Text: The spirit of Benjamin Franklin, toward the end of 1853, conveyed to medium John Spear (he announced) a set of two hundred communications purporting to contain plans for a ³perpetual motion² machine, driven by ³a new motive power.² More precisely, it seems, the machine was to be what is nowadays called a ³free energy generator² by those interested in the subject. It was meant to collect the atmospheric energy, condense it, and re-distribute it, for use in powering other machines. But more than that, the parts of the machine abstractly corresponded to the parts of the human body. The human mind itself, the spirits said, worked by receiving ideas, storing them, and then distributing them again‹it did not really generate (or as we might say ³process²) ideas anew, appearances notwithstanding. Those were simply placed in the mind from the spiritual world. In good faith with the spirits, Spear and his associates built the machine on a rise in Lynn, Massachusetts, in the first part of 1854, and invested it with Millennial expectations. It would provide free energy for the benefit of all, and so embody, in a way, the idea of the selfless medium, the philanthropist, and the reformer. It would be ³the New Motor,² and more scandalously, ³the Electrical Infant,² and ³God¹s Last, Best Gift to Mankind.² The group publicized its grandiose expectations for the machine in their newspaper, The New Era, arousing public opposition from materialistic skeptics and pious Christians alike. Increasing the scandal was public alarm over the group¹s attempt to build into the machine the ability to reproduce itself, which is to say, the group¹s attempt to copy the human sexual function into the machine. One of Spear¹s associates came to believe that she was to be the ³Mary of the New Dispensation.² She placed herself in intimate contact with the machine and underwent (false) labor pains for a few hours, believing she had conveyed to the ³Electrical Infant² her psychic energy and, thus, given birth to it. Nevertheless, the machine did not move at all, much less in perpetuity. This did nothing, however, to lessen the intense public criticism of Spear and his associates. At the height of the controversy, Josiah Wolcott, a portrait and landscape painter who had spent time at the Brook Farm community and had become a spiritualist, wrote to The New Era describing a dream of his, regarding the ³persecuted² New Motor. The machine¹s envisioned ability to replicate itself and to overrun, with that ability, the previous civilization, oddly foreshadowed images from H. G. Welles¹ War of the Worlds, although in Wolcott¹s dream, of course, the threatening invasion was to be an ultimately benevolent one. Josiah Wolcott Dreams of the New Motor At the end of the summer, Spear and his associates dismantled ³The New Motor² and transported it to the town of Randolph in Western New York State. Not long afterwards, a gang of local rowdies, incensed by the publicity the machine had received, broke into the shed where it was being kept and smashed it. The idea of the ³New Motor,² however, continued on with Spear and his followers, as the powering mechanism for a series of other spirit-guided inventions, equally unsuccessful, including intercontinental telepathic towers, an ³electric ship,² and a ³self-powered² sewing machine. Kevin Dann Chapel Hill, NC and Woodstock, VT

See Also:

Source: