John Murray Spear was a nineteenth-century spiritualist who claimed that the ghosts of famous inventors like Benjamin Franklin were telepathically instructing him to build a mechanical messiah.

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John Murray Spear was a nineteenth-century spiritualist who claimed that the ghosts of famous inventors like Benjamin Franklin were telepathically instructing him to build a mechanical messiah. He gathered his devoted followers in Massachusetts to construct a massive, bizarre machine out of copper, zinc, and gears, which he firmly believed would magically come to life and usher in a utopian era of free energy. He even had a woman subject herself to simulated labor pains in front of the metallic contraption for hours to symbolically birth a spiritual soul into the lifeless machinery. Naturally, the mechanical savior completely failed to do anything except sit there looking like a chaotic pile of scrap metal, eventually prompting an angry mob to break in and smash it to pieces. It represents a truly spectacular failure of occult engineering, proving that channeling dead scientists to build a steampunk robot god is definitely not a reliable method for fixing the world's socioeconomic problems