It’s almost impossible to know what life will be like in the future. Sure, people in the past have made some semi-accurate predictions. However, making an accurate guess regarding what the world will look like a century from now? It’d be unbelievably difficult, if not actually impossible.
But, if you’re like John Murray Spear, you’d try to figure out the future anyway. Born in 1804, Spear was an American spiritualist and inventor whose view involved something that even we in 2014 could fathom possible: a mechanical god.
John Murray Spear.
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John Murray Spear was a member of Hosea Ballou’s Universalist Church of America from an early age. As an adult, he became a minister of his own congregation. Spear was ahead of his time in terms of social morality, becoming an activist for woman’s rights, labor reform, removal of the death penalty and being active in the abolitionist cause. He held that “peace and love” might one day save the world, a philosophy that predated the 1960s hippie movement.
Convening With Sprits.
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After two decades of being a priest, Spear left the Universalist Church and devoted himself to Spiritualism. It was at this time that he claimed to be convening with the spirits of Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, John Quincy Adams and Benjamin Rush. Spear said that in their correspondence with him they called themselves the “The Association of Electrizers” and their goal was to bring new technology and spiritual freedom to the world.
New Motive Power.
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Spear rented a building in Lynn, Massachusetts, in order to perform a task that the Electrizers requested of him: to create a Mechanical Messiah. Spear and his team pulled together magnets, brass, and motors in the hopes of creating an “electric thinking machine”, calling it the New Motive Power. It was supposed to lead humanity into a new era of existence. The team performed debaucherous rituals in order to make their Mecha-god come to life.
“Retirement”
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Obviously, his steam-punk robo-Jesus didn’t come to life and Spear’s team abandoned him, now very certain of his insanity. He wrote that the Electrizers had called for his retirement from his position as prophet. Five years later, he was buried in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Although Spear’s mechanical messiah and theories never came to fruition, the future is a mystery. Who knows, in place of a robot god, we may soon at the very least have robot overlords.
