Uploaded October 2025 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
In the summer of 1854, on a rocky hill outside Lynn, Massachusetts, a small group of spiritualists gathered around what might have been the strangest invention of the nineteenth century (outside of vibrators, but that'll be another episode of FREAKBAiT News): a mechanical savior made of copper, zinc, and magnets. Its creator, John Murray Spear, believed it would change the world. His followers called it the "New Motive Power." Outsiders preferred “the Mechanical Messiah” or "the Bullshit A Crazy Guy Made."
Spear himself began life in a far more conventional pulpit. Born in 1804, he was a Universalist minister and a fierce reformer. He preached abolition, women’s rights, prison reform, and pacifism - a sort of one-man moral upgrade patch for antebellum America. Not a bad dude. Then, in his middle age, he made a hard turn into Spiritualism, the fashionable belief that the living could communicate with the dead through mediums, seances, and trances.
According to Spear, the spirits he spoke with were not random ghosts, but a celestial think tank he called the “Association of Electrizers.” This ghostly board of directors included the departed luminaries of American democracy such as Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, John Quincy Adams, and a rotating cast of enlightened phantoms (for some reason a bunch of white guys). They told him that Heaven was ready to send humanity its greatest gift yet, not another prophet, but a machine.
Under their guidance, Spear and his followers built a complex apparatus of wires, coils, and magnetic metals around a large table. It looked, by one account, like “an electrical octopus" - half engine, half altar. The New Motive Power, they said, would harness divine electricity to power factories and heal souls and change the world. Once awakened, it would usher in an age of universal freedom, equality, and clean perpetual motion.
A female medium, known only as the “New Mary,” began to experience what she described as a spiritual pregnancy, or a phantom gestation of a divine child. For nine months she communed with unseen forces while the mechanical body took shape. Finally, on June 29, 1854, atop High Rock Hill, the community assembled for the “birth.” As the woman cried out in labor, Spear laid his hands upon the machine, proclaiming that the soul of the New Motive Power had descended. For a brief moment, the copper limbs were said to tremble and puls, proof enough for the faithful that the thing lived.
Spear announced that the age of divine mechanics had begun. Newspapers, ever hungry for eccentricity, declared otherwise. The Boston press mocked the “electric baby,” and skeptics arrived to see if the machine could, at the very least, spin a wheel. It did not. The New Motive Power remained spiritually vigorous but physically inert.
Embarrassed but undeterred, Spear moved the device to Randolph, New York, hoping the more serene energy there might jump-start its soul. Instead, he found a mob. Local residents, less tolerant than Lynn’s utopians, stormed the shed, tore the contraption apart, and scattered its parts into a nearby pond. Spear mourned the loss like a bereaved parent. Others were relieved that God’s first machine had not, in fact, switched on.
Afterward, Spear kept preaching spiritual technology and moral reform, but the world largely forgot about him. He died in 1887, convinced he had glimpsed the next evolution of both man and machine.
Whether his device was a delusion, a metaphor, or the first dream of artificial life, John Murray Spear left behind one of the most peculiar footnotes in American history. In his Mechanical Messiah, the 1850s flirted with a question that still haunts the 2020s. Can humanity find salvation through hardware?
In the summer of 1854, on a rocky hill outside Lynn, Massachusetts, a small group of spiritualists gathered around what might have been the strangest invention of the nineteenth century (outside of vibrators, but that'll be another episode of FREAKBAiT News): a mechanical savior made of copper, zinc, and magnets. Its creator, John Murray Spear, believed it would change the world. His followers called it the "New Motive Power." Outsiders preferred “the Mechanical Messiah” or "the Bullshit A Crazy Guy Made."
Spear himself began life in a far more conventional pulpit. Born in 1804, he was a Universalist minister and a fierce reformer. He preached abolition, women’s rights, prison reform, and pacifism - a sort of one-man moral upgrade patch for antebellum America. Not a bad dude. Then, in his middle age, he made a hard turn into Spiritualism, the fashionable belief that the living could communicate with the dead through mediums, seances, and trances.
According to Spear, the spirits he spoke with were not random ghosts, but a celestial think tank he called the “Association of Electrizers.” This ghostly board of directors included the departed luminaries of American democracy such as Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, John Quincy Adams, and a rotating cast of enlightened phantoms (for some reason a bunch of white guys). They told him that Heaven was ready to send humanity its greatest gift yet, not another prophet, but a machine.
Under their guidance, Spear and his followers built a complex apparatus of wires, coils, and magnetic metals around a large table. It looked, by one account, like “an electrical octopus" - half engine, half altar. The New Motive Power, they said, would harness divine electricity to power factories and heal souls and change the world. Once awakened, it would usher in an age of universal freedom, equality, and clean perpetual motion.
A female medium, known only as the “New Mary,” began to experience what she described as a spiritual pregnancy, or a phantom gestation of a divine child. For nine months she communed with unseen forces while the mechanical body took shape. Finally, on June 29, 1854, atop High Rock Hill, the community assembled for the “birth.” As the woman cried out in labor, Spear laid his hands upon the machine, proclaiming that the soul of the New Motive Power had descended. For a brief moment, the copper limbs were said to tremble and puls, proof enough for the faithful that the thing lived.
Spear announced that the age of divine mechanics had begun. Newspapers, ever hungry for eccentricity, declared otherwise. The Boston press mocked the “electric baby,” and skeptics arrived to see if the machine could, at the very least, spin a wheel. It did not. The New Motive Power remained spiritually vigorous but physically inert.
Embarrassed but undeterred, Spear moved the device to Randolph, New York, hoping the more serene energy there might jump-start its soul. Instead, he found a mob. Local residents, less tolerant than Lynn’s utopians, stormed the shed, tore the contraption apart, and scattered its parts into a nearby pond. Spear mourned the loss like a bereaved parent. Others were relieved that God’s first machine had not, in fact, switched on.
Afterward, Spear kept preaching spiritual technology and moral reform, but the world largely forgot about him. He died in 1887, convinced he had glimpsed the next evolution of both man and machine.
Whether his device was a delusion, a metaphor, or the first dream of artificial life, John Murray Spear left behind one of the most peculiar footnotes in American history. In his Mechanical Messiah, the 1850s flirted with a question that still haunts the 2020s. Can humanity find salvation through hardware?
