The height of Harriet Hosmer’s career was in the 1850s and ’60s, before she turned 40. Her decline in popularity in later years came about for a variety of reasons, including changing American tastes after the Civil War, changes in Rome after Italian unification, and the attention Hosmer devoted to her relationship with Louisa, Lady Ashburton. But another reason was that Hosmer turned much of her creative energy to her attempts to create a perpetual motion machine. She was not alone in the endeavor–many other people were attempting to the same thing. But Hosmer spent decades on this project, eventually proclaiming, ” I would rather have my fame rest upon the discovery of perpetual motion than upon my achievement in art.” Some of her friends were less than enthusiastic; the Irish reformer and author Frances Power Cobbe bemoaned the fact that “She was lured away from sculpture by some invention of her own of a mechanical kind over which many years of her life have been lost.”
One of my happiest moments as a researcher came when I found the drawings of the invention Hosmer had submitted to the British Patent Office at the New York Public Library’s Science and Industry branch. I had gone in the hopes of learning how I would go about contacting the British Patent Office to begin a search. But I lucked into asking a very knowledgeable, very helpful librarian, who knew the library held the patent office’s Official Journal, which includes the descriptions and illustrations submitted with patents. It took him a while to find them, as they had been miscataloged, but he finally dug out the volumes I needed, which clearly no one had looked at in decades. They were covered with dust. While I had read her descriptions of the machine, it was amazing to see illustrations of them. I couldn’t believe the information was right here in the New York.
The patent below is the one she submitted in 1881.
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Hi! Do you know where Hosmer’s quote (“I would rather have my fame rest upon the discovery of perpetual motion than upon my achievement in art.”) comes from? I’ve been trying to find the source for my dissertation and I’m struggling! Would be so grateful if you were able to point me to it.
[…] But the fourth and final article—ah, that’s the cream of the crop. It’s a pair of letters published in the New York Evening Post, although I very nearly missed the first one. That would have been a shame, because it was written by none other than John Gamgee! His final defense of his machine, along with the following “LAST WORD ON THE OTHER SIDE”, are not to be missed. Note the references to two other contemporary attempts at perpetual motion: the Keely motor and Harriet Hosmer’s magnetic perpetual motion machine. […]