The Growing of Scientific Lemons

GREAT SCHEMES THAT NEVER PAN OUT. HOW PSEUDO-SCIENTISTS "SQUARE THE CIRCLE," EXTRACT GOLD FROM SEA WATER, MAKE COAL ASHES BURN AND REALLY "DISCOVER" PERPETUAL MOTION.

AFTER extensive research I have discovered that the original lemons of the current vernacular grew on the shores of the Dead sea. They were golden in hue against the vivid green of foliage. Their shape was that of the perfect oval, and to the untrained and unsuspicious eye they were fair to the gaze and tempting to the palate. The sun scorched traveler of these arid wastes gazed with rapture on this smooth and luscious appearing fruit, plucked it eagerly, bit through the rind—and found his mouth filled with ashes. Nature had “handed him a lemon.” He was on a “dead one”—a Dead sea one.

It is comforting to trace a popular expression back to so antique and respectable a source. Those of us who have stood where the Jordan pours its flood into the Dead sea are aware that the lemon which was “ashes on the lips” no longer grows along the shores of this saline lake, but we have biblical authority for the belief that this fruit once lured the wandering Syrians to their undoing. We have a right to imagine that drummers from Babylon, Nineveh and other centers of trade and jollity, having once bitten themselves, carried specimens of this deceptive fruit back with them and found harmless amusement in handing lemons to friends and enemies.

The ash cored lemon has been transplanted to a more fertile soil. Extinct in Palestine, it now flourishes in New York, fairly riots in Chicago and is cultivated with success in most parts of the United States. An ever increasing supply is met by an insatiable demand. Financial lemons have made Wall street a household word, medical lemons fill the pages of our family periodicals with their advertising, literary lemons have exhausted the supply of adjectives at the command of the reviewers. To treat of the innumerable classes of lemons in demand by the public would require the space of an encyclopedia and the vocabulary of a circus press agent. Therefore this essay will confine itself to a brief consideration of a few of the scientific lemons which have been presented to us in recent times.

The scientific lemon is based on the certainty that a man can lift himself over a fence by pulling at his boot straps. The mere fact that no man has ever succeeded in performing this feat constitutes no reason for assuming its impossibility or desirability. We know that our ancestors believed that this could be done. There never has been an era or generation in which faith in perpetual motion was lost or in which men of means would not come forward to back the proposition that two and two make five. It has ever been the fate of the man tugging at his boot straps to be reviled and ridiculed by those who clung to such conservative and reactionary beliefs as gravitation and the conservation of energy, but to the credit of credulity it must be said that there have never been lacking stout jaws and sharp teeth to bite into all new lemons.

The Impossible Is Easy

The man who becomes convinced that it is practical and economical to build an air line method of transportation from the Battery to Yonkers may be able to enlist the support of hard headed and mercenary financiers, but he need not appeal to popular fancy. The small investor will have none of his project, but let another man announce that after years of study and experimentation he has devised a way of constructing an air line route between the earth and Mars, then it is different. Nothing save the interference of the police and the national government can prevent the oversubscription of the stock in this Earthian-Martian enterprise, especially if stock of the par value of $100 is offered at 5 or 10 cents a share, with a rise to 15 cents set for the fifth of next month.

This simply proves that the people are more anxious to go to Mars than they are to Yonkers, and why the authorities should blast their aspirations is something which puzzles me, but which I have the not the time to discuss.

There is every indication that this year’s crop of scientific lemons will beat all records. Not every grower of this class of lemons is inspired by hope of financial gain. There are thousands of scientific citrus horticulturists who propagate this fruit for the pure amusement of doing so, and who find in the admiring gaze and comments of the public full compensation for their labors. These may be classified as amateur lemonists as contrasted with those professions who raise this agricultural product for public sale and profit.

Within the limited space of three days I culled three scientific lemons from the columns of the daily press, and each of them was so fair to look upon that I have dispensed with tooth powder, using their ashes instead.

The first came from the modest orchard of John Ellmore, the Altoona cobbler. There are several kinds of cobblers, leather and liquid and otherwise, and to the list we now must add the “Altoona lemon cobbler.” It was gravely announced that this erstwhile mender of shoes had discovered the secret of burning ashes through the aid of a liquid compound, and that this discovery had thrown the coal trust into wild consternation. Regardless of the merits of Mr. Ellmore’s contribution to promology, it must be doubted if any process tending to lessen the amount of coal used can in any way menace the profits of the coal trust, their prices being based, not on the cost of production, but on what the consumer can be forced to pay. However, that is foreign to the main question, and perhaps a trite redundancy.

It seems that the people of Altoona have been using the cobbler’s ash process for some time, thereby avoiding the purchase of the stipulated amount of coal. This was hardly fair on the rest of us, who have been using coal steadily during the nine months of the present winter; but human nature is the same in Altoona as elsewhere. But the secret is out at last. It has been printed in the papers, and now it will be possible to keep warm all summer, provided we can procure a little salt, oxalic acid, water, and borrow a modicum of coal. It will be just my luck if it never gets cold again. I have ashes to burn.

This is a serious matter. Listen: “When an aqueous solution of an alkaline salt — such as common salt — is mixed with coal ash the result is that a mild lye is formed which, when mixed with any combustible material, such as coal, and upon the application of heat, gives off oxygen gas, thus enabling rapid combustion. The addition of oxalic acid causes a chemical change of greater value than the first, for the reason that it results in the formation of a carbide which, in turn, gives off acetylene gas, adding to the intensity of the heat and facilitating complete combustion.”

Whether or not Mr. Ellmore derives economy by the use of salt and oxalic acid I do not pretend to know. Possibly he does, but he does not burn ashes, never has and never will. He may complete the combustion of the inflammables in cinders, but he can no more burn ashes than he can the lining of his furnace.

All Ends in Smoke

We have progressed so little in the science of coal combustion that most any kind of a scientific lemon will take root in the waste. When we burn any fuel, be it coal, wood or any other substance, we simply attempt to employ that substance as a medium to ignite the oxygen in the air. We aim to burn a little fuel and the largest possible amount of air. If we use too little air we create smoke; if we use too much air we drown the blaze. Our stupid owners of power plants cannot be induced to install scientific appliances, the result being that they lose money on their coal and smudge the community with smoke — unconsumed carbon. In the use of fuel we have made little advancement over the savages, but it will be time to discuss the burning of ashes when we have learned how to burn coal. A kerosene lamp turned too high or too low will smoke; one so adjusted that the proper amount of air is admitted from below will burn with a pure light and will consume most of the carbon in the oil. The same thing is possible with coal, wood or any other fuel. Absence of smoke is the test of perfect combustion and it goes without saying that when a thing is burned there is no initial heat in what remains.

On the day following the leaping into fame of the Altoona cobbler was heralded the advent of the London barber. The name of the latter is Witherington, and he is more of a traitor to his profession than was Benedict Arnold to his country. This is a chemical lemon, and while not so large as the Pennsylvania product, it is beautifully formed and marked. It is thus catalogued in a cable dispatch: “There is consternation among the barbers of England over the invention of a Londoner named Witherington. He has made a paste which removes the beard without the use of a razor in ten minutes. The paste makes the hair so brittle that it can be rubbed off clean with a wet sponge, and the performance is simply a part of washing the face upon rising in the morning.”

Let me contribute a lemon of my own. Since science has discovered the microbe which produces baldness, why not introduce him into the paste? After a few applications one’s cheeks and chin will be as bald as the top of Pike’s peak and will stay that way. Patent applied for.

To be relieved of the exactions of the coal dealer and the barber within 48 hours was exhilarating, but on the next day announcement was made that Nikola Tesla has discovered a way of making war impossible, through a “new wireless wonder that will create fleet destroying convulsions in the open sea, engulfing the heaviest fighting ships like toy boats in a tub, and by its horrors hasten the day of universal peace.” I submit that that is going some in the growing of scientific lemons.

The whole thing is so easy and simple that I wonder I did not think of it myself long ago. Mr. Tesla explains that “such a wave can be produced with twenty or thirty tons of cheap explosive, carried to its destination and ignited by a noninterferable telautomaton.”

In these days, when noninterferable telautomatons are for sale in every department store and when a man can stroll down Park avenue or most any other street and pick up 20 or 30 tons of cheap explosive, it will be well for the foreign navies which have been thinking to bombard New York city to keep out of range.

Mr. Tesla’s idea is to discharge the explosive under the fleet and thus create a tidal wave 100 or more feet high. This will tip over the ships of the fleet, and that is the end of it. The telautomaton is a boat which can be operated from shore by wireless waves of electricity and will go where you wish and do anything you desire with the same precision as if a captain and crew were aboard. It can go on the surface, below the surface, and, for all I know, in the air. It is shaped like a lemon seed, and I’d rather have one than an automobile.

What of New York City?

It occurs to me that a wave 100 feet high might, after destroying a fleet off Sandy Hook, come ashore and wipe out Coney island and New York. The only tidal wave I ever saw hit the state of California an awful slap after having traveled across the Pacific ocean from Java, some 10,000 miles or so, but Mr. Tesla says his tidal wave will subside just as soon as it has done its work. One can do most anything with wireless waves with a fountain pen or a typewriter, and the pictures of the huge fighting ships going to the bottom of the sea looks as natural as life.

It is seven years ago since Mr. Tesla announced the perfection of the telautomaton, and all of our set have one or more of them. They can rake oysters, retrieve ducks or sink a fleet and we cannot do without them. In the same orchard which raised the telautomaton there was produced in 1899 a scientific lemon by which most diseases could be cured by electricity. In the following year Mr. Tesla announced new discoveries in wireless telegraphy, but he desisted for fear that he would set fire to the atmosphere. In 1901 he stated that he was prepared to send messages through the earth, and he also worked out an electric light which made the sun look like a tallow candle. In 1903 he perfected the wireless telephone and in the following year made public the outlines of a scheme to supersede newspapers. In 1906 he was busy with devices with which to telegraph to Mars, and since then has been interested in such subjects as weighing the soul, wireless aerial navigation and the use of a wireless system of railroads.

Mr. Tesla is not so sordid as to seek to make money on these great inventions. He is content to create a great idea, and while people are still marveling over it he proceeds to devise a process by which the former one can be destroyed. His former rival, Thomas Edison, seems to have lost his nerve or his press agent in recent years, but there was a time when he did not hesitate to manufacture iron from sea sand or electrical energy directly from coal.

It is not so long ago that most of us decided to quit work because it was announced that everything in the future would be performed through the agency of liquid air. It was to take the place of coal, it was to revolutionize civilization and it was to do several other things fully as important. It had perpetual motion beaten to a standstill and a man without shares of stock in liquid air companies was looked down on as one who cared nothing for the future welfare of his wife and children. I have several beautifully engraved shares which I will sell to any one seeking to complete his collection.

A few paragraphs about the Rev Prescott F. Jernegan. Do you recall him? You will if you lived in New England at the time that he taught the shrewd dwellers of Connecticut that there was more money in lemons than in nutmegs. Jernegan was the man who got rich by reading an encyclopedia. In it he learned that there is an appreciable amount of gold in sea water. Now you recall who Jernegan was?

He is now living in the Philippines, so they say. It is to his credit that he worked the most ingenious fake of his generation. He organized the “Electrolytic marine salts company,” with a capital stock of $10,000,000, of which it was frankly announced that the discoverers of the secret process would retain $9,000,000, and that the remaining $1,000,000 would be offered to the public, the proceeds to be devoted to the construction of machinery with which to take gold from sea water.

Jernegan and Keely

There were plenty of backers for a scheme like that. Jernegan established his plant in a lagoon near Lubec, Me., and once a week sent a gold brick to his Boston offices. Lubec was selected on account of its high tides, and with a small plant it was declared that the profits were $2,000 a week. His crowning feat was accomplished in February, 1898, near the city of Providence. There he installed a small plant for the purpose of making a demonstration before the eyes of a group of conservative capitalists. They were supplied with certain chemicals which had been tested and which showed no trace of gold. These the capitalists placed in the “accumulators,” and then waited patiently all the long and cold night hours for the salt water to yield up its gold. Jernegan took no part in the test, leaving the doubting men of money to do the whole process themselves. In the morning they raised the accumulators and took them to Boston. An analysis showed the presence of a considerable amount of gold. The wealth of the world was within their reach.

What had happened? C. E. Fisher, a former Brooklyn floor walker who had become a diver, made his way under the water, poured out the chemicals, replaced them with mercury saturated with gold, and crawled away as silently as the fish which darted about his armor.

New England went mad to invest in this “lemon.” At the height of the craze Jernegan and his brother fled abroad with hundreds of thousands of dollars which had been converted into United States government bonds. The dupes did not even stop to reflect that had there been any such process it would inevitably have resulted in the destruction of the value of gold as a precious or money metal. However, the same scheme could be worked again today if a paternal and meddlesome government would not interfere.

The most artistic purveyor of a most wonderful scientific lemon was John Ernst Worrell Keely, the inventor of the famous Keely motor. It was my privilege when a boy to see it in operation in Philadelphia, and the only reason I did not buy stock in it was because I had no money. Hundreds of the leading capitalists of the country placed funds in the hands of Keely and some of them had confidence in him until the day of his death. Like the Jernegan process for extracting gold, the Keely process of deriving power was a secret one on which it would not do to apply for patents. He kept it surrounded with a halo of mystery. Its basis was a marvelous vapor, generated by an “interetheric liberator,” and there was no limit to the power which could be generated. The one thing which hampered him — so Keely alleged — was to find means to harness and control the stupendous forces which were generated at nominal expense.

“With the amount of water I can hold in the palm of my hand,” he declared to his awed and faithful financial backers, “I can produce power sufficient to run a train of 30 cars from Philadelphia to New York at the rate of a mile a minute. With a bucketful of water I can generate a force sufficient to move the world out of its course.”

But he never did it. Year after year he made claims and alleged experiments. He lifted huge weights by drawing a bow across the strings of a fiddle, revolved a huge ball at the rate of 600 revolutions a minute by striking a tuning fork, and performed, or pretended to perform, other feats no less wonderful, but he was unable to complete his motor. In 1888 he was sent to jail for contempt of court because he refused to reveal his alleged secret. He died in 1898, and an examination showed that all of his feats were performed by a hidden compressed air apparatus. From 1875 until the hour of his death he had everything which money could buy, and for long sustained effectiveness the Keely scientific lemon must be awarded the palm.