by Poe · Cluster: Money and Gold · Poverty · Imprisonment
Abstract
A pseudo-scientific hoax-tale presenting Von Kempelen’s alchemical discovery of turning lead into gold and its economic consequences. Themes of gold, science, satire and appearance vs reality.
Readability (prose)51.3 Flesch ease13.4 FK grade16.8 Fog12% complex29.5 words/sent
Connections
Archetypes: Trickster Motifs: Money and Gold Themes & Concepts: Appearance vs Reality, Deception, Satire of Society Forms & Genres: Satire, Short Story
Testo integrale / Full text
After the very minute and elaborate paper by Arago, to say nothing of the summary in ‘Silliman’s Journal,’ with the detailed statement just published by Lieutenant Maury, it will not be supposed, of course, that in offering a few hurried remarks in reference to Von Kempelen’s discovery, I have any design to look at the subject in a scientific point of view. My object is simply, in the first place, to say a few words of Von Kempelen himself (with whom, some years ago, I had the honor of a slight personal acquaintance), since every thing which concerns him must necessarily, at this moment, be of interest; and, in the second place, to look in a general way, and speculatively, at the results of the discovery.
It may be as well, however, to premise the cursory observations
which I have to offer, by denying, very decidedly, what seems to
be a general impression (gleaned, as usual in a case of this
kind, from the newspapers), viz.: that this discovery, astounding
as it unquestionably is, is unanticipated.
By reference to the ‘Diary of Sir Humphrey Davy’ (Cottle and
Munroe, London, pp. 150), it will be seen at pp. 53 and 82, that
this illustrious chemist had not only conceived the idea now in
question, but had actually made no inconsiderable progress,
experimentally, in the very identical analysis now so
triumphantly brought to an issue by Von Kempelen, who although he
makes not the slightest allusion to it, is, without doubt (I say
it unhesitatingly, and can prove it, if required), indebted to
the ‘Diary’ for at least the first hint of his own undertaking.
The paragraph from the ‘Courier and Enquirer,’ which is now going
the rounds of the press, and which purports to claim the
invention for a Mr. Kissam, of Brunswick, Maine, appears to me, I
confess, a little apocryphal, for several reasons; although there
is nothing either impossible or very improbable in the statement
made. I need not go into details. My opinion of the paragraph is
founded principally upon its manner. It does not look true.
Persons who are narrating facts, are seldom so particular as Mr.
Kissam seems to be, about day and date and precise location.
Besides, if Mr. Kissam actually did come upon the discovery he
says he did, at the period designated—nearly eight years ago—how
happens it that he took no steps, on the instant, to reap the
immense benefits which the merest bumpkin must have known would
have resulted to him individually, if not to the world at large,
from the discovery? It seems to me quite incredible that any man
of common understanding could have discovered what Mr. Kissam
says he did, and yet have subsequently acted so like a baby—so
like an owl—as Mr. Kissam admits that he did. By-the-way, who is
Mr. Kissam? and is not the whole paragraph in the ‘Courier and
Enquirer’ a fabrication got up to ‘make a talk’? It must be
confessed that it has an amazingly moon-hoaxy-air. Very little
dependence is to be placed upon it, in my humble opinion; and if
I were not well aware, from experience, how very easily men of
science are mystified, on points out of their usual range of
inquiry, I should be profoundly astonished at finding so eminent
a chemist as Professor Draper, discussing Mr. Kissam’s (or is it
Mr. Quizzem’s?) pretensions to the discovery, in so serious a
tone.
But to return to the ‘Diary’ of Sir Humphrey Davy. This pamphlet
was not designed for the public eye, even upon the decease of the
writer, as any person at all conversant with authorship may
satisfy himself at once by the slightest inspection of the style.
At page 13, for example, near the middle, we read, in reference
to his researches about the protoxide of azote: ‘In less than
half a minute the respiration being continued, diminished
gradually and were succeeded by analogous to gentle pressure on
all the muscles.’ That the respiration was not ‘diminished,’ is
not only clear by the subsequent context, but by the use of the
plural, ‘were.’ The sentence, no doubt, was thus intended: ‘In
less than half a minute, the respiration [being continued, these
feelings] diminished gradually, and were succeeded by [a
sensation] analogous to gentle pressure on all the muscles.’ A
hundred similar instances go to show that the MS. so
inconsiderately published, was merely a rough note-book, meant
only for the writer’s own eye, but an inspection of the pamphlet
will convince almost any thinking person of the truth of my
suggestion. The fact is, Sir Humphrey Davy was about the last man
in the world to commit himself on scientific topics. Not only had
he a more than ordinary dislike to quackery, but he was morbidly
afraid of appearing empirical; so that, however fully he might
have been convinced that he was on the right track in the matter
now in question, he would never have spoken out, until he had
every thing ready for the most practical demonstration. I verily
believe that his last moments would have been rendered wretched,
could he have suspected that his wishes in regard to burning this
‘Diary’ (full of crude speculations) would have been unattended
to; as, it seems, they were. I say ‘his wishes,’ for that he
meant to include this note-book among the miscellaneous papers
directed ‘to be burnt,’ I think there can be no manner of doubt.
Whether it escaped the flames by good fortune or by bad, yet
remains to be seen. That the passages quoted above, with the
other similar ones referred to, gave Von Kempelen the hint, I do
not in the slightest degree question; but I repeat, it yet
remains to be seen whether this momentous discovery itself
(momentous under any circumstances) will be of service or
disservice to mankind at large. That Von Kempelen and his
immediate friends will reap a rich harvest, it would be folly to
doubt for a moment. They will scarcely be so weak as not to
‘realize,’ in time, by large purchases of houses and land, with
other property of intrinsic value.
In the brief account of Von Kempelen which appeared in the ‘Home
Journal,’ and has since been extensively copied, several
misapprehensions of the German original seem to have been made by
the translator, who professes to have taken the passage from a
late number of the Presburg ‘Schnellpost.’ ‘Viele’ has evidently
been misconceived (as it often is), and what the translator
renders by ‘sorrows,’ is probably ‘lieden,’ which, in its true
version, ‘sufferings,’ would give a totally different complexion
to the whole account; but, of course, much of this is merely
guess, on my part.
Von Kempelen, however, is by no means ‘a misanthrope,’ in
appearance, at least, whatever he may be in fact. My acquaintance
with him was casual altogether; and I am scarcely warranted in
saying that I know him at all; but to have seen and conversed
with a man of so _prodigious_ a notoriety as he has attained, or
_will_ attain in a few days, is not a small matter, as times go.
“The Literary World” speaks of him, confidently, as a native of
Presburg (misled, perhaps, by the account in “The Home Journal”)
but I am pleased in being able to state _positively_, since I
have it from his own lips, that he was born in Utica, in the
State of New York, although both his parents, I believe, are of
Presburg descent. The family is connected, in some way, with
Mäelzel, of Automaton-chess-player memory. In person, he is short
and stout, with large, _fat_, blue eyes, sandy hair and whiskers,
a wide but pleasing mouth, fine teeth, and I think a Roman nose.
There is some defect in one of his feet. His address is frank,
and his whole manner noticeable for bonhomie. Altogether, he
looks, speaks, and acts as little like ‘a misanthrope’ as any man
I ever saw. We were fellow-sojourners for a week about six years
ago, at Earl’s Hotel, in Providence, Rhode Island; and I presume
that I conversed with him, at various times, for some three or
four hours altogether. His principal topics were those of the
day; and nothing that fell from him led me to suspect his
scientific attainments. He left the hotel before me, intending to
go to New York, and thence to Bremen; it was in the latter city
that his great discovery was first made public; or, rather, it
was there that he was first suspected of having made it. This is
about all that I personally know of the now immortal Von
Kempelen; but I have thought that even these few details would
have interest for the public.
There can be little question that most of the marvellous rumors
afloat about this affair are pure inventions, entitled to about
as much credit as the story of Aladdin’s lamp; and yet, in a case
of this kind, as in the case of the discoveries in California, it
is clear that the truth may be stranger than fiction. The
following anecdote, at least, is so well authenticated, that we
may receive it implicitly.
Von Kempelen had never been even tolerably well off during his
residence at Bremen; and often, it was well known, he had been
put to extreme shifts in order to raise trifling sums. When the
great excitement occurred about the forgery on the house of
Gutsmuth & Co., suspicion was directed toward Von Kempelen, on
account of his having purchased a considerable property in
Gasperitch Lane, and his refusing, when questioned, to explain
how he became possessed of the purchase money. He was at length
arrested, but nothing decisive appearing against him, was in the
end set at liberty. The police, however, kept a strict watch upon
his movements, and thus discovered that he left home frequently,
taking always the same road, and invariably giving his watchers
the slip in the neighborhood of that labyrinth of narrow and
crooked passages known by the flash name of the ‘Dondergat.’
Finally, by dint of great perseverance, they traced him to a
garret in an old house of seven stories, in an alley called
Flatzplatz,—and, coming upon him suddenly, found him, as they
imagined, in the midst of his counterfeiting operations. His
agitation is represented as so excessive that the officers had
not the slightest doubt of his guilt. After hand-cuffing him,
they searched his room, or rather rooms, for it appears he
occupied all the mansarde.
Opening into the garret where they caught him, was a closet, ten
feet by eight, fitted up with some chemical apparatus, of which
the object has not yet been ascertained. In one corner of the
closet was a very small furnace, with a glowing fire in it, and
on the fire a kind of duplicate crucible—two crucibles connected
by a tube. One of these crucibles was nearly full of lead in a
state of fusion, but not reaching up to the aperture of the tube,
which was close to the brim. The other crucible had some liquid
in it, which, as the officers entered, seemed to be furiously
dissipating in vapor. They relate that, on finding himself taken,
Kempelen seized the crucibles with both hands (which were encased
in gloves that afterwards turned out to be asbestic), and threw
the contents on the tiled floor. It was now that they hand-cuffed
him; and before proceeding to ransack the premises they searched
his person, but nothing unusual was found about him, excepting a
paper parcel, in his coat-pocket, containing what was afterward
ascertained to be a mixture of antimony and some unknown
substance, in nearly, but not quite, equal proportions. All
attempts at analyzing the unknown substance have, so far, failed,
but that it will ultimately be analyzed, is not to be doubted.
Passing out of the closet with their prisoner, the officers went
through a sort of ante-chamber, in which nothing material was
found, to the chemist’s sleeping-room. They here rummaged some
drawers and boxes, but discovered only a few papers, of no
importance, and some good coin, silver and gold. At length,
looking under the bed, they saw a large, common hair trunk,
without hinges, hasp, or lock, and with the top lying carelessly
across the bottom portion. Upon attempting to draw this trunk out
from under the bed, they found that, with their united strength
(there were three of them, all powerful men), they ‘could not
stir it one inch.’ Much astonished at this, one of them crawled
under the bed, and looking into the trunk, said:
‘No wonder we couldn’t move it—why it’s full to the brim of old
bits of brass!’
Putting his feet, now, against the wall so as to get a good
purchase, and pushing with all his force, while his companions
pulled with all theirs, the trunk, with much difficulty, was slid
out from under the bed, and its contents examined. The supposed
brass with which it was filled was all in small, smooth pieces,
varying from the size of a pea to that of a dollar; but the
pieces were irregular in shape, although more or less
flat-looking, upon the whole, “very much as lead looks when
thrown upon the ground in a molten state, and there suffered to
grow cool.” Now, not one of these officers for a moment suspected
this metal to be anything _but_ brass. The idea of its being
_gold_ never entered their brains, of course; how _could_ such a
wild fancy have entered it? And their astonishment may be well
conceived, when the next day it became known, all over Bremen,
that the “lot of brass” which they had carted so contemptuously
to the police office, without putting themselves to the trouble
of pocketing the smallest scrap, was not only gold—real gold—but
gold far finer than any employed in coinage—gold, in fact,
absolutely pure, virgin, without the slightest appreciable alloy.
I need not go over the details of Von Kempelen’s confession (as
far as it went) and release, for these are familiar to the
public. That he has actually realized, in spirit and in effect,
if not to the letter, the old chimaera of the philosopher’s
stone, no sane person is at liberty to doubt. The opinions of
Arago are, of course, entitled to the greatest consideration; but
he is by no means infallible; and what he says of bismuth, in his
report to the Academy, must be taken _cum grano salis_. The
simple truth is, that up to this period all analysis has failed;
and until Von Kempelen chooses to let us have the key to his own
published enigma, it is more than probable that the matter will
remain, for years, in statu quo. All that as yet can fairly be
said to be known is, that ‘Pure gold can be made at will, and
very readily from lead in connection with certain other
substances, in kind and in proportions, unknown.’
Speculation, of course, is busy as to the immediate and ultimate
results of this discovery—a discovery which few thinking persons
will hesitate in referring to an increased interest in the matter
of gold generally, by the late developments in California; and
this reflection brings us inevitably to another—the exceeding
inopportuneness of Von Kempelen’s analysis. If many were
prevented from adventuring to California, by the mere
apprehension that gold would so materially diminish in value, on
account of its plentifulness in the mines there, as to render the
speculation of going so far in search of it a doubtful one—what
impression will be wrought now, upon the minds of those about to
emigrate, and especially upon the minds of those actually in the
mineral region, by the announcement of this astounding discovery
of Von Kempelen? a discovery which declares, in so many words,
that beyond its intrinsic worth for manufacturing purposes
(whatever that worth may be), gold now is, or at least soon will
be (for it cannot be supposed that Von Kempelen can long retain
his secret), of no greater value than lead, and of far inferior
value to silver. It is, indeed, exceedingly difficult to
speculate prospectively upon the consequences of the discovery,
but one thing may be positively maintained—that the announcement
of the discovery six months ago would have had material influence
in regard to the settlement of California.
In Europe, as yet, the most noticeable results have been a rise
of two hundred per cent. in the price of lead, and nearly
twenty-five per cent. that of silver.