Lagado is a fictional city from the 1726 satirical novel ''

Gulliver's Travels ''Gulliver's Travels'', originally titled ''Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. In Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of Several Ships'', is a 1726 prose satire by the Anglo-Irish writer and clerg ...

'' by

Jonathan Swift Jonathan Swift (30 November 1667 – 19 October 1745) was an Anglo-Irish writer, essayist, satirist, and Anglican cleric. In 1713, he became the Dean (Christianity), dean of St Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin, and was given the sobriquet "Dean Swi ...

Location

Lagado is the capital of the nation

Balnibarbi Balnibarbi is a fictional land in Jonathan Swift's 1726 satirical novel ''Gulliver's Travels''. it was visited by Lemuel Gulliver after he was rescued by the people of the flying island of Laputa. Location The location of Balnibarbi is illus ...

, which is ruled by a tyrannical king from a flying island called

Laputa Laputa is a flying island described in the 1726 book ''Gulliver's Travels'' by Jonathan Swift. It is about 4½ miles (7¼km) in diameter, with an adamantine base, which its inhabitants can manoeuvre in any direction using magnetic levitat ...

. Lagado is on the ground below Laputa, and also has access to Laputa at any given time to proceed in an attack or defense. It is located in the centre of the kingdom, some 150 miles from that land's

Pacific The Pacific Ocean is the largest and deepest of Earth's five oceanic divisions. It extends from the Arctic Ocean in the north to the Southern Ocean, or, depending on the definition, to Antarctica in the south, and is bounded by the cont ...

coast.

Description

Lagado is poverty stricken like the rest of the nation. The king had invested a great fortune on building an Academy of Projectors in Lagado so that it shall contribute to the nation's development through research, but so far the Academy has yielded no result. The author has vividly described bizarre and seemingly pointless experiments conducted there, for example - trying to change human excretion back into food and trying to extract sunbeams out of cucumbers or teaching mathematics to pupils by writing propositions on wafers and consuming them with "cephalick tincture". Gulliver is clearly unimpressed with this academy and offers many suggestions to improve it. The author's ulterior motive on describing this place could possibly have been to point out the senseless side of science in his time. The Academy is home to

The Engine The Engine is a fictional device described in the 1726 satirical novel ''Gulliver's Travels'' by Jonathan Swift. It is possibly the earliest known reference to a device in any way resembling a modern computer. The Engine is a device that generat ...

, a fictitious device resembling a modern

computer A computer is a machine that can be Computer programming, programmed to automatically Execution (computing), carry out sequences of arithmetic or logical operations (''computation''). Modern digital electronic computers can perform generic set ...

. Gulliver's guide on Balnibarbi, Lord Munodi, a former governor of Lagado, is a rare case of a practical-minded man in the kingdom who runs his estate well and productively, but is seen as an oddity by other Laputans because he has no ear for music and must endure social ostracism.

Legacy

Mars Mars is the fourth planet from the Sun. It is also known as the "Red Planet", because of its orange-red appearance. Mars is a desert-like rocky planet with a tenuous carbon dioxide () atmosphere. At the average surface level the atmosph ...

's largest

moon The Moon is Earth's only natural satellite. It Orbit of the Moon, orbits around Earth at Lunar distance, an average distance of (; about 30 times Earth diameter, Earth's diameter). The Moon rotation, rotates, with a rotation period (lunar ...

, Phobos, there is a

planitia In geography, a plain, commonly known as flatland, is a flat expanse of land that generally does not change much in elevation, and is primarily treeless. Plains occur as lowlands along valleys or at the base of mountains, as coastal plains, and ...

, ''Lagado Planitia'', which is named after Swift's Lagado because of his 'prediction' of the two then undiscovered Martian moons, which his Laputan astronomers had discovered.Gazetteer of Planetary Nomenclature

USGS The United States Geological Survey (USGS), founded as the Geological Survey, is an government agency, agency of the United States Department of the Interior, U.S. Department of the Interior whose work spans the disciplines of biology, geograp ...

Astrogeology Research Program, Phobos

Notes

References

*Jonathan Swift: ''Guliver's Travels'' Oxford World Classics (1986, reprint 2008) introduction by Claude Rawson, explanatory notes by Ian Higgins. First published 1726.

Location

Description

Legacy

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See also