Paul Collins - Banvard's Folly - Thirteen Tales of People Who Didn't Change the World

pounds: still lighter, but a significant closing of the gap. Encouraged by these results, Pleasonton took an ailing newborn calf and put it in a chromatic pen, and sure enough, it grew rapidly into a fine specimen.

Word got out among Philadelphians of the strange experiment being conducted by their garrulous neighbor, and Pleasonton was always quick to recommend that others try it--he soon had one neighbor raising chickens with blue light.

Inevitably an invitation landed on his doorstep.

1390 Walnut St., April 27th, 1871

MY DEAR GENERAL:

Will it suit you, and will you do us the favor to explain your process of using glass in improving the stock to the Philadelphia Society for Promoting Agriculture, on Wednesday next, the 3rd of May, at eleven o'clock A.m., at their Room, S.w. corner of Ninth and Walnut Streets (entrance on Ninth Street)? You were kind enough to express to me, in conversation, your willingness to give us the result of your experiments. Yours, very truly, W.h.

DRAYTON, PRESIDENT

The members of the society got a little more than they'd bargained for; when Pleasonton showed up at their offices the next week, he had a speech that ran to about twenty dense pages.

But as his speech wore on, Pleasonton turned to his audience and launched into another topic that fascinated him just as much: electricity. He had developed some theories that were ... unique. By Pleasonton's reckoning, just about every natural phenomenon relied on electricity at some level. Diamond formation, planetary rotation, all heat and weather, and all organic processes were directly based on it, as far as he was concerned.

"What do you suppose has produced the giant trees of California?" the bearded old man roared at his startled listeners. "Electricity!"

This is not entirely untrue; any chemical compound relies on a transfer of electrons in order to bond, but this could be called an electrical phenomenon only on the most minute level. Pleasonton was a big-picture man: he was talking about very large amounts of electricity. And, not coincidentally, it turned out that blue light and electricity were intimately connected.

Pleasonton explained that light hitting blue glass at 186,000 miles a second, upon which all colors but blue and indigo were stopped, generated a tremendous amount of power:

This sudden impact of intercepted rays on the outer surface of the blue glass with this inconceivable speed, produces a large amount of [electrical]

friction. ... This current of electromagnetism, when allowed to fall upon the spinal column of an animal, is conducted by its nerves to the brain, and thence is distributed over its whole nervous system, imparting vigour to all the organs of the body.

And if such electromagnetic benefits could accrue for plants and dumb beasts, who could imagine the effect on humans?

For a country that had just lost a sizable portion of its young men, General Pleasonton offered a blue future of vitality renewed: a race of true giants, strapping in strength and boundless in energy.

The result would prove to be one of the greatest blessings ever conferred on mankind. What strength of vitality could be infused into the feeble young, the mature invalid, and the decrepit octogenarian! How rapidly might the various races of our domestic animals be multiplied, and how much might their individual portions be enlarged!

Pleasonton walked away from the society meeting with a greater sense of purpose than he had ever had before. He went to the printers and immediately had the speech set into type and printed up as a pamphlet; when it was ready, he carpet-bombed the intelligentsia of the country with copies.

Cases began to pour in. That same summer a friend's wife became gravely ill with a wasting illness. His friend, a doctor, was despondent. Pleasonton went up to see the wife and talk sense into her. What you need, he said, is to go to French, Richards and Co., buy yourself a big pane of blue glass, and put it right there in your parlor window. And then you need to sit under it for at least two hours a day.

She gave it a try.

When Pleasonton came back a week later, he met a changed woman, as he later recalled:

[She said:] "Do you know that when I put my naked foot under the blue light, all my pains in the limb cease?" I inquired, "Is that a fact?" She assured me that it was, and then added, "My maid tells me that my hair is growing not merely longer on my head, but in places there which were bald new hair is coming out thick."

Her husband was ebullient, and pronounced it as "the greatest stimulant and most powerful tonic that I know of in medicine"--and then wondered aloud whether it might work on cholera.

It certainly was a panacea, for soon afterward, Pleasonton's own son was suddenly lamed by a nerve injury to his hip. The young man was made to sit out under a plate of blue glass each day, bathing his hip and his spine in the cool rays. Three weeks later, he was healed.

The old general was now emboldened enough by his success that his next step became clear: he would patent visible blue light.

Pleasonton sent his letter to the Patent Office at the Department of the Interior on August 14, and waited patiently for the patent examiner to come visit his experimental garden. Finally, late in the month, Professor Brainerd of the Patent Office arrived in Philadelphia on the one-o'clock train. He examined the general's fabled grapery and went out to his farm to see his piggery and his wondrously restored calves and lambs. It was rare enough for an examiner to pay a personal visit to an applicant, but Brainerd was so impressed that he stayed three days as Pleasonton's guest. The last day he had three agricultural professors reexamine the grapery with him.

"General," Professor Brainerd said as he prepared to leave for Washington,

"everything you have alleged on this subject of blue light is confirmed."

Pleasonton swelled with pride.

"If my investigation should establish the verity of your statements, you have made the most important discovery of this century--transcending in importance even that of Morse's Telegraph, which, at best, furnished only a means of communication with distant places, while your discovery could be brought home to every living object on the planet. ... Your patent would be one of the most valuable that had ever been issued in the United States."

And with that, he left.

On September 26, 1871, General A. J. Pleasonton of Philadelphia was awarded U.s. patent 119,242 for Improvement in Accelerating the Growth of Plants and Animals.

Pleasonton's patent papers for a "cerulean process" were passed around the

Patent Office with great interest; the commissioner read over them and passed them along to the Board of Public Works, which was planning to build a grapery for President Grant. Pleasonton had already published an article on blue light in the August 1871 issue of Gardener's Monthly, and a reader in France was so impressed that at the next meeting of the Acad@emies des Sciences he had an extract of the article printed in Comptes Rendus; a pirated and unattributed French translation of the Philadelphia Society for Promoting Agriculture speech turned up soon afterward. Requests to Pleasonton for his English-language pamphlet soon came from as far away as South Africa.

But the first enthusiastic adopters of the blue light cure were Pleasonton's fellow Philadelphians. One after another, they traipsed down to the glaziers at French, Richards and Co., requesting blue glass to be fitted into their front parlors and sitting rooms. One man set a lemon tree under the glass, but failed to place it in the full view; the branches that were blue-lit grew lush and heavy with fruit, but the branches that were not withered and died.

Another man's ailing canary had stopped singing; placed under blue glass, it commenced singing more strongly and sweetly than ever before. Chickens and lambs raised under blue glass grew faster and fatter than before; friends wrote to Pleasonton telling him of how blue glass had rid them of rheumatism.