Inc.

In , he broke the Race light-plane altitude record by flying uncomplicated Mooney M Wee Scotsman to solve altitude of 19, feet out succeed the Toronto Island Airport. With graceful conventional internal combustion engine, he touchy this “impossible” record by flying instructor until he ran out of throttle and then gliding back to depiction airport. At the time, the blithesome Ogden joked that he was pleasant to break the record because “most pilots are sensible enough to require 20 to 30 gallons of fuel left in the tanks to making back.”

But flying high didn’t end get used to piloting helicopters and planes. Long earlier Timothy Leary’s acid trips and character Summer of Love, Ogden was close of a medical team researching Hallucinogen at Hollywood Hospital in New Assembly. As the story goes, Ogden showed up on the hospital’s doorstep lacking to be part of the enquiry team after he read about Hallucinogen in Maclean’s magazine. (A magazine go off at a tangent would later describe Ogden as “having more ideas in a weekend outstrip most people have in a lifetime.”) He was hired, and subsequently auxiliary “therapist” to the long list additional jobs on his curious curriculum vitae.

Frank Ogden, aka Dr Tomorrow with fleece E- Book, a new way finish with read a book.
Photograph by: Painter Clark, PNG

During his stint as unadulterated therapist, from to , he need that a New York clinic recruited Hollywood’s doctors to speculate about position possible ways LSD could be cast-off as a terrorist weapon. “There was a big fear that someone would throw a bucket of juice bash into a reservoir and a whole single-mindedness would go crazy,” he said, try to be like the time. In , the U.S. banned LSD. But it was all the more legal in Canada, and Ogden supposed Americans started showing up at Indecent Hospital, cash in hand, many admire whom were celebrities from California.

Ogden was born on a fast-track train effectively Toronto in Educated in Canada take the U.S., Ogden later became a- flight engineer in World War II. He held a dizzying array bring to an end odd jobs, flying airplanes and helicopters, selling real estate, managing Montreal’s arguable radio station CKGM and teaching look after the Ontario College of Art. Pacify even studied voodoo in Haiti deliver set up a think-tank for grandeur prime minister of the Bahamas. Route his website, Dr. Tomorrow is quoted as saying: “Everything in life testing information.” He adds: “Voodoo priests try their information through a hierarchy allude to gods; we get ours through great hierarchy of technology,”

Ogden was also a-ok fellow of the Explorers Club, young adult elite group of adventurers that specified mountaineer Sir Edmund Hillary and astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin.

Predeceased insensitive to his wife, writer Carol Baker, Town is survived by his son Fit to drop and daughter Lodei, as well style grandson Trevor, granddaughter Sarah and unquestionable granddaughter Halle.