Episode 61: Labor Pains

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They were staring at a paradox.

It was a stone tool chipped away to form a sharp edge with all the characteristic marks of something handmade.

It was, in fact, a perfect example of an early stone hand tool.

And yet, well, but there was a problem.

You see, the scientists who uncovered this tool in Kenya back in early 2015 believe that it was created 3.3 million years ago, which is about 500,000 years further back in the evolutionary scale than the earliest humans known to date.

We don't know who they were, but we know this.

Like us, they use tools.

Clearly, technology has always been intoxicating to us, however far back in time we go.

Tools for hunting and food prep later gave way to instruments of war and writing.

Complex machines powered by gears or steam or electricity.

It's our heritage and it's evidence of a deep passion for making things.

It's actually a great way to view human behavior when you think about it.

If a tool was created, it usually points to a major interest or passion from that era.

Inventions are, in a sense, a cultural fingerprint.

Study the history of firearms, and you'll see the transformation of ballistics and chemistry into military hardware.

But it's also a revealing glimpse into the violence of human nature.

The history of navigational science is also the history of our passion for exploration.

Who we are drives what we make.

Some inventions have gone further, though.

They've tapped into a deep longing that most people have felt, a few were willing to admit.

That there was a world beyond our own.

The other world, the afterlife, heaven.

Whatever we called it, it was a world populated by divine beings.

And believe it or not, there were people who wanted to control it.

I'm Aaron Mankey, and this is lore.

People have always wanted to talk with spirits, and for just as long, we've crafted tools to help us do it.

Nearly a thousand years ago in China, mediums used a device called a talking board.

They're part of the ancient tradition known as automatic writing, the modern Ouija board being a newer interpretation of that old idea.

But all of them share a common purpose.

They were tools for speaking with the dead.

As we moved into the middle of the 19th century, new devices rose to prominence, like the planchette, that heart-shaped piece of wood that a medium would set their fingers on so the spirits could guide them.

Those were originally made with a hole in the tip for a pencil, allowing spirits to write messages from beyond the veil.

And mediums loved it.

Mediums, if you remember, are individuals who claim to stand between the living and the dead in order to pass communication between them.

And while they've been around for thousands of years in one shape or another, it wasn't until the mid-1800s that mediums really began to gain attention.

In 1849, three sisters from Rochester, New York became overnight superstars.

As the Fox sisters, they toured America and performed seances in front of packed audiences.

In the process, they kicked off a wave of spiritualism that transformed the way people thought about how this world was connected to the next.

Another New Yorker, Andrew Jackson Davis, was making his own contributions to the movement.

He was a self-taught expert in mesmerism who traveled all over and lectured about topics from his many books.

Books, according to his own account, that he wrote by falling into a trance and dictating them to a secretary.

It was a claim that earned him the nickname, the Seer of Poughkeepsie.

In 1853, A Universalist minister named John Murray Speer published a book of his own, a series of messages from his hero and namesake, John Murray.

It was a collection of messages that wasn't so revolutionary in their content as it was in their premise.

You see, John Murray had been dead for nearly 40 years.

We don't know a lot about John Murray Spear's early life, but we do know that he was born in Boston in 1804.

His father died when he and his brother Charles were still young, forcing him to leave school and find work in a local cotton factory.

He managed to make the most of it, though.

A A kind factory clerk took the time to teach him to read and write, which, looking back, most likely saved his life.

Without those skills, he might never have left the factory.

Reading was a tool that allowed him to move on, to grow, to become his own man.

And by 1830, he'd made it.

He was married, the father of five children, and fully ordained for ministry in the Universalist Church.

But John also had a passion for social justice, which he spoke about frequently.

Issues like labor reform, women's rights, and the abolition of slavery.

In 1844, he traveled to Portland, Maine to participate in an anti-slavery rally.

While he was speaking, an angry pro-slavery mob dragged him off the stage and beat him senseless, leaving him horribly injured.

His wife, along with a friend named Oliver Dennett, cared for John over the following months, slowly nursing him back to health.

But the attack only served to deepen his commitment to the cause.

After recovering, he began to organize public events of his own, anti-slavery conventions, speeches, local rallies.

He even became a leader in the Boston portion of the Underground Railroad.

But when his friend Oliver Dennett died unexpectedly, John's focus began to shift.

Maybe he was already on the edge emotionally.

Or perhaps it was the country's growing obsession with the spiritual world.

Whatever the reason, John left the church in March of 1852 and published the book of letters from his long-dead hero entitled Messages from the Super State.

And in it, he made some pretty strong assertions.

He claimed that God was asking him to communicate with the spirit world.

John saw this as his new calling, and he threw himself into it with the same passion that he had with social issues.

And it was at some point in his practice of mediumship that he learned he could fall into a trance and become a mouthpiece for the forces beyond the veil.

While he was in that state, John was said to dictate medical advice for sick friends.

And although he wasn't a physician, his recommendations actually worked.

John was helping people get better.

And while he was proud of that, he refused to take all the credit.

Everything he was doing, he said, was made possible by his spirit guide, none other than his old friend, Oliver Dennett.

But Dennett wasn't the only spirit sending important messages to John.

According to him, there were others all lined up and waiting on the other side of the veil, eager to share their own messages as well.

And John said that they had a mission for him.

Just what the spirits were asking him to do, though, would turn out to be one of the most ambitious undertakings of the 19th century.

The various spirits that John claimed to be hearing from resembled a who's-whose list of important dead personalities.

Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson are just two examples, but there were so many others.

John's guides included prominent minds from the fields of philosophy, medicine, science, agriculture, politics, and education.

He called them the Association of Beneficents and said that they were a collection of spirits all grouped into specialized categories whose goal was to help advance humanity.

Through their connection with John, he claimed to be gifted with insight into a number of unusual topics.

For example, John claims that one of the spirits told him that women shouldn't curl the hair on the backs of their heads because it interfered with their memory.

And while that one is pretty laughable, other claims were a lot harder to disprove, like the accurate and comprehensive 12-part lecture on geology that he gave at Hamilton College in New York, a topic that John had absolutely no training in.

More spectacular were the devices that these spirits requested John to build.

I can't find evidence that he actually followed through on any of these projects, but he was given plans for electric airships, for devices he called thinking machines, even for an entire circular city.

It was Jules Verne on a whole new level.

But John said that these benefactors had one particular task in mind for him.

They wanted him to help give birth to what they called the new Messiah, the second coming of Christ.

But this Messiah wouldn't be a flesh and blood person.

No,

it would be a machine, a mechanical being.

built by John's own hands.

But to do it, he would need help.

So he began began gathering a group of followers.

There weren't many of them, but some of the prominent members included a pair of editors of popular spiritualist publications, Simon Hewitt, who had helped John publish his book the previous year, and Alonzo Newton.

Both men brought clout to the project and their own small cadre of supporters.

John said that the spirits told him to build the new Messiah in the town of Lynn, just north of Boston.

There was a hill there called High Rock that was said to hold deep spiritual power, and conveniently enough, the hill already had a building on it, owned by a musical group called the Hutchinson Family Singers.

Think of them as a mid-19th century version of the Osmond family, traveling the country as a variety show that combines song, comedy, and dramatic performances, but with a hint of politics, including anti-slavery songs.

which is most likely how John Murray Spear first met and befriended them.

The Hutchinsons handed over the keys to the building there there on top of the hill, and John moved in and set up shop.

In October of 1853, John lay down on a bed and fell into one of his trances, giving control of his body to the scientific group of spirits that he referred to as the band of electrocizers.

He spoke while others took dictation.

The plans were drawn out, and all of the important steps were written down.

Their goal was to build what John kept calling the new motive power, or even more mysteriously, the infant motor, a device that would become home to the spirit of the new Messiah.

But don't picture a little robot, ready to get up and walk around.

This thing was completely unique.

There are no pictures of the device.

Nothing exists today that can allow us a better glimpse of the vision that John was given.

No notes or drawings or schematics.

And the construction was said to have been completed in a manner reminiscent of modern remote surgery.

John would literally just place his hands on the parts and tools and let his spirit guides do the work.

Over time, the machine was given limbs, a respiratory system, and a central motor, all of which was fastened to the top of a small table.

Each part was handcrafted from either copper or zinc, none of which was cheap.

Estimates put the cost at around $2,000, nearly $60,000 in modern American currency.

So here's where things get really bizarre.

You see, while this mechanical Messiah was being built, two other things were taking place.

First, only the most carefully selected individuals were allowed into the machine's presence.

John said it was to introduce the infant motor to what he called positive vibration levels.

Second, and more importantly, a woman was chosen to be the new Mary.

Through her, somehow, the spirit of the new Messiah would be born and passed over to the device.

Yeah, I know.

Just stay with me.

On June 28th of 1854, nine months after the construction began for anyone looking for more birth symbolism, Mary went into labor.

In response, Spear was said to have climbed inside a sort of copper armor complete with gemstones and batteries and slipped into a trance.

The witnesses reported seeing a glowing, transparent umbilical cord appear between the machine and and Mary.

Or maybe it was John.

The events aren't really clear.

But after two hours of labor, Mary was said to have reached out her hand and touched the infant motor.

What happened next?

An article in the Spiritualist magazine called the Boston New Era tells us everything we need to know.

It is with no ordinary feelings of satisfaction, it said.

that we announce to our readers for the first time the result of some peculiar labors under spirit spirit direction.

Now, after about nine months of almost incessant labor, oftentimes under the greatest difficulties, we are prepared to announce to the world: the thing

moves.

John Murray Spear was the proud father of a mechanical messiah.

Or, at least, that was the idea.

He'd allowed himself to be used by the spirit world in order to create a new life, a life that was meant to usher humanity into a better age, an age of enlightenment and power and salvation.

In an earlier article in his Boston New Era publication, Hewitt said that this new God machine was built as, and I quote, an exact correspondence of the human body, at least insofar as involuntary motion is concerned.

It was designed to be a living being, with a divine soul and earthly parents, and everyone wanted to see it.

Spear's collection of spiritualist followers there on High Rock were soon given access to the device, to see for themselves this new world-changing power.

And as word spread, more and more people flocked to Lynn to see it with their own eyes.

But the vast majority of them walked away severely disappointed.

The trouble was, no one was seeing the movement that had so boldly been proclaimed.

I mean, a living creature moves around, right?

This thing, well, contemporary accounts say that it basically just had balls.

Dozens of metal balls hanging from its chassis like Christmas tree ornaments.

And if you watched it long enough and stared at just the right places, sometimes, maybe,

You might see one of them move.

Perhaps.

It was all enough to attract a constant stream of criticism.

Spears' experiment was a hoax, a fraud, or at the very least an experiment in misguided thinking.

Remember Andrew Jackson Davis, the seer of Poughkeepsie?

He didn't go as far as to declare it a hoax, but he was pretty sure that the spirits had played a practical joke on their earthly representative.

Not everyone was as accepting of the notion of spirit guides, though.

Well-known 19th century medium Daniel Holm later called Spears' machine, and I quote, the strangest shadow which ever darkened spiritualism.

Holm, by the way, built his own reputation on the claim that he could levitate into the air during his seances.

To get a man like that to call something bogus is, admittedly, quite an achievement.

In fact, just a few decades after Spears' first claims, Another medium by the name of E.W.

Wallace wrote a popular guide to mediumship called, A Guide to Mediumship and Psychic Unfoldment, and took a moment within it to trash the whole idea.

A spirit guide, he suggested, was just an easy cop-out.

If a medium turned out to be wrong, oh, look, it was the spirit guide's fault.

Wallace found that to be all too convenient in a field that already had a steep uphill climb toward credibility.

And maybe the events that unfolded in John Murray Spears' life simply highlighted that flaw.

As the days and weeks went on, John encouraged Mary to spend more and more time with their mechanical child.

Maybe it needed maternal attention.

Maybe it needed her around to grow and develop.

But instead, the God machine seemed to grow weaker and weaker.

There was also a storm brewing.

Enough of the public had heard about the machine and found the purpose behind it so offensive and heretical that it was actually inspiring anger and resentment.

People were upset at John and his followers, and they were becoming becoming restless.

Given enough time, that anger was bound to spill over into violence of some kind.

Conveniently, John heard from his spirit guides once again, his band of electrocizers, and they told him that the device needed to be moved to a better location to thrive.

They directed him to move everything to Randolph, New York, where a tall hill was located that spiritualists had long believed was electrically conductive.

The move happened in the summer of 1853.

It's not clear just how many followers joined him, but Speer and a few others managed to transport their God machine to its new home in Randolph in a small structure on top of the hill.

And then, later that fall, tragedy struck.

In Speer's own words, Under the cover of night, a mob entered, tore out the heart of the mechanism, trampled beneath their feet, and scattered it to the four winds.

No one discovered who had done the deed.

The rumor was that a local Baptist congregation was to blame.

John later wrote that a good number of his friends had sacrificed everything for the project ⁇ their time, their energy, their wealth ⁇ and he knew that they were mourning the loss with him.

Regardless of whether the world viewed it as a success or a failure, their great experiment had finally come to an end.

According to everyone who knew him, the loss utterly destroyed John Murray Spear.

Like the death of his friend Oliver Dennett, which had sparked this whole crazy adventure in the first place, the death of the infant motor flipped the switch in the other direction.

John seems to have walked away from divinely appointed mechanical projects and his band of electrocizers.

Life after that was much less unusual, but still had its rocky points.

He left his wife in 1863 for another woman, and they married a short while later.

The couple spent six years touring England, trying to promote John's spiritualism to a new audience, but his message fell on deaf ears.

In the end, they gave up and returned to America, settling in Philadelphia.

In 1872, the spirits reportedly told John to retire.

He died five years later, at the age of 83.

The old cliché says that we are what we eat, but I think it's more accurate to say that we are what we build.

Our creations reflect our true nature.

The history of invention, if viewed the right way, can also be an insightful journey into the human psyche.

We're prone to exploration, to risk, and to uncovering answers beneath the mysteries of this world, and so we, for millennia, have been explorers.

Our craving for stability and safety transformed us from nomadic tribes to city dwellers, literally building nests around our lives.

And proof of our fear of death is just around the corner in your local graveyard.

What we make says a lot about who we are.

Maybe that means John Murray Spear was a lunatic.

I wouldn't fault anyone for jumping to that conclusion.

But it could also mean that he and the dozens of people who followed and supported his experiment were really just deeply interested in knowing more to get a glimpse behind the curtain.

In that sense, their intentions were good.

They meant well, even if most of the general public found the journey to be more than a little bit insane.

Still, there are some who wonder, what if it actually did work?

John was already intimately familiar with mob mentality.

Getting dragged off that stage and beaten senseless in Portland almost a decade earlier had taught him just how violent people can be when they disagree with something strongly enough.

It was only a matter of time before the crowds brought their hate to his workshop door.

Only this time, their violence would destroy something else.

So John knew it it was coming.

There's no way he couldn't have.

But if that's true, then why move the device and broadcast the location of its new home?

It was like taking out an advertisement specifically targeting the people he most wanted to avoid.

What history says took place should never have happened at all.

Unless it didn't.

What if the device didn't go to New York?

Some people believe the proof is in the press, or in the absence of it.

There was no newspaper coverage of their arrival in Randolph, no reports of visitors and this bold new attraction in town.

At the height of the spiritualist movement, Speer claims he brought the centerpiece of that movement to a new location, but no one there wrote about it.

Even more telling, there are no local reports of the destruction of the device.

That dark night in the fall of 1853, when the Baptist mob was said to have crept to the top of the hill and destroyed the new Messiah.

Not a single newspaper mentioned it.

The only reason we know what happened at all is because Spear himself told us over a year after it was said to have happened.

So what options are we left with?

I'm not sure.

But those who believe the move and the destruction were a hoax also believe something else about the device.

They think that it actually worked.

It was small and weak, for sure.

Even Spear himself called it nothing more than an embryo.

But it was the beginning of something bigger to come.

The God machine, they say, was hidden away to protect it from the angry mobs, to give it time to learn and mature and grow in power.

It was a newborn, after all, the infant motor.

But given enough time, it will come back, they say, throw the modern world to the ground, and usher in a new era of humanity.

I suppose, if that's true, we'll all eventually find out, won't we?

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This episode of Lore was written and produced by me, Aaron Mankey, with research help from Marcette Crockett.

Lore is much more than a podcast.

There's a book series in bookstores around the country and online, and the second season of the Amazon Prime television show was recently released.

Check them both out if you want more lore in your life.

I also make two other podcasts, Aaron Mankey's Cabinet of Curiosities and Unobscured, and I think you'd enjoy both.

Each one explores other areas of our dark history, ranging from bite-sized episodes to season-long dives into a single topic.

You can learn about both of those shows and everything else going on all over in one central place, theworldoflore.com slash now.

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Just search for lore podcast, all one word, and then click that follow button.

When you do, say hi.

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And as always,

thanks for listening.

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