William Quisenberry

William Quisenberry was an American carpenter and mechanic resident at Pellville, Hancock Co., Kentucky who reportedly sought a patent for a perpetual motion machine in 1893.

Press Coverage

• "PERPETUAL MOTION. A HANCOCK COUNTY MAN THINKS HE HAS IT. A Rejected Application for a Patent Throws His Back on a Series of Bitter Disappointments.", Owensboro Messenger (Owensboro, KY): 8, 23 July 1893, https://www.newspapers.com/newspage/375728925/ 
  

  Mr. Wm. Quisenberry, of Pellville, was in the city yesterday on a mission that has wrecked stronger minds than his without ever accomplishing its object. Mr. Quisenberry thinks he has invented the "perpetual motion" machine that has been the delusion of cranks and the vain dream of half-cracked mechanics for the past hundred years, ever since it came to be believed that the government would pay a million dollars to the happy inventor who should solve the problem of making something out of nothing and causing wheels to go round of their own volition after an idea evolved from the doubtful celebration of some fellow who was fortunate enough to repeal the law of gravitation in the supreme legislature of his own intellect.

  Mr. Quisenberry, who is a carpenter and mechanic of upwards of fifty years standing, has got together an ingenious system of wheels and pulleys and weights and strings that come as nearly to going on forever as anything in the nature of the present laws of the universe can ever do. He sent an embodiment of his plan to Washington, and with the customary courtesy of the patent office he was written that it would be necessary to furnish drawings of his machine as well as a working model of the same which did not quite work under all the requirements of the case. His mission here yesterday was to get those drawings made. One draughtsman was too busy. Another could not get his limited mental caliber expanded to an extent sufficient, so he told the great inventor, to grasp the magnitude of the subject. Another was gone away on a summer vacation and would not be back for a couple of weeks. A fourth would not do the work for less than more ready money than Mr. Quisenberry had with him. With all these rebuffs striking him full in the face he left for home on the Falls of Rough train, thoroughly disheartened, but with firm faith in his discovery and a determination to succeed in getting theose momentous drawings made if it took all the money to be had in Hancock County.