JOHN MURRAY SPEAR: FATHER OF THE MECHANICAL MESSIAH

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

“At first appeared the … New Motor with some spectators gazing in wonder at it...The Machine seemed to grow in bulk and stature, in spite of all their efforts, and threw off from itself smaller machines after its own pattern... In their path stood a great number of churches...But the machines did not turn out of their courses at all, running over and through those temples.. Beyond the churches was a vast multitude of people...whose minds were free and open for the reception of any and all new truth. These hailed the new revelation with shouts of joy and acclamation.”

This proclamation was a dream by Josiah Wolcott published in a 1854 issue of the paper The New Era. The New Motor, that Josiah Wolcott wrote of, was not just a thing of dreams -- though it’s inception may have seemed that way. It was the most infamous of many inventions said to be transmitted from the greatest minds of all time through former minister turned medium John Murray Spear. 

John Benedict Buescher, Doctor of Religious Studies and author of “The Remarkable Life of John Murray Spear: Agitator For The Spirit Land” told us about when he first discovered the life of John Murray Spear:

“When I turn to the story of John Murray Spear, I just couldn't believe what I was reading about his projects and what he was doing. It seemed to me like, wow. The 19th century was a whole lot stranger than what I had ever been led to believe. This guy seemed to me to have invented steampunk science fiction, even if it's possible to have invented steam punk back in the 1850s. It just seemed incredible what he was trying to do.”

While most people seem to only brush against the bizarre, John’s whole life -- from communication with dead founding fathers to Mechanical Messiahs to sewing machines -- was full of strange phenomena.

John Murray Spear was born on September 16, 1804, a year after his brother Charles, in Boston, Massachusetts. Spear was named after pastor John Murray of the First Universalist Church, which the brother’s were raised in, eventually becoming pastors themselves. 

“For universalists to be regarded as extreme liberals were, as they said, progressives in social matters show. John took up all of those progressive reforms of the time. And that included abolitionism and would later include women's rights and prison reform, the abolition of the death penalty, temperance movement and everything else basically became his way. “

Even in Universalism, John pushed the boundaries of what many found acceptable. Forcing him to take over smaller and smaller congregations causing his wife, Betsey, and children to sacrifice for his causes.

On Christmas Eve 1844, John attended a lecture against Roman Catholicism in Portland, MA. John remained silent throughout. At the end of the lecture, a man stood up to ask if “a reply would be permitted.” The crowd roared at him to be quiet -- which caused John to stand up and ask “if they were afraid of free discussion.” Because of this, as John left, a mob grabbed him. They forced him to the ground -- beating his head repeatedly.

A friend of John’s was able to drag him to safety. Everybody thought he would die as he had a severe concussion and was spasming throughout the night. Soon, he fell into a coma.  After a week, John awoke with a smile on his face. 

“He seems to have been. Visited by. Spirit, perhaps he wasn't sure what happened, but in any event, he was. I think you might be a different person, right? … I think in retrospect, you can see that he was he was not so well worldly to her and after that he was more tuned towards. What was happening in his head, basically.”

This change opened him up to a new way of thinking that would threaten to uproot everything once again, but one which he could not resist.

So part of the excitement about this and the reason it spread like wildfire from them was that it seemed to people at the time to be something like an opening of a spiritual telegraph between spirits in the afterlife and those of us still here in mortal flesh. That was something new and people were prepared to be excited not only because the electronic telegraph had been something that was seen seemingly so miraculous, so people were opened to the possibility that maybe something like this had begun intercourse between her happened, but also because it was something different and progressive in the sense that here was something that was a sort of religion that was based on empiricism. It seemed like, hey, not only do we have physical evidence for this sort of communication here, the sounds, the trappings, the responses and so on. But also it was something that was sort of awkward democratic. You can do it and perform experiments with it on your own kitchen table. You can sort of do your own theology around what the spirits told you.

As John started to see strict religion as a burden on free thought and science, he decided to leave the church of Universalism to devote his studies to the spiritualist movement. By this time, John had begun to experiment with “mesmeric trance”. 

“The claim about mesmerism was that you could turn yourself into a seer through developing yourself as a mesmeric subject. So the subject of trance was sort of sort of fit logically together in the reformer’s mind with the notion that now we were on our own and each one of us could find the light of truth and illumination within us through visionary experiences. So it was something the reformers practiced. "

By 1852, John claimed to mostly be taking directions from spirits to guide his life. From their commands, he would travel city to city to perform their mission. He wrote, “Thus far I have learned that when I have been moved to go to a place, that is usually the best place to go to. I am more and more persuaded that if we will hearken to the teachings of the spirit, it will lead us into all truth, and into the way of duty.” 

On April 1st of that year, he had a breakthrough. John fell into trance for three to four days. Holding in his hand only a pen, which he claimed to have no control over. Instead, spirits were conveying messages through him. He had become a medium. 

The first message he received read: 

“You must go to Abington tomorrow night. You will be wanted there. Call on David Vining. Go with your horse and chaise...Do not fear to do as you are guided.I am your friend, and will protect you from all danger, and will lead you safely and pleasantly home. You do not know him... I shall impress you again tomorrow to go, go, go, go, go, go,go,go, go, go, go, go , go, go.”

The messages were supposedly from the spirit of Oliver Dennett -- the man who had nursed him back to health after his beating in Portland. John did as he was told, and found Mr. Vining, who was incredibly sick. Even though they had never met before, John sat by his side and placed his hand upon Vining’s leg, which was in much pain. Despite his family’s skepticism, Vining claimed that the pain was gone! 

John believed this was now his calling -- to travel the world on missions from the spirits to heal people in need. But the spirits had far greater plans for him. 

A year to the day after he had began as a medium, John received the following message from the spirit world: 

“The undersigned, by the instrument which is being herein communicated, say to the inhabitants of the earth on which this Scribe dwells, that an association, called “THE ASSOCIATION OF BENEFICIENTS” has been selected, qualified, and commissioned, to teach of the Benefices; and they now say and declare that they have in contemplation a system of revealments which will much surprise the dwellers of the lower earth.”

They had chosen John Murray Spear as their scribe to carry out their work. 

Their message was signed through John, in twelve different handwritings, by some of the greatest minds of all time, including the spirits of, Benjamin Franklin, John Murray,  and, Thomas Jefferson. 

John looked around the room at the followers gathered for his messages, and later wrote: “They looked upon me with tender compassionate eyes, as they decided that I had become a lunatic. I knew their verdict, and greatly feared I might be confined in an asylum for the insane; but I was mercifully preserved from such unhappy fate.” 

The spirits would later reveal that the Association of the BENEFICIENTS was just one of a larger congress named THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY OF SPIRITS which was comprised of 7 associations:  the Electricizers, Elementizers, Educationizers, Governmentizers, Healthfulizers, Agriculturalizers and, of course, Beneficients. Each group was made up of the spirits of luminaries throughout time in their fields. It would be a new Era where spirits from here and beyond would work together for total reformation, and, of course, John would be their vessel.

In November, John received a message from the spirit of Benjamin Franklin, the Association of Electricizer’s spokesman: They would begin transmitting plans for a NEW MOTOR. A machine that would have perpetual motion.  

“Great and critical search has long been made for perpetual motion,” said Franklin’s spirit, “yet it has always existed. When it shall be revealed to the mind of an inhabitant of your earth, it will be applied to uses most important; and the time has arrived for the disclosure to be made.” “This discovery will produce immense changes on your earth, such as words cannot describe.”

Not only was this to be a mechanical marvel, but proof of the spirits and the great things they can do for this world. It would motivate man kind to reach a new evolutionary form. They called it, among many names, the New Motive Power. 

“At the beginning, the New Motive power. It was a phrase that was used for other projects and spiritual projects, but steam engines and and new sources of energy. People were experimented in developing new kinds of new motors. But this new motor was going to be something different. Now, exactly what it was was unclear at the beginning... r. But it was more like what the idea of this is. For one thing, it would be self powered and. Metaphysically speaking, you might say that was important to reformers because they were convinced that people themselves had to become self power and sovereign individuals and not slaves or bound to any political power.”

John knew little to nothing about mechanics or electronics, but his followers said this would prove the legitimacy of the project because it could only work if the spirits truly spoke through him. 

One of John’s followers had built a large home with a tower at High Rock Hill in Lynn, Massachusetts. After several of the followers had a vision of a spirit coming down to the tower, it was decided this would be where the New Motor would be constructed.

“John would be in trance and would dictate the instructions he was receiving day by day to his followers and they would take it down and then they would make the necessary adjustments. It was like, hey, we've got Benjamin Franklin on the phone, sort of. And he's telling us what to do next. So the thing kind of built so far up and accreted slowly over time. One part was designed. One day, another part was and another day, then another part was. Oh, well, you didn't do that, right. You have to attach something else to that. And it was really. Well, I didn't want to call it trial and error, but there were plenty of things that weren’t clear when when the instructions were first given.”

Andrew Jackson Davis, a close friend whose writings first peaked John’s interest in spiritualism, visited during the construction of The New Motor and had this to say about John and his followers: : “They invest the very materialism with principles of interpretation which give out an emanation of religious feeling altogether new in the development of scientific truth. Each wire is precious, sacred, as a spiritual verse.”

Simon Hewitt, a newspaper publisher and follower of John’s, was so enthralled that he started a paper which chronicled all of the announcements of the spirits. It was called the New Era; or Heaven Opened to Man. 

“It's going to do, how it is going to be providing free energy for everyone, how it was going to go on forever, how it was to create a model and ideal for human society and for individual humans. All of this stuff was just kind of floating around in their head. So one of the ideas was something on me on the order of well, which would be a kind of electrical like an electric motor that you could attach parts to and it would drive other motors, presumably agricultural implements and know all kinds of other stuff. So this was this was the basic way it was that they fixated on by the time it was complete that it was going to be the sign that the thing was alive, that this armature would rotate.”

They didn't believe it would be simply a machine, but a new Creation all together. Franklin’s spirit said, ““A living, working mechanism can be constructed. It would reproduce the human form, but it would also reproduce the macrocosm, the whole universe, the perpetuum mobile.

“For building this machine and day by day learning more about it as they were given instructions on its building, that this was something that was a sort of model of what the human would be in the future. There was a new. Man, it was going to be called the electrical infant. The gods last best gift to mankind.”

It was built on a large wooden table in the tower. As it took shape, it began to be modeled after the human body. It had parts that were analogous to the brain, lungs, arms, legs and even hair.

“ like the lunar lander...But maybe with exposed parts like this armature that was supposed to rotate and parts that were meant to work like a motor bike, if you took the casing off of. Of a mechanical motor and you could see the parts moving inside was, you know, it didn't need a casing as such.”

The processes being used to build it were unorthodox. A follower wrote, “Certain portions of the structure were subjected to very peculiar processes, such as immersion for a time in novel chemical preparations, exposure to heat and to electrical action.. designed apparently to fit them to perform their respective functions… All parts were adjusted with mechanical nicety, and finished with tastefulness.” 

Andrew Davis wrote, “ Minerals were classified, the female distinguished from the male, so that the female metals could be located on one side of the mechanism, and the male on the other. Then certain wires were carefully arranged and critically located.” The wires connected the male and the female elements. They represented “sexual interminglings so that the two become one, and by this process a third is produced.” 

“Ritual modeling” was also involved. John’s followers would act and behave as machines to understand how a machine would work, and they would perform acts for the machine to demonstrate how to be a living thing. They would even wrap metals in oiled pouches and consume them to become more machine-like.

The spirits wrote this through John Muray Spear, “Man must come to that state where he will feel that the human form is divine, that every organ is holy, that all the functions are pure, and as these functions are understood, so that mechanism, the Electric Motor, be carried forward and perfect.”

Through John, the spirits gave  over 200 messages from July 1853 to May 1854. The New Motor was finally complete. There was just one problem: it didn’t work.

“Well, it seemed to be completed. And then they spent a lot of day thinking, well, maybe we didn't do this quite right or that quite right. It hadn't started yet. So, you know, maybe we should go polish the little Ball or something. So they spent they spent some time during those sorts of things. And. You know, under high expectation and the word and got out in the community so everybody knew that this was happening, so people were waiting for something to happen and it didn't happen. Jackson Davis visited it one day and thought, oh, this is really interesting. But, you know, it really wasn't moving. So what's the payoff here? Some people had noted that there was some small movement of these suspended steel balls, but they were attributing that to static electricity in the air. But basically, the big armature was not turning. So. The spirits are, John, really decided that it needed some kind of jumpstart.”

John gave it a charge from a basic static generator which caused, “ a slight pulsatory and vibratory motion ... in the pendants around the periphery of the table, commencing first on the positive or masculine half, and extending to the negative, in accordance with the alleged order of nature. This motion was temporary.” 

The spirits were consulted. They said that simple static electricity wouldn’t be enough because it wasn’t “living” energy. “: “The next step...was to bring it in contact with model persons, of both sexes, in such a way they might impart to it their personal magnetisms.” 

Mediums had already believed that powerful “personal magnetisms” caused certain people to be able to connect with the afterlife in seances. This was an extension of that idea -- harnessing these “magnetisms” not through an object, but to the New Motor. 

The spirits said: “ “A child to be begotten could only come into being through an electric and magnetic use of these portions of the human body. Wombomic principles, wombomic motions, wombomic forms, wombomic actions, must be so far unfolded as would tend to the illustration of electric action. The womb must, as it were, be modelized; its attractive forces illustrated.” 

“So what they decided was, well, OK, what's missing here? Well, it's just newborn. So it needs it somehow needs to be nourished and protected the way a newborn is. It needs to be further matured before it can really take on its own and do what it's supposed to do. So like a mother's womb or like the swaddling brother, mother. Gives her infant after it's born... I think that was part of what was going on in their minds when they decided to move the thing, right. So they took it. They disassembled it and took it out to Randolph, New York, where one of the followers had a big farm and they reassembled it. Their. And that would be know more private place for experimentation or whatever and tried to continue to work on it.”

Thus began what they called the “wombatic processes”. Since the New Motor was supposed to be all encompassing, the team was sent to select people of both “coarse” and “fine” energies. They would sit around the table, and through some form of contact with the machine would transfer their energies into the New Motor -- beginning with the “coarsest” and moving up to the “finest” energies. 

In the Spirit’s message titled, “Of Electric Motor”, some of these processes were clearly outlined. However, much of this did not make it far beyond John’s inner circle, because John purposefully edited the message believing that many people would be outraged because of the “sexual magic” that was used to collect the “personal magnetisms”.

“It's not like a hey, here's a here's a workshop. Let's go to work and try to think of something. It was first to go into a trance and then have sexual intercourse.Then have a dream where something would come to you. Based on these powers that you know, these spirits, these. Spirits with affinity to the project would visit you and give you ideas. ..Something that looks like each person being assigned or consecrated to the name of a different mechanical functional machine. Someone was called a meta wished and you know, for example. And then they did some kind of improvised. Ritual or dance where they would all the parts would interact and to do some basic functions as if they were doing the functions of showing and then they would retire to the room next. Sure. And where they would go to sleep and then hopefully have some visual weight with some kind of vision in the morning about how to build a machine. “

Once the transfer of energies had been completed, the spirits selected John to be the father of the New Motive Power. John said he agreed, “only from a rational confidence in the wisdom and good faith of the invisible directors.”

“It needed some kind of influx of spiritual energy, so he was figuring out a way to try to do that and constructed himself a sort of armored suit. I think these were made of plates of metal, maybe zinc and copper, something that were strong around him. And, you know, again, he's he's got some simple idea that he could attract. Etheric energy to himself and hold it in himself like a battery. Accumulate it like a Leyden jar and then translate it into the machine. So the what we have is a description of him walking towards the machine, having himself gotten all juiced up. And then as it's described in the newspaper account by his colleague.”

One person who was there during the ritual described it as, “a stream of light, a sort of umbilicum, emanating (from the encased person) enveloping the mechanism. The condition of extreme exhaustion in which he was found at the termination of the process indicated conclusively that ‘virtue’, of some sort, ‘had gone out of him,’ by this novel mode of transfer.”  

Beyond John, there needed to be a woman -- a mother. While the man would bring the machine “wisdom”, a woman would supply the machine with “love.” They said , “One without maternal experience could not be in any true sense a producer of an intellectual, moral, social, religious, spiritual, or celestial thought-child. There must be a basis. Hence in the selection of the feminine a more-than-woman must be chosen--a mother.” In addition to that, she would need to be “electrically attractive” enough to store the man’s “germinal element.” 

Sarah Newton, a follower of John’s and wife of one of his richest supporters, had a vision that explained the true meaning of the crucifix to her. She saw it as the intersection of male and female, positive and negative, heaven and earth. The New Era would later write , “It was to [her] by spiritual intelligence...that she would become a mother in some new sense; that she would be the Mary of a new dispensation.” For weeks following her visions, she began having pregnancy symptoms, despite not actually being pregnant. 

John did not know about her vision or condition, but the spirits told him to invite her to come to High Rock. When she arrived, she began to experience labor pains around the machine.  Sarah and John realized what was happening: she was to be the mother of the Electrical Infant. She connected to the machine without an apparatus.  

While the exact process is shrouded in secrecy, in a message to John, the spirits spoke of her “illustrating” sexual acts. She would be taken over by the spirits in charge of the project during sex, and be given the design in her imagination. When completed, Hewitt wrote, she felt “an exhaustion of vitality, as great or greater than [John]...the emanations given forth proceeded mainly from the (physical) heart, the center of life, and partook of the very inmost essence of her being.”

FINALLY! The New Motor moved… But not much. According to a follower present, the silver balls that dangled from wires sticking out from the machine showed signs of life.

“This pulsation or throbbing was perceptible first to the touch, but gradually increased until it produced a visible vibratory motion, first on the positive, and shortly afterwards on the negative side.” As Sarah approached or moved away from it, the vibrations would grow -- sometimes up to where the silver balls were swinging about an inch-- or decrease depending on where she was. ““thus indicating that the mechanism had been brought into such a state as to be susceptible to the action of human magnetism.” 

The spirits, through John, sent a message:

“Unto your Earth a child is born. Its name shall be called the ELECTRICAL MOTOR. It is the offspring of mind--of the union of mind with matter impregnated by invisible elements. It is to move the mortal, scientific, philosophic, and religious worlds… It is now thoroughly, electrically, magnetically, chemically, spiritually, and celestially, impregnated. It needs material care, like other newborn babes.”

The New Era ran an article titled “IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT” about “The New Motive Power, or Electrical Motor, otherwise called ‘Perpetual Motions’--The Great Spiritual Revelation of the Age”. In large print above, it read: “THE THING MOVES!” The announcement ran:

“This new motive power is to lead the way in the great speedily-coming salvation. It is to be the physical Saviour of the race. The history of its inception, its various stages of progress, and its completion, will show the world a most beautiful and significant analogy to the advent of Jesus as the spiritual Saviour of the race… Hence we most confidently assert that the advent of the science of all sciences, the philosophy of all philosophies, and the art of all arts has now fairly commenced. The child is born, not long hence he will go alone.”

“Well, I mean, it was a mixed but mostly it was something like, OK, here's a blast from a going on in high rock, trying to create a new race of human beings, messing with the creator's prerogatives. So some people regard it as a satanic project. Others others regarded it as simple, foolish. No, said crazy is and hokum. And, you know, hopeless hopelessness. And found it to be a matter of of high comedy. So I think there was any number of different reactions. But, you know, from the skepticism to horror and even within by this time, I must say that January Spear had, by his actions, had distanced himself from what you might call a more level headed or depending on your point of view, more conventionally bound members of the reform community.”

In August, a group of young men from Randolph broke into where the machine was being kept and destroyed it by “pulling out it’s heart.” John wrote a letter titled “The Electric Motor Mobbed” It read “The Little mechanism has been assailed, torn asunder, and trampled beneath the feet of man… the oppressed shall yet be free. So shall it ever be with all truths which have been communicated to man. They are immortal and can not be destroyed.” 

Some people believed that John had fabricated the whole story to cover up for his failure. The editor of the Scientific American wrote, ““We do not believe a word respecting a mob breaking into the building and destroying the spiritual machine. We are of the opinion that it was broken by the crafty author of it, whose schemes had come to the exact point of exposing his ridiculous pretensions.” 

With its destruction, The spirits had decided the world was not yet ready for the New Motor. There was more work to be done, and the quest for a New Motive Power would evolve. 

However, not everybody in the Spiritualist movement was as impressed by the Electrical Motor. The Spiritual Telegraph wrote an article called “New Motive Power, Rather Premature.”

Following the “destruction” of the New Motor, the Association of Electicizers communicated a flurry of new inventions which included: Telepathic transmission towers to send messages directly into people’s minds. Floating carriages powered by “high spiritualized” mediums. And The “Electric Ship” to be powered by “personal magnetisms” -- the types of which “charged” the New Motor”.

But a new idea took hold. That the New Motor would come back and move once the world had changed. The spirits spoke of a utopia of free thinkers and lovers who worked only through empirical evidence. It was up to John and his followers to bring about this New Society for the Electrical Motor to be reborn into. 

The first thing that would have to be done away with was “False Marriage” -- that is marriage defined by laws and contracts. Instead, they would bring about “True Marriage” aka sexual union based on attraction.

“So it was thought that the improvement of the human race would come when we could abolish traditional marriage and allow people to procreate according to their natural affinities. That was the doctrine of free love. So in order to have that happen, you needed to create a society of small society, perhaps at first where people could follow their leanings in this regard.”

This new society would be started at the springs in Kiantone, New York which had previously been purchased by John’s followers. The construction of which would be guided by the spirits. Each building was supposed to be built to correspond to a seated human body. There would be a room with a dome for a library to mimic the brain. Down the center of the buildings would run a hallway that mimics the spinal column. It would allow for communication via connecting tubes that would transmit sound and water.

In October 1854, they moved into the new commune, which they were now calling “Harmonia,”.” It was dedicated to, “New Inventions, and to the encouragement of Inventors when they most require assistance.” It’s doors were open to the homeless and downtrodden. 

John unveiled that he would go on a trip across the U.S looking for investors. Caroline Hinckley, a follower of his, would accompany him and work to dictate the messages the spirits transmitted through John. When they arrived in Boston after several months, scandal broke out because Caroline was obviously pregnant despite John still being married. They denied that John was the father.

During her pregnancy, the spirits transmitted a new paper called “Birthology”. In it, it said, “It may be declared that mind impregnates matter and hence then comes what is called birth… The father of the baby would be the greatest minds of the spirits. 

Caroline described it as “immaculate conception” and a pure “marvelous machine” -- the next step for the New Motor.  In 1859, Caroline gave birth to a nine-pound baby boy named Murray Hinckley Spear -- the first new man.

Following the pregnancy, one of his followers Eliza Kenney, took John to court.Her filing read, “I charge Brother John M. Spear with obtaining money, under false pretences, to carry out his purposes and projects, she said, “I charge him that as a “medium,” “Communications” are made through him directing persons as to precise, practical steps to be taken by them, which greatly result to their injury, and he uses his influence in a normal or natural state, to have said “communications” obeyed. “ During this trial, many of the secrets of the inner circle became known -- most damningly the free love practices.

These overlapping scandals splintered John’s followers, and made him a pariah not just to the secular world, but to spiritualists as well. Ex-spiritualist Benjamin Hatch wrote that before being a medium, John Murray Spear was ,” almost universally acknowledged a paragon of almost every Christian virtue” but now “His family is broken up, and the wife, to whom he was once a most worthy husband,, is forsaken; he is travelling with his paramour who acts as his scribe in reporting his spiritual lectures, and...bore to him what they call a spiritual baby but of sufficient materiality to counterbalance nine pounds.”

However, a small group of followers did stay with John, and they believed that huge change was about to come. 

That change came when the Civil War broke out. During this time, John founded a new group of people who were not opposed to  ideas of True Marriage and Free Love.  In 1861, the spirit of Benjamin Franklin came forward with a decree for seven years of “modellic behavior” the end of which they would be able to show, “A model state, a model church, a model commerce, a model home, with some specimens of model machines.” 

But they would need a way to fund this. Through the same rituals that had given them the plans for the New Motor, the spirits unveiled plans for an affordable automatic Sewing Machine. 

“Why the sewing machine? The invention of the sewing machine was was important to domestic life. And of course, John was a big, huge advocate of. Women's rights and freeing women from the bondage of domestic slavery, etc.. Secondly, so in one sense it was a continuation of this, right? It was it was a machine that would free women from domestic slavery.”

The ad for their sewing machine sounded very similar to the proclamations about the New Motor. It said:

“What shall we say of a Sewing Machine so simple as to be understood by a child, which takes up common needles and sews like a thing of life, and which can be sold for the paltry sum of ten dollars! The importance of such an invention supasses even the comprehension of human mind. But yet such is The Union Ten Dollar Family Sewing Machine. It stands alone, far above and beyond anything ever attempted in the sewing machine line, and thus must ever stand a child of inspiration which conceived it, and almost an immortal monument to the inventive genius of man.”

Unfortunately, much like the New Motor, they could never actually get it to work automatically, which is how they envisioned it, their version had a hand crank when it was finally released. While it wasn’t a total failure, the best they did was  break even.

 n 1862, Emma Hardinge, a trance-lecturer, spiritualist leader, and adversary of Free Love, went after John Murray Spear and his followers  as an example of the rot inside the spiritualist movement. She believed, “a new movement permeating the ranks of spiritualism which had already enlisted in its interests some of the wealthiest and most distinguished citizens of the New England States… contained seeds of irrevocable mischief, if not ruin, to the cause of Spiritualism.”

Hardinge founded the “Church of Spiritualism” as a way to draw the movement out of closed meetings and “secret societies”, and into respectable services. While some saw it as regressing back to the rule of churches they fought back from, many Spiritualists still saw themselves as Christains and embraced this new normal -- cutting John Murray Spear out of a movement he had once been a leader of. 

Thus, he went to Europe, where spiritualism was taking off. Before he left, he officially separated from Betsey and married Caroline, after being transmitted from the spirits a message that legal divorce was acceptable to break free the chains of False Marriage.

Eventually, his family moved back to the states after believing that Europeans cared more about parlor tricks, like rappings and levitating chairs, than actual spiritual communication. They eventually settled in Philadelphia.

“Well, I tend to think the who was. Constantly enlivened by these visions you have. But of course, he found obstacles in the way to making them real. And some of them, not only obstacles in the way of the natural world really works, but also maybe disappointment among his followers and competition. Mocking and so on. And he eventually decided or was told by his spirit friends that he could retire more or less and transfer his responsibilities to someone else.”

When he retired in August 1872, John wrote a “A Final Report of Domestic and Foreign Missions” titled Twenty Years on the Wing; a Brief Narrative of My Travels as a Missionary Sent Forth and Sustained by the Association of Beneficients in Spirit Land. In it, he writes:

“It is proper to say that my labors have been performed in FAITH. Very few have so understood my mission that they could give me either counsel or assistance, and therefore my trust has been in the invisible world.” 

In fall of 1887, John began to see spirits around his bed. One was his grandmother, whose presence made him feel “as a baby in her soothing and loving embrace.” On October 5th, he passed away in Caroline’s arms.

After his death, the public focused on his philanthropic work -- prison reform, abolition, his missionary work alongside men like Frederick Douglas and WIlliam Llyod Garrison. Work that history books have essentially erased him from. Decades of his life were ignored and buried. Every controversy and eccentricity, swept under the rug. 

For many years, the only place that had an extensive history of his work was a book by Emma Hardinge on the history of spiritualism. She was not kind. Even the obituary that Caroline wrote made no mention of Kiantone, Benjamin Franklin,True Marriage, Associations of spirits, sewing machines or the New Motor.  

But there are rumors that the New Motor may still be out there, watching the world “model” its behavior awaiting for the time to unveil itself as our Mechanical Messiah.