Ingersoll Lockwood: Institute for Advanced Physics

Ingersoll Lockwood (1841–1918) was an American lawyer and writer best known for a pair of children’s novels published in the late 19th century: The Travels and Adventures of Little Baron Trump and His Wonderful Dog Bulgar (1889) and Baron Trump’s Marvelous Underground Journey (1893). These stories follow a boy named Wilhelm Heinrich Sebastian von Troomp, nicknamed “Little Baron Trump,” who lives in “Castle Trump” and embarks on adventures guided by “the Don,” a wise mentor. Nearly forgotten for over a century, the books drew renewed attention in the late 20th and early 21st centuries because of coincidental name overlaps with Donald Trump and his son Barron Trump, as well as plot elements involving political figures, unexpected travels, and references to New York. Lockwood also wrote 1900: Or, The Last President (1896), a novel depicting social upheaval in New York following a controversial outsider’s election, which some readers have found striking given later historical events.

Separately, John G. Trump (1907–1985), an American electrical engineer and physicist at MIT, was Donald Trump’s uncle. Following Nikola Tesla’s death in 1943, the U.S. Office of Alien Property seized Tesla’s papers, concerned about potential national security implications of his research. John G. Trump was the government’s appointed technical expert to review Tesla’s documents. In his report, he concluded that Tesla’s papers did not contain workable ideas for revolutionary weapons or practical applications of speculative energy transmission. The government eventually released most of Tesla’s personal effects to his family in Yugoslavia, but John G. Trump’s involvement has often been noted because of the Trump family connection to advanced science and engineering at the same time that Ingersoll Lockwood’s earlier works were rediscovered and linked in popular culture to the names of Donald and Barron Trump.

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