THE YEAR 2000 PREDICTED

What would the world be like in that far-distant year of 2000? Hard to believe, but apparently everything will be powered by electricity – which, of course, will be transmitted through air.

One of the more interesting evenings in early 1906 Santa Rosa was the presentation by “the Wizard of Electricity” Reno B. Welbourn, a popular science speaker on the Lyceum and Chautauqua lecture circuits. What he demonstrated were machines that are toys today and principles which now are shown at high school science fairs, but in 1906, this was all gee-whiz stuff.

The review that appeared in the Press Democrat was skimpy, but a fuller description of “In the Year 2000” appeared in the Aug. 6, 1910 Nebraska State Journal. Welbourn blew a whistle into a microphone to power a light bulb; used an early version of the fax machine to transmit a picture of the President; and what was probably the dramatic highlight of the show, used a magnesium flare to simulate the sun, powering a solar cell to drive a motor, likely similar to this model Stirling engine. Not that the future would be a utopia; Welbourn also demonstrated weaponry, including a noiseless gun equipped with a silencer, and showed how explosives could be detonated at a distance using a solar cell.

Little of this tech was cutting edge, even in 1906; some inventions were already a decade old or more, such as the photovoltaic selenium cell and the fax (which he probably called a “scanning phototelegraph“). What made the presentation unique was how he tied each demonstration into wireless technology, either radio or Nikola Tesla’s experimental near field power transmission.

The wireless electricity angle never came to pass because the effect didn’t really work beyond laboratory conditions (good demonstration video here) but that wouldn’t be known until years later, and Welbourn can’t be faulted for believing the kinks would be ironed out someday. And Tesla was eventually proven right, in a way; his predictions of a wireless global communications network sounds very much like the real world that came about in the 21st century.

But Welbourn did overreach in his predictions of how all this would be tied together. According to the Nebraska paper, “airships and trains might be driven with power generated miles away and sent through the air…in the future a traveler in the Andes, far away from home, might cook his supper over an electric stove deriving its heat from Niagara power.” The newspaper also reported, “Electricity was generated from sound and a light was made to glow with the force of sound. A motor was driven by the same force. The sound was made by a whistle and an acoustic engine which was in tune with the whistle made the wheels turn. ‘The time will come soon,’ the speaker declared, ‘when a man will play a fiddle on his back porch while the music saws wood.’ The light generated was shown in a small bulb.”

Welbourn was obviously a good speaker, a good scientist, and a man of wit. His lecture also included a demonstration of a water engine (probably an early version of Tesla’s bladeless turbine), and predicted it would be the power generator of the future. But, he reassured readers of the Santa Rosa Republican, “he did not want to create any uneasiness among the wood dealers in Santa Rosa at the present time.”

WIZARD OF ELECTRICITY
Reno B. Welbourn Will Speak Here on Thursday Night

“In the Year 2000” is to be the topic of the lecture in this city on Thursday evening by Reno B. Welbourn. Mr. Welbourn is familiarly known as the “Wizard of Electricity,” and it is said that this effort will be one that will be very attractive and instructive for old and young. It is one of the attractions of the Lyceum course. The lecture will be delivered in the Athenaeum.

“In the Year 2000” is Mr. Welbourn’s greatest work. It was prepared at the request of hundreds of people from all parts of the country. The invariable questions brought forth by the previous efforts, night after night, were: “Why not give is a bit of prophecy, and show us what scientists are doing for the future[?] Why not let us into the secrets of the laboratory that we may cross the borderland of discovery and see in the experimental stage the wonderful things which future generations will be most likely to make practical?” The American people have always craved prophecy. The magazines are full of it. They recognize that all progress depends upon the ability of the people to look ahead and see what is coming. And so it came about that “In the Year 2000” was produced; but it required five years of unremitting labor to do it.

During these five years Mr. Welbourn enlisted the attention of some of the greatest men of science in the world, and was fortunate enough to secure the personal assistance of Nikola Tesla, Lord Kelvin, Sir William Crookes, Signor Marconi, and many others both in this country and Europe. No better testimonial of Mr. Welbourn’s ability and standing could possibly be written. He prophesies that those things will be which must be. He meets the great problems of life face to face and shows, by the most wonderful experiments ever produced on the lyceum stage, how they are going to be solved.

– Press Democrat, January 2, 1906

“TWO WIZARDS IN ONE TOWN”
Welbourn Connects His Name with that of Burbank in Pleasant Manner

Reno B. Welbourn, the wizard of electricty, arrived in Santa Rosa this morning and is spending the afternoon seeing the city, and arranging his outfit for the entertainment this evening.

In speaking on various matters in his room today, he seemed pleased with the fact that he was in the city of Luther Burbank, and ended with the saying, “Two wizards in one town.” Welbourn is a very interesting person to talk with, and is full of the experiences he has had with meeting most of the great scientists of the world. Speaking of the entertainment he stated that since he started on this tour he has been compelled to eliminate many of the numbers of the program as at first announced, but that he has replaced them with numbers that are far superior to the others.

Considerable was said during the conversation about the statement that he would illustrate the burning of water, and he said that this feature of the program would be presented, and that whether it would be the coming fuel or not was not for him to say, though he firmly believes that it will be realized some day. However, he did not want to create any uneasiness among the wood dealers in Santa Rosa at the present time. He is a firm believer in the future of the electric energy and looks forward to the day when it will be the material used for the lights, cooking and heating purposes of the public.

– Santa Rosa Republican, January 4, 1906

ELECTRICITY IN YEARS TO COME
An Instructive Lecture Delivered by Reno Welbourn Last Night

There was a large and appreciative audience present at the Athenaeum on Thursday evening when Reno B. Welbourn, “The Wizard of Electricity,” delivered his lecture “In the Year 2000.” The lecture was an illustration of the development of electricity. All of the various uses to which wireless electricity has already been put in the commercial world was shown. Wireless telegraph, telephone, fire and burglar alarms, automatic signals and lights, and the transmission of power were a few of the wonders demonstrated for the benefit of the audience.

The lecturer also explained sound, music, and light power which would run a motor, and numerous other marvels of present day knowledge of electricity which he declared would be worked into practical use in the years to come.

– Press Democrat, January 5, 1906

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SO LONG, GONE TO MEET JESUS

Right after Christmas, 1905, the Norton family of Santa Rosa sold their home, said their goodbyes, and headed east with their three children to meet the Lord in the upper Midwest. But the Nortons apparently hadn’t gotten the memo: The 1906 Dies Irae had been called off, and now the prophecy was an indefinite promise that Jesus would be coming back Real Soon Now. Before 1916, definitely.

The Nortons were bound for the House of David, a religious commune in Benton Harbor, Michigan that was founded just two years earlier by Benjamin Purnell, a charismatic Kentucky preacher who claimed that he and his wife were jointly the seventh and last “Messenger” who would presage the second coming of Christ. In 1902, Purnell prophesied that the millennium would come four years from then — later upped to 1916 or when all the signs would be in place, whichever came first — and that his “elect” (144,000 men and 144,000 women) would, at that instant, become immortals in the flesh. His followers were always seeking portents that those good End Times were really nigh, and they celebrated on hearing news of the 1906 earthquake. One wonders how the Nortons must have felt about the boast that a church leader had “called down” the quake, which also meant death for so many of their former neighbors in Santa Rosa.

The House of David never came close to the tipping point of that many converts; at most, there were around a thousand members in Benton Harbor (there were 500 living there at the time of the California quake, according to a newspaper account). But despite the smaller than expected numbers, the enterprise thrived, becoming almost entirely self-sufficient with a dairy, fruit and vegetable farms, a state-of-the-art sawmill, a jam and jelly factory, and much more. The operation was also profitable, thanks to all that free labor provided by converts (as well as the requirement that new acolytes, such as the family from Santa Rosa, turn over all earthly possessions), and the House of David would come to sprawl over 100,000 acres of prime land in southwest Michigan.

Articles on the “Flying Rollers,” as they were dubbed by newspapers of the day (it’s an obscure Old Testament reference unrelated to the “Holy Roller” nickname for Pentecostals), loved to mention that men were forbidden to shave or cut their hair and sometimes offered drawings, helpfully educating readers how a person of European descent might look like with long hair. But except for those who chanced to cross paths with Purnell’s small band of missionaries, few outsiders had actual contact with members of the faith. That all changed, starting in the 1920s.

After WWI, Americans were most likely to read about the House of David in their sports pages, as the church fielded a semi-pro baseball team that barnstormed around the country. Although players were an unusual sight with their often waist-length hair braided into a tight ponytail, it was a serious team, good enough to even win exhibition games against major league teams. They also wowed fans between innings with a fast-paced version of catch they called the “Pepper Game” — think of the Harlem Globetrotters with a baseball (short film clips here).

If you didn’t follow sports in the 1920s, perhaps you danced to the music of one of the House of David touring bands (although the musicians weren’t allowed to dance themselves). Both male and female bands hopped around the country, often playing large halls. The ten-piece jazz group, “House of David Syncopep Serenaders” even appeared at Harlem’s legendary Cotton Club.

But if you were anywhere near the upper Midwest, you probably thought of the House of David as a destination amusement park that attracted 200,000 visitors a year during the mid-1920s. The all-free entertainment included a vaudeville stage, bandstands for the House of David musicians, a 3,500 seat baseball field for the House of David non-touring teams, bowling alleys (they invented an automatic bowling pin setter) a miniature railway system with 11 rideable trains, and souvenir stands where artisan treasures and trinkets in jewelry, ceramics, leather or wood could be purchased and often customized with your name. And of course, there was an auditorium welcoming visitors in for religious lectures.

Give the Purnells their due; in only fifteen years or so, they transformed a fringe religious community that newspapers had pigeonholed as a “queer cult” into an entertainment empire worth a fortune. Their apocalyptic dogma was no longer mentioned in the press, and as far as I can tell, no newspaper mentioned that embarrassing detail about Jesus’ failure to show in 1916. Not that their religious past was entirely forgotten: As Purnell began collecting animals for his amusement park zoo, some papers printed rumors that the colony was building a modern Noah’s Ark. Ummm…..could they know something we don’t?

Legal troubles began as early as 1907, when the state of Michigan found that the House of David was less a religious association than a business, and forced it to change legal status. There were vague accusations against Purnell of “immorality” (read: statutory rape) from 1909 onwards, and by 1916, former members were charging in court that he was having sex with teenage girls, afterwards assigning them to marry randomly selected men in the colony. Of course, intimacy with their new husbands was forbidden because celibacy was a central tenet in Purnell’s gospel.

Similar suits followed, and Purnell went into hiding for four years. It later came out that he never left the compound during that time, but was an invalid under the care of a small cadre of trusted aides. Even most of his followers apparently thought he was away; it would be bad if the true believers saw the Seventh Messenger — a man they believed immortal — wasting away. Benjamin Purnell was fatally ill with a combination of TB, diabetes, and heart disease.

A 3-month trial in 1927 ensued, and the judge’s comprehensive 191-page decision (fully reprinted in the Benton Harbor newspaper and generally summarized in a period survey on religious cults) revealed that the House of David had many skeleton closets, and might have been more accurately called the Stalag of David. Children were poorly educated (Purnell’s own son could not read or write); members were not allowed to leave the grounds without passes from the office; all outgoing mail was read and censored; the women who managed housing, called “sweepers,” were expected to eavesdrop and inform on fellow members; detailed records were kept of the required monthly personal confessions; “scorpions” who dared to leave the cult were forced to sign blanket affidavits asserting there was no wrongdoing.

Most damning, however, was discovery that members were given “perjury books” instructing them how to testify regarding questions asked about “Benjamin and the girls.”

As it came out at the trial, a select group of girls age 12 and older always lived in rooms next to Purnell, and he socialized exclusively with them. Thirteen testified that he had coerced them into sexual intercourse via religious arguments, such as he was really “testing their faith” or suggesting they would become immortal as well. Judge Fead wrote in his judgement: “The general trend of the girls toward Benjamin’s quarters was too pronounced and regular to be entirely accidental….This is not true of all the girls but there was a general trend which brought a large number of them to Benjamin’s residence. It was not at all so with the boys…The conclusion is that Benjamin, from the founding of the colony, has had immoral relations with a large number of girls and women of the colony, and that such relations have been imposed on them by the force of Benjamin’s position and power as spiritual and temporal leader.”

The court decreed that the commune was to placed into receivership and Purnell banned from the premises, members allowed to visit him only under “proper protective conditions.” Purnell died eleven days later.

Your obl. Believe-it-or-Not footnote: In 1960, a sensationalized account of Purnell’s sexcapades appeared in a dimestore novel, “King of the Harem Heaven,” which was quickly pulled from the shelves after the colony sued the publisher for libel. But in 1972, Purnell’s great grandson was convicted of murder, despite a defense psychiatrist testifying that the defendant had read that book over and over as a youth, coming to identify with his ancestor as a “powerful, smart, and somewhat magical man,” the boy not realizing that the author was portraying Purnell as a psychopath.

SANTA ROSANS WELCOME SAVIOR
Are Preparing to Leave for Michigan Where They Will Meet Their Lord

There will be an exodus from this city Wednesday of parties who are going to meet the Lord. There are several Santa Rosans in the party and they are starting for Benton Harbor, Michigan, where they claim the Lord will appear shortly after the New Year, and where they hope to welcome the Heavenly Visitor. They are now disposing of their property and will hasten to the eastern city to extend a welcome to the Coming King.

The pilgrimage from this city will be headed by Mr. and Mrs. C. J. Norton, and they are very enthusiastic over the trip that they soon will take. The advent of the Savior has become their chief topic of conversation, and they are kept busy answering the various questions that are propounded to them by those who are curious about the purpose of their proposed trip east. It has been revealed to them that the Lord will reveal himself to a company of people composed of 144,000 of those who have been faithful, and that they will be the ones who are permitted to remain on the earth and inherit the same with all other good things that have been prepared for the truly good.

These Mr. Norton says, are the members of the house and Lineage of David who have been dispersed over the earth because of sin and now the time has arrived when they shall be gathered as the chosen ones, and those who do not avail themselves of this opportunity will be doomed to everlasting punishment. Mr. and Mrs. Norton expect to be joined on the trip by large companies from many cities of the state, including Sacramento, Oakland, San Francisco, Los Angeles and other points. The trip will be made with considerable anticipation, as would naturally follow from those who are anticipating the final coming of the Lord to gather in those who have gone to meet him, and who are looking for his coming.

Santa Rosa people will doubtless regret the loss of Mr. and Mrs. Norton from the community, but will rejoice that they are going to be privileged to meet their Lord, and hope that they may be found in readiness when the Master comes to reward his servants “whether it be noon or night.”

– Santa Rosa Republican, December 26, 1905

DEPARTED TO MEET THE LORD
Mr. and Mrs. Charles J. Norton Have Gone to Benton Harbor, Mich., Expecting to See Savior

Mr. and Mrs. Charles Norton departed on the afternoon train over the Southern Pacific en route to Benton Harbor, Michigan. They are going to meet the Lord as they believe, in that city, according to the story published in the Republican several evenings since. Mr. and Mrs. Norton are accompanied by their three young children, and were accompanied on the first stage of their journey celestial to Oakland pier by a number of relatives.

The people who left this afternoon are under the impression that the Lord will reveal himself to them and to his chosen people, numbering 144,000, at the Michigan city, early in the coming year. They have an abiding faith in this belief, and in carrying out their plans sacrificed their property here on Boyce street to obtain the finances needed to travel half way across the continent.

Mr. and Mrs. Norton assert that others from this city will also journey to meet the Lord in Michigan, and they expect to make their home there for some time to come. It is the belief of these people that they will be permitted to live and inherit the earth after the Lord has manifested himself to them in an unmistakable manner. The Santa Rosans believe they will be enaged [sic] from mortal to immortal on obtaining the expected vision of the Savior of Mankind.

– Santa Rosa Republican, December 28, 1905

Still Await His Coming

Letters have been received from Mr. and Mrs. Charles A. Norton who recently left here for Bar Harbor [sic], Mich., to join others of the same faith to “meet the Lord.” The letters are dated from the “House of David” and tell of the colony of the “Lord’s chosen” who have gathered from all parts of the earth to await His coming. The colony is said to have all the conveniences that “modern science and ingenuity has invented from the greatest to the smallest.”

– Press Democrat, January 17, 1906

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