Extropia’s Curious Science: The New Motive Engine

EXTROPIA’S CURIOUS SCIENCE

‘NEW MOTIVE ENGINE’

Welcome to an occasional series on weird and wacky ideas from the fringes and scrap heap of science.

Now, here is someone who might have been popular at the Burning Man festival. I am talking about John Murray Spear, the inventor of the ‘New Motive Engine’.

‘New Era’, a spiritualist newssheet published in America, reckoned that “the time of deliverance has come at last”, following its demonstration in July of 1854. And its inventor was no less grandiose in his claims, calling it “heaven’s last gift to Man”.

Ok, so what was this thing? It was a mechanical device, also known as the ‘New Messiah’. It was a child-sized contraption, with zinc and copper plates for ‘brains’, a chest full of wires, chemicals and magnets, and antenna that drew power from the skies. It was built at High Rock, just outside Massachusetts. Its construction took nine months.

(Ok I admit this is a toy not the Mechanical Messiah. Image from ‘Follies Of Science’ by Eric and Jonathon Dregni)

Once completed, John Murray Spear, dressed in a suit of gem stones and metal strips, entered into a trance and created an ‘umbilical link’ with the New Messiah, while a woman known only as the New Mary lay next to the anthropological contraption, seemingly overcome with labour pains. When this New Mary placed her hands on the device, according to observers it began to move as though it were a newborn infant.

So had John Murray Spear successfully managed to create a new kind of mechanical life? We cannot know for sure, as the New Messiah was destroyed by an angry mob. But if you ask me the only people who could believe this miracle would be the sort who could be talked into covering themselves in copper and zinc batteries as a way of boosting signals to the spirit world, like Spear was. You know, gullible types.

Still this Spear fellow was not all bad. He was a devoted abolitionist, and the spiritualist movement he belonged to (the ‘Band of Electricizers’) was headed by Benjamin Franklin, no less.

Now, there was a man not afraid to experiment with electricity…

REFERENCES

“FAR OUT” by Mark Pilkington