Spear trusted his spirit advisors without reservation. Among their ‘projects’ was an experiment in which Spear “subjected himself to the most scathing ridicule from his contemporaries by seeking to promote the influence and control of spirits through the aid of copper and zinc batteries so arranged about the person as to form an armor from which he expected extraordinary results.” 6

Despite all his efforts, Spear’s reputation remained small, while the Fox sisters triumphed as famous mediums and Andrew Jackson Davis as a well-known visionary and prophet. This promised to change after a spirit-inspired journey to Rochester, New York, in 1853 revealed to Spear his special mission.

Spear began producing automatic writing which proclaimed him to be the earthly representative for the ‘Band of Electricizers’. This was a fraternity of philanthropic spirits directed by Benjamin Franklin and dedicated to elevating the human race through advanced technology. Other groups that made up the ‘Association of Beneficence’ were the ‘Healthfulizers’, ‘Educationalizers’, ‘Agriculturalizers’, ‘Elementizers’ and ‘Governmentizers’, each of which would choose their own spokesmen to receive plans for promoting “Man-culture and integral reform with a view to the ultimate establishment of a divine social state on earth.” The Electricizers began speaking through Spear, transmitting “revealments” that ranged from a warning against curling the hair on the back of the head (bad for the memory) to plans for electrical ships, thinking machines and vast circular cities. 7

The first, most important task, however, would be construction of the New Messiah (“Heaven’s last, best gift to man”), a universal benefit that would infuse “new life and vitality into all things animate and inanimate”. Spear – or the Electricizers – chose High Rock as the place to build it. High Rock is a hill rising 170ft (52m) above Lynn, a town north of Boston. Lynn is now poor and unemployment is high, but it was once well known for shoe manufacturing and has a history that is pure Lovecraft, full of witchcraft, sea serpents, spontaneous human combustion and rioting Quakers. 8 iritualism received an enthusiastic reception in Lynn, and some of its most devoted followers owned a cottage and observation tower on the site Spear needed.

High Rock Cottage (shown in 19th-century stereoscopic photographs) belonged to the Hutchinsons, who were both spiritualists and reformers. The cottage was a favourite destination for visitors, especially after 1852, when Andrew Jackson Davis witnessed a meeting of the Spiritual Congress from the tower and was introduced to the disembodied representatives of 24 nations. Spear had known the Hutchinsons when he was minister in Boston and allowed them to rehearse in his church when they began singing professionally. 9 Spear was given the use of a woodshed and work on the Physical Saviour began in October 1853.

Assisting Spear and the Electricizers was a group that included Rev SC Hewitt, editor of the Spiritualist newspaper New Era; Alonzo E Newton, editor of the New England Spiritualist; and a woman called “the Mary of the New Dispensation”. The identity of the New Mary has never been clear. 10

Vivifying the Messiah was a four-step process that began with Brother Spear entering a “superior state” and transmitting plans from the Electricizers. Building it required nine months for construction (gestation) and in that time he received 200 ‘revealments’ providing detailed instructions on the materials to be used, how the different parts should be shaped and the pieces put together. The group was not given an overall plan but built it bit by bit, adding new parts “to the invention, in much the same way [..] that one decorates a Christmas tree.” 11

Spear’s total lack of scientific and technical knowledge was considered an advantage, as he would be less inclined to alter the Electricizers’ blueprints with personal interpretations or logic (what remote viewers might call “analytical overlay”). The parts were carefully machined from copper and zinc, with the total cost reaching $2,000. (A prosperous minister then earned around $60 a week.) 12

No images of the New Motive Power exist, but apparently it was impressive, sitting on a big dining room table. “From the center of the table rose two metallic uprights connected at the top by a revolving steel shaft. The shaft supported a transverse steel arm from whose extremities were suspended two large steel spheres enclosing magnets. Beneath the spheres there appeared [..] a very curiously constructed fixture, a sort of oval platform, formed of a peculiar combination of magnets and metals. Directly above this were suspended a number of zinc and copper plates, alternately arranged, and said to correspond with the brain as an electric reservoir. These were supplied with lofty metallic conductors, or attractors, reaching upward to an elevated stratum of atmosphere said to draw power directly from the atmosphere. In combination with these principal parts were adjusted various metallic bars, plates, wires, magnets, insulating substances, peculiar chemical compounds, etc… At certain points around the circumference of these structures, and connected with the center, small steel balls enclosing magnets were suspended. A metallic connection with the earth, both positive and negative, corresponding with the two lower limbs, right and left, of the body, was also provided.”

In addition to the “lower limbs”, the motor was equipped with an arrangement for “inhalation and respiration.” A large flywheel gave the motor a professional appearance. 13 This, however, was only a working model; the final version would be much bigger and cost 10 times as much.

The metal body was then lightly charged with an electrical machine resulting in a “slight pulsatory and vibratory motion [..] observed in the pendants around the periphery of the table”. 14 Following this treatment, the Engine was exposed to carefully-selected individuals of both sexes, who were brought into its presence one at a time in order to raise the level of its vibrations.

Then Spear encased himself in an elaborate construction of metal plates, strips and gemstones and was brought into gradual contact with the machine. For one hour he went into a deep trance which left him exhausted and, according to a clairvoyant who was present, created “a stream of light, a sort of umbilicum” that linked him and the machine. 15

It was at this time that the New Mary began exhibiting symptoms of pregnancy. The spirits instructed her to appear at High Rock on 29 June 1854 for the final stage of the experiment. On the appointed day, she arrived and lay on the floor in front of the engine for two hours, experiencing labour pains. When they ended she rose from the floor, touched the machine and it showed signs of… something. Precisely what happened is not clear; Spear claimed that for a few seconds the machine was animate.

The New Era was unrestrained: “THE THING MOVES”, it shouted to its readers. “The time of deliverance has come at last, and henceforward the career of humanity is upward and onward – a mighty noble and a Godlike career.” 16  Spear proclaimed the arrival of “the New Motive Power, the Physical Savior, Heaven’s Last Gift to Man, New Creation, Great Spiritual Revelation of the Age, Philosopher’s Stone, Art of all Arts, Science of all Sciences, the New Messiah”. 17

The machine’s movements remained feeble, but this was attributed to the “electrical infant” being a newborn; the New Mary began providing it with maternal attention while it gained strength. It’s hard to imagine what this involved. Despite the headlines, visitors to High Rock were unimpressed. JH Robinson – in a letter to the Spiritual Telegraph – pointed out that the New Messiah could not even turn a coffee-mill 18; despite claims of success, AE Newton admitted there was never more than a slight movement detected in some of the hanging metal balls.

Andrew Jackson Davis wrote a long, careful critique of the whole project. Although he praised Spear as a man “doing good with all his guileless heart” and as a fearless defender of unpopular causes, he suggested that Spear had mistaken his own impulses for spirit directives or been duped by irresponsible entities into carrying out the experiment. Davis also felt that the precision and intricacy of the machine’s construction was proof that higher intelligences were involved because Spear was “intellectually disqualified for the development of absolute science.” He also praised the Messiah’s excellent workmanship and construction; it didn’t move, but it was beautifully put together. 19

The Electricizers suggested that a change of air would provide the machine with a more nourishing environment – so the Messiah was dismantled and moved to Randolph, New York, where “it might have the advantage of that lofty electrical position.” In Randolph, it was put into a temporary shed, but a mob broke in, trampled the machine, tore it apart, and scattered the pieces. Nothing of it survived.

Spear’s High Rock experiment may have been eccentric but it was also characteristic of the period. New technologies profoundly changed 19th century society, producing industrialisation, urbanisation, the rise of capital and a middle class whose values became dominant. A conservative reaction to this might have been neo-Ludditism, but Spear was no conservative; he was on a Christ-like mission to transform humanity and believed technology was the most powerful force of the era, one that could be transformed to serve spiritual ends.

He spent the rest of his life working for reform and acting as spokesman for the Spiritual Congress. When the spirits began preaching free love, he fathered a child by Caroline Hinckley (1859) and, four years later, divorced his wife to marry the mother. They went on a six-year tour of England, lecturing and holding séances, but were disappointed by the lack of interest in radical politics among British spiritualists/ 20^.

Several years were spent in California working for women’s rights and socialism before the couple settled in Philadelphia, where they lived contentedly until Spear’s death in October 1887. He is buried in Mt Moriah Cemetery.

Did an angry mob really destroy the New Messiah? This would have been an exciting conclusion to a story that seemed headed for an anticlimax. According to Spear, the Machine was dismantled and transported hundreds of miles to the small town of Randolph. There it was housed in a temporary structure until a mob – in a scene reminiscent of the peasants storming Frankenstein’s castle – destroyed it. Some sources blame Baptist ministers for inflaming local opinion and one guidebook – An Eccentric Guide to the United States – claims the episode took place in a barn belonging to the Shelton family.

Spear’s account was reported in the Lynn News, 27 October 1854, but is he reliable? Many questioned his sanity, but no one ever seems to have doubted his integrity or suggested he was a charlatan. The Randolph story, however, is troubling because there is no corroboration. Randolph historian Marlynn Olson has searched through contemporary sources and found nothing. In 1854, Cattaraugus County, New York, had two newspapers – one Whig, the other Republican – and neither mentions Spear, a riot, a Mechanical Messiah or anyone delivering anti-Mechanical Messiah sermons. No known letters or diaries mention the event. “I think,” writes Ms Olson, “the whole thing was a pipe-dream of the Rev JM Spear.” Perhaps, like so many other failed experiments, the machine was discreetly sunk into a pond or buried in the woods.

If the New Messiah had not vanished, the passage of 147 years would have improved the reputation of both the object and its creator. As a medium, Spear was a failure, but the object he built was a unique, if unintentional, example of 19th-century folk art. If it had actually moved, it would be as surprising as a cargo cult making an airplane that could fly. Spear was not using the language ts vocabulary, to build a statue that expressed the human urge for transcendence.

NOTES

1 Slater Brown: The Heyday of Spiritualism
2 Maurice A Canney: An Encyclopedia of Religions
3 The Foxes were Methodists, a denomination founded by John Wesley whose family also experienced poltergeist phenomena when he was a child.
4 Alan Delgado: Victorian Entertainment
5 Andrew V Rapoza: ‘Touched by the ‘Invisibles’’ in No Race of Imitators: Lynn and her People – an Anthology
6 Emma Hardinge: Modern American Spiritualism
7 Slater Brown: ibid
8 Bostonians say: “Lynn, Lynn, City of Sin, you never come out the way you went in!”
9 The Hutchinson Family Singers went on to become very popular and their descendants still perform programs of 19th-century music.
10 It was probably Mrs Newton; though Spear’s wife, Betsey and Semantha Mettler have also been mentioned. Nandor Fodor: ‘John Murray Spear’ in Encyclopedia of Psychic Science (University Books, 1966).
11 Slater Brown: ibid
12 Article linked here
13 Slater Brown: ibid
14 Slater Brown: ibid
15 Slater Brown: ibid
16 Emma Hardinge: ibid
17 Andrew V Rapoza: ibid
18 Emma Hardinge: ibid
19 Emma Hardinge: ibid
20 Article linked here