Cheney, Frank J
Entry updated 31 July 2023. Tagged: Author.
(1851-1919) US businessman and author whose first book, A Life of Unity and Other Stories (coll 1901), contains some fantasies. He is of sf interest for Ten Thousand Years Hence or 19002 of the Christian Era (1909), whose contemporary protagonist, the richest man in the world, finds himself transported (perhaps by Time Machine) to an Island ten millennia hence. Its inhabitants of the Utopia are superior versions of Homo sapiens who adhere to an advanced form of socialism. The capitalist returns to the present with much to think about.
As a businessman whose firm, Hall's Catarrh Care, marketed almost certainly fraudulent patent medicines, and as founder president of The Proprietory Association of America designed to protect this trade, Cheney was a target for "The Great American Fraud" (7 October-? 1905 Collier's), a famous series of muckraking articles by Samuel Hopkins Adams, which exposed him to Federal scrutiny. His firm apparently survived him. [JC]
Frank J Cheney
born 1851
died Toledo, Ohio: 1919
works
- A Life of Unity and Other Stories (Toledo, Ohio: The Blade Printing and Paper Company, 1901) [coll: binding unknown/]
- Ten Thousand Years Hence or 19002 of the Christian Era (Toledo, Ohio: The Blade Printing and Paper Company, 1909) [pb/]
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