APDL Eductation Resources/APDL Eductation Resources.iso/text/authors/poe/vonkemplen/VONKEMPLEN

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                         1850

           VON KEMPELEN AND HIS DISCOVERY

                by Edgar Allan Poe


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 Maelzel, 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-sojouners 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 an
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 any thing 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.


                             THE END