Asa Jackson's Perpetual Motion Machine
"ASA JACKSON'S FABULOUS-PERPETUAL MOTION MACHINE, WHICH HE DESIGNED AND BUILT IN THE MID 1800'S TO PRODUCE ITS OWN POWER AND RUN FOREVER...
According to local legend, Asa kept his invention hidden in a cave during the civil war, and took it apart when it was unattended, so that if it were discovered, no one could understand how it worked.
Asa Jackson (1792-1870) lived on a farm in that beautiful and pristine countryside near Lebanon, in middle Tennessee, a few miles from President Andrew Jackson's home. (Some family members say they were related.) It is not known how or why Asa became interested in a perpetual motion machine. Stranger still is why he thought he could succeed in designing such a device which had been pondered and studied for hundreds of years by some of the greatest scientific minds of the world (including the great Sir Isaac Newton of the 1600's), and they generally had concluded that it could not be done.
I first saw this most amazing and intriguing contraption in October, 1994, hanging from the ceiling in Jack Jackson's workshop in Lebanon. Jack Jackson, whose remarkable story as a pioneer country musician and as an inventor is presented elsewhere in the Museum, was the great-grandson of old Asa Jackson, and he acquired this odd contraption from his father, Jonas Asa Jackson. For 55 years it had hung in his shop behind his modest home, and after he died in August, 1994, his two sons, Doug and John, sold me the piece (or pieces) so it could be preserved here for all to see.
They had always heard that old Asa Jackson, one of eight children, spent most of his time and resources working on and perfecting the machine, even to the point of not properly tending his farm and caring for his family. Family tradition has it that someone (perhaps the federal government) had offered a million dollar reward for anyone who could invent such a machine. In order to secure his work, Asa, it is said, took the machine to a cave near Murfreesboro during the Civil War. He never left it, the story continued, without first partially taking it apart so that if it were found, his secret could not be stolen. Asa did get the machine to running, according to oft told stories, and it is said that it ran for a month or more.
One of the people I interviewed, other than family members, was Alfred T. MacFarland an interesting, colorful and most impressive retired country lawyer who practiced his profession for 48 years in the Lebanon area, and who had served as the Commissioner of Revenue for the State of Tennessee, and as a member of the powerful interstate Commerce Commission in Washington for several years. I visited him at his home on his large, rolling farm located near historic Castalian Springs, at the end of MacFarland Lane, in late October, 1994. In addition to his accomplishments in various fields, he was obviously a student of history -- at least of the human interest type of history. He had indeed heard of the Asa Jackson's perpetual motion machine.
He said, in part: "I started following my father around, down in the Leeville Community, when I was about 4 years old; and one day we passed the place where a young boy named Jackson had recently been run over and killed by a mail carrier in a Model-T Ford. That reminded my father of the story about old Asa Jackson, whom I believe was a relative to the boy who had beer killed.
"He said that he had always heard of tree strange and mysterious contraption that old Asa Jackson had built, called a perpetual motion machine. He apparently spent many years trying to make and perfect it.
In this connection, John and Doug Jackson showed me a copy of an old promissory note in which Asa Jackson borrowed $75.00 from his son, William Henry Jackson, dated December 12, 1861. MacFarland continued with what his father had told him about Asa Jackson -- sketches of stories which had lingered around that part of the county for generations. "Such a machine, I understand, is against the law of physics, but maybe Asa got the law repealed," MacFarland joked, "because they said he finally got his self-powering machine to running, sometime during the Civil War. He was so afraid that somebody would copy his invention, or perhaps steal it in its entirety, that he hid it in a cave near Murfreesboro. It's right across the road from where the Joe L. Evins Veterans Hospital is now located.
"This machine which supposedly produced its own power as it ran, drew state-wide and even national attention -- college professors and people like that. It created quite a stir."
At this point the reader is about as well informed as is the writer relative to the perpetual motion machine. Asa died in 1870, and it is assumed that the contraption passed to his son William Henry (1830-1891), then to his grandson Jonas Asa (1865-1935), thence to Asa's great-grandson Jonas Asa Jackson (always called Jack Jackson), who kept it until he passed it on to his two sons when he died in August, 1994. It was from his sons, John and Doug, that I acquired it.
Tim Beets, of the Museum staff, and I designed the frame from which the two wheels are suspended. The churn was added to illustrate how the power produced by the machine might have been used.
I would be much obliged for any information relative to additional history of this contrivance, and I'd welcome definitive or speculative comments as to how the machine might have worked.
John Rice Irwin
The Museum of Appalachia
Mr. Jackson's invention is featured in this article at the Murfreesboro Post, which also sports this photo on the cover.
