A bouquet of scammers

This is an excerpt from (and promo for) my recent Kindle e-book, Not Your Usual Clever Ideas  (https://www.amazon.com.au/dp/B072BCKBVQ) 

People were prepared to try almost anything. From the 1840s, “crude oil” could be obtained, but it didn't come from wells: it was distilled from coal, and most of the techniques that would be used in the 1860s to separate the fractions in “rock oil” began with research on getting liquid fuels from either coal or Trinidad asphalt (bitumen).

By 1858, the asphalt was being exported as a raw material, but The Times (Monday, July 19, 1858; p. 10) reported that asphalt oil was expected soon to replace coconut oil for lighting in the islands. By October 1863, The Times was discussing a basin filled with asphalt with springs of asphaltic oil nearby and large pitch banks off the shore. The paper estimated that the lake could produce “three hundred million gallons of oil, and forty or fifty gallons are considered equal to a tun of coal”. 

Already, a Mr. Stollmeyer, of Port of Spain had suggested that this oil might be used as liquid fuel for oceanic steam navigation.

The hunt was on, because by then, everybody knew that loading coal was a long, slow and onerous business. In foreign ports, British ships would be tied up for days while 'coolies' carried loads of coal on board and stowed them below decks. It was this need that started Europeans becoming tourists, because the passengers needed something to do while the ship was “coaling”. The report continued:

To oil a ship would not take above a tenth of the time it takes to coal her, if pipes were employed, and the oil would not take above a fourth of the space occupied by coals. He recommends that it be applied at once as auxiliary to coal, by throwing jets over the burning mass, but contemplates, eventually, upright tubular boilers, the liquid fuel to be supplied as fast as it can be converted into flame. Of course, the North American oil springs are another source of supply.
— The Times, Tuesday, October 6, 1863; p. 4. 

The beauty of steam engines was that you could burn almost anything in there, so long as a stoker could safely feed it into the furnace. Even fish weren't safe, if they had stopped wriggling.

The Cleveland (Ohio) Herald says :— The other day, at the Islands, we noticed a novel kind of steamboat fuel. When the Philo Parsons was wooding at North Bass Island, she took on board a large number of sturgeon which had been, landed from the fish ponds in that vicinity. As these fish had been lying a day or more in the sun they were, like the exploded dog, not good for much as fish. Curiosity as to the design of such freight was soon satisfied on seeing a huge sixty-pound sturgeon go head foremost into the furnace. Inquiring into this novel species of steamboat fuel, we were told that the oil from the fish assists the combustion of the wood very much, and that the boatmen are glad to clear the docks of sturgeon, which would otherwise be deemed worthless, unless to enrich the soil. “It is said twenty sturgeon make as much steam as a cord of wood, though we do not know that the. wood-measure tables have been 'reconstructed' so as to read, 'a score of sturgeons make one cord.'
— Scientific American 30 June 1866, 4. 

The problem now was that there were so many wonders about that nobody was quite sure what to believe. If coal gas could be improved by the addition of water (it made water gas), why shouldn't trams run on compressed air? (That particular scam—one can hardly put it higher than that—is still alive and well today.)

Perpetual motion was another. Every small boy must have dreamed of using capillary action to draw water up in order to have it fall and turn a water wheel, or to have a generator producing the energy to electrolyse water so the hydrogen can be burned to drive the generator, or some such. Most of them learn, one way or another that you can't get something for nothing—though this scheme might have worked:

Improvement in Light Houses. A gentleman in Oxford, Mass., (whose name we withold for the present) has submitted a drawing and description of a mode of furnishing light houses with the Drummond light, to be supported by gasses produced by magneto-electrical machines, which are to be kept in operation by the power of water descending from an elevated reservoir, which reservoir is to be occasionally replenished by pumps operated by a wind mill mounted above the lantern. That such an arrangement is practicable there is no reason to doubt, though it might be attended with considerable expense in the first instance. We may present a more full description with an engraving in a future number.
— Scientific American 27 March 1847, 212. 

Reading from the context in a couple of partial records, Harris Ransom, of Colchester was a prisoner in jail in the 1770s, probably in Connecticut. What is quite certain is that this gentleman, on the principle that one can't be hanged for trying, petitioned for a patent of 100 years, for making water rise thirty feet high from any pond, or spring, to convey it to towns or cities.

The height specified is a give-away that was merely the common siphon, though Ransom called the effect “a perpetual water motion.” The records are clear on one thing: his petition was not acted upon. Still, people tried, and it seems that 1863 was a very good year for perpetual motion devices:

Messrs Editors: —I have understood that you had a standing offer of some amount to any man that would bring a machine to your office that would run of itself, or, in other words, a machine that would run until it was worn out, or a perpetual motion. have you ever had any machine brought to you for that purpose? If you have any, please inform me by letter all about how much the premium is and what the terms of the offer are. If the machine works according to expectation it will be brought to your office before taken to any other place, or applying for a patent. The man that is at work on it is very certain that it will run, and will have it ready in three or four weeks.
— Scientific American 28 March 1863, 198. 

Just as modern scientists know that when they see a letter or an email promising that a proof is almost ready to show that <Darwin, Einstein, Maxwell or whoever> is wrong, the proof will never appear. Equally, promised miraculous machines never eventuate. The editors of the journal knew that and commented as follows:

We print the above communication as there seems to be, from the innumerable letters we receive on the subject, a popular impression that we are desirous of obtaining a perpetual-motion machine, and that a premium has been offered by us for a satisfactory one. We are not particularly anxious to procure a machine for private use, but we will guarantee to find a purchaser for a machine that is what it purports to be — a perpetual mover. When that is found we shall immediately start on a journey to the moon with it. — Eds

In August of that year, the journal reported on a display of perpetual motion in Vermont, and suggesting that hidden bellows were involved. “Several contrivances on the same plan were subsequently exhibited at Barnum's Museum. This Vermont show is probably one of them.” (Scientific American 29 August 1863, 138.)

In November, the journal dismissed out-of-hand the scheme of one Carruthers, saying that he had “… lost ten years of his life in prosecuting a useless idea.”

Another scam that is still around today is the wonderful fuel additive that makes engines go further, or turns worthless material into fuel. That one has a long history as well.

ASHES FOR FUEL FURORE: The daily papers have gone wild during a lull in the ordinary supply of news and are filling columns with the wonderful discovery (!) of a poor Pennsylvania shoemaker who “burns ashes”. One teaspoonful of his secret “dope” in two gallons of water, when poured on ordinary ashes and lighted, is declared to keep a stove red hot for an hour. We recall that the Keeley motor was raised in the same state.
— Popular Mechanics, May 1907, 522.

The art of ingeniously putting one over one's fellows will be addressed in the last chapter, but it is worth noting that novelties were always misunderstood, and became the subject of superstition with no real intent to deceive. It just came from ingenious enthusiasm. In the 1950s, people truly believed that gamma radiation would be a good way to sterilise the dirty laundry.

Within a few years isotopes will turn up in many more expected or unexpected places — perhaps the slogan 'Gamma Washes Whiter', will become quite familiar to us when our ultra-sonic washing machines are equipped with some gamma source to sterilize shirts and socks and napkins.
— Egon Larsen, Atomic Energy, Pan Books, 1958, p. 136-7.

No thanks, Mr. Larsen!  In such a case, a little well-placed ingenuity could go a long way. Not long before he died in 1603, a physician named William Gilbert wrote De Magnete (All About Magnets). In it, he set out to debunk some of the wild beliefs sailors held about the lodestone or magnet. He wrote in Latin, but here is what he said, translated into (period) English:

But when I tried all these things, I found them to be false: for not onely breathing and belching upon the Loadstone after eating of Garlick, did not stop its vertues: but when it was all anoynted over with the juice of the Garlick, it did perform its office as well as if it had never been touched with it.
— William Gilbert (1540 - 1603),

Like new machines, new ideas and new discoveries, new materials brought new problems. Some of these came from a lack of standards, some from a lack of understanding, and some by the machinations of unscrupulous and clever rogues, because dangerous mixtures being sold as safe oil, all over the world. There were warnings in Scientific American, but it was also a problem in Australia.

Several varieties of paraffine oil were shown. These are now much used for lamps, and some are too volatile to be safe. The following simple rule is given for testing the volatility of such oils :— Place a few drops in a teaspoon, float the spoon on a cup of boiling water, and hold a lighted match an inch above it. If the vapour ignites, the liquid is not safe. 
— John Smith, 'The International Exhibition of 1862', Sydney Morning Herald, 1 August 1862, 2.

Here, the problem might have been careless producers, failing to remove all of the lighter fractions that we would now call petrol, when they fractionated “rock oil”. It was an old problem: adulteration in bread was known in ancient Rome, and bad ale was a problem in the time of Edward the Confessor. Tobias Smollett knew about it:

What passes for wine among us, is not the juice of the grape. It is an adulterous mixture, brewed up of nauseous ingredients, by dunces, who are bunglers in the art of poison-making …
— Tobias Smollett, The Expedition Of Humphry Clinker, 1771. 

I will come back to this in my next entry. I have been away hunting rocks and dingoes (with a camera), so I haven't been posting here, but I have been drafting, so there will be a few, close together.