A SECOND was to manufacture butter out of beech trees;* a third was for a wheel for driving machinery, which once started would go on forever, thereby furnishing a cheap perpetual motion.* A fourth projector, going beyond all the rest in audacity, had the impudence to offer stock for sale in an enterprise “which shall be revealed hereafter.” He found the public so gullible and so greedy that he sold £2000 worth of the new stock in the course of a single morning.* He then prudently disappeared with the cash, and the unfortunate investors found that where he went with their money was not among the things to “be revealed hereafter.”
The narrow passage leading to the London stock exchange was crowded all day long with struggling fortune hunters, both men and women. Suddenly, when the excitement was at its height, the bubble burst, as Law’s scheme in France had a little earlier. Great numbers of people were hopelessly ruined, and the cry for vengeance was as loud as the bids for stocks had once been.
This one is not quite as absurd as Montgomery supposed. Beech nuts are still sometimes pressed to make cheap vegetable oil, for lamps, haircare and culinary use; a beech nut margarine would be a brave investment, even so. Coffee might have made a better project: the nuts are quite bitter and astringent, and in the late Victorian age were quite in vogue roasted as a substitute.
Perpetual motion is now recognised as a scientific impossibility. In 1775, the Royal Academy of Sciences in Paris let it be known that no further consideration would be given to supposed perpetual motion machines.
Close to £300,000 in today’s money. See Measuring Worth.