File:John Laney - The Hartford Republican (Hartford, Conn.) - 1915-11-19, p. 2.jpg

Summary
The Hartford republican. (Hartford, Ky.), 19 Nov. 1915. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress. 

Text
Death Ends Quest of New Power.

Recently when James Laney, ninety-three years old, was laid to rest in Crystal Lake cemetery at Minneapolis, a seventy-year quest for the secret of “perpetual motion” came to a fruitless end.

So close did he think himself to the secret at times that he trembled with expectancy. For seventy years, despite his disappointments, his mind aflame with ambition, Laney worked, thinking, experimenting.

Meanwhile this man, a Scotchman by birth and a stonemason by trade, whose only relaxation was reading the works of Bacon, Shakespeare, Coleridge, Wordsworth, smashed and destroyed contrivance after contrivance when it failed. Then with intensified energy he concentrated on a new idea.

“It almost worked.”

These three words tell the life story of a man gifted in some ways beyond his fellow men. John Laney wanted his name to go down in history, but always when he fancied he was at the very edge of accomplishment, it was only to find the something missing in a contrivance that “almost worked.”

“When I was just a little girl father used to have the kitchen table cleared for him when supper was over,” said Mrs. Lizzie Welton, at whose home the aged man spent his last days. ‘He had a groove in the table and a round stone ball that he made himself. He would roll this round and round and then mother would have to get up late at night and beg him to stop and rest.

“Father had a good education, mostly self-acquired. He loved the poets and he wrote several songs, one for the St. George Guards, of St. George, New Brunswick, where we once lived. He was a sculptor also.”

Outside the steps of the cozy cottage where Mrs. Welton lives, are two pieces of granite. One has on it figures of Hiawatha and Minnehaha, the other has on it a bear and two cubs. Inside the house, highly treasured, is a chain, five feet long, with many links and an anchor at their end that was cut with a jack-knife from a solid piece of wood, many small mementoes remain.

But before he died John Laney destroyed all charts or mechanical contrivances he had made in search for perpetual motion. One day he said to his daughter:

“Perpetual motion will yet be found. There is no doubt of it. When it is found the world will be astounded, not alone by the stupendous changes that it will bring in all industrial life, but by the simplicity of it. Millions will wonder why no one ever thought of it before.”

“I am not an old man,” he would often say. “I saw the coming of the railroads, the telegraph, the automobile and the more wonderful things of later years. I predicted, back in 1850, that the world would one day see the horseless wagon, and it is here. Ah, if I could only just get the one little missing link.

But near-perpetual motion was the best he could do. Everything that he started, and he had some contrivances made of balls and weights that kept moving of their own volition for a long time, stopped eventually.

One day he broke down. “When I came on earth I had nothing,” he said, sobbing, “and now I am an old man and I have nothing.”

But he really had much. He had a good home and many loving friends and was respected by all who knew him.