Leonard Cheney

Leonard W. Cheney (c. 1822 - November 30, 1895) was an American carpenter, harbour pilot, and sometime inventor who was interested in such eccentric pursuits as perpetual motion and astrological prediction. Newspaper accounts published in relation to an adultery charge brought against him in 1860, for which he served a year in prison, disparaged Cheney as "a miserable crack-brained vagabond" who had "spent most of his unprofitable life in trying to invent perpetual motion," while a 1887 report on his prophecies of catastrophic upheaval and claims to have proof that the Moon, Mercury, Venus, and Mars are populated by a "much higher type" of humanity, based on a brief interview given from his seclusion at a run-down farm in Grafton County, New Hampshire, found him treated somewhat more generously, being described as "a strange man" and "a hard student, spending all his time, summer and winter, indoors, over his books and inventions."