Lester Hendershot: FUELLESS MOTOR, Free Energy and Suicide?

Making a motor that ran without fuel was the biggest mistake of his life...

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Let me tell you a story about a young man named Lester Hendershot. Lester's first major invention came at the age of 10. This was when he took the pedals from his father’s bike and put them on a hideous wooden structure. The makeshift car he created, although made from a pile of junk, could go for 300 yards on a single revolution of the pedals. Lester quickly became the most popular kid in the neighborhood. His curiosity and innovation carried with him through adulthood.

In his 20's he was shot by a man who wanted to rob him. The injury caused him to be stuck at home, so when his son begged him to make him a toy airplane, he decided to tinker with his dream of a fuelless motor.

Lester, who had always been fascinated by aviation, built a miniature model motor that was operated using a magnetic field device, which he also designed. He placed the tiny motor into the little airplane and flicked the switch to on. To his surprise, the propeller began spinning. The machine had no fuel and was not connected to any electrical current, but was running on its own accord from the earth’s currents. But there was a small problem: when the plane faced north or south, it worked, but when it faced east or west, it stopped. Hendershot realized what he needed to develop was not a magnetic motor, but a magnetic generator. He would spend the next two years working on perfecting the invention.

Lester then took his properly working toy plane motor to Bettis Field. There he met Barr Peat, manager of the airfield. Barr looked at it and was astounded. In fact, he was so astounded that he reached out to William B. Stout, head of the aviation division of Ford Motor Company.

In late January of 1928, Mr. Stout landed at Bettis Field. He confirmed the motor hummed with no connection through outside wires. He told the papers, “Like a radio tube picks sound waves from the air, the magneto picked up waves from the earth, which were similar to electricity.” He went on to say, “I inspected the makeup sufficiently to convince me that there was merit to the motor…” Hendershot was then invited to take the motor to Ford Motor’s lab in Dearborn, Michigan.

News of the device spread quickly. Major Lanphier (United States Army Air Corps) flew into Bettis and was said to be highly impressed with Hendershot’s invention. The Major invited Lester to Selfridge Air Force Base.

Around February 15th, the Selfridge trip was made. It was reported that, at Selfridge, on the orders of Major Lanphier, Lester’s motor was built from scratch by the military. Lester supervised the project from start to finish. The completed device was said to have tremendous power and easily made between 1,500 and 2,000 revolutions per minute. Major Lanphier was so impressed that he sent word for Colonel Charles Lindbergh to come see it. Lindberg was said to be astounded - so astounded that he set up a trip to New York in hopes of signing a deal to put the device into mass production.

On February 25th, 1928, Lindberg, accompanied by Lanphier, arrived in New York with a party of financial backers. Upon landing in New York, they went to Guggenheim estate at Port Washington.

The estate belonged to Daniel Guggenheim, a silver mining tycoon who had gifted the property to his son Harry F. Guggenheim. The Guggenheim family, particularly Daniel and Harry, was very active in advancing aviation technology in the United States during the 1920s, and they had just used their family fortune to establish the Daniel Guggenheim Fund for the Promotion of Aeronautics, so these financial backers and their connections seemed to be all that was needed to get Lester’s motor into production. The papers said Hendershot would be arriving separately in New York in another day.

It is unknown what happened in New York, but we do know another meeting was held at the Ford Motor Company laboratory in Dearborn, Michigan. We also know that come February 26th, 1928, electrical engineers reported to Washington, DC, government officials that Hendershot’s small size fuelless motor had been successfully tested. Commerce Department aviation officials told the media, “There was little doubt that Hendershot had found a method of obtaining convertible energy from terrestrial magnetism… whereby power could be supplied for a long period of time without fuel.”

Days later, the bad press began when assorted high-ups in the science community came out against the invention. They insisted you can’t get something out of nothing; therefore, the invention could not work. Dr. Hochstetter of Hochstetter Research Laboratories announced that they would not be able to generate enough electricity even to light a 1-volt flashlight. He proceeded to call it a hoax and said it isn’t a motor at all. At a press conference, journalists asked him why he was so interested in Hendershot, his demonstrations, and why he was so fiercely trying to discredit him. He answered: “I came to expose the fraud, which could destroy the belief in 1,000-year-old science.” He then accused 29-year-old Lester of “tarnishing the science”. But Hochstetter didn’t stop there. He got his hands on some early models of the motor, which were three years old. These outdated inventions contained pencil batteries. The doctor then displayed the models to the media as if they were the current models. The media then ran stories claiming the powerful motors were all fraud, powered by nothing more than some tiny batteries.

Lester responded to the bad press by saying, “Of course I had pencil cells in those things. I was experimenting… an effort to take electricity from the air. And I still believe I actually did take some power from the air but it had no practical use…”

He went on to remind the press that, in the past couple of months, he oversaw the military building his invention, and it worked without issue and without batteries. He added, “Here is my answer to all the critics - it works.”

Only ten days later, tragedy would strike. On March 10th, 1928, the inventor was reported to have been rushed to the hospital. The papers claimed he must have been shocked while working on his inventions. The alleged shock had left him partially paralyzed, his vocal cords temporarily severed.

Although unable to talk while in ER, Lester would later tell his son that while he was in the hospital, he was approached by a large corporation regarding his activities related to engines and generators. Out of fear, he refused to name the company. The son stated, “Because of the success of his generator, he could become a serious threat to the multi-million dollar industry”. The shadowy corporate hospital visitors gave him $25,000 to keep quiet and, most importantly, cease inventing for the next 20 years. Lester was not to finish this project nor start anew.

While Hendershot was recovering from his injuries, Guggenheim and a professor at Columbia University came out against his technology. They didn’t say it doesn’t work; they said it couldn’t work.

The reason it couldn’t work, the papers reported, was because “…such theories are believed contrary to known facts.” The bottom line was that science had ruled that there is no such thing as free energy of any form; therefore, without exception, no free energy device will ever work because it can’t. Not because it doesn’t, but because it can’t.

Come fall, Lester had recovered from the accident, and no sooner than he recovered, he was arrested. The arrest came in mid-September of 1928. He was charged with writing bad checks in Pennsylvania. Weeks later, on October 2nd, he was arrested again, this time on the charge of abusing his mother. Someone alleged the inventor had chased his mother into the street with a revolver. When the police arrived at the Hendershot home, they located a revolver, which was assumed to be the same gun from the report. It is unclear who contacted the authorities. It sounds like an alleged eyewitness.

The following day, October 3rd, Lester was accused of writing bad checks during his trip in Detroit. The media said he was currently in jail. Police were investigating the charges.

Months later, on November 12th, there was a bill before Congress to give Lester the opportunity to have the government review his invention. A panel of five government scientists were to look at the motor and have the final say on whether it is worthy of patent protection. The press said that four motors had already been built at Bettis and two were ready to ship to Washington, DC. Should the panel of engineers give the device the thumbs-up, Congress would provide Lester and his tech with a 17-year patent.

The same day, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported the motors that had been developed had achieved 60 horsepower at 1,450 revolutions per minute and that they continued operation for two weeks, without loss of speed or power. After two weeks, the magnetic core needed to be recharged, and the motors could run another two weeks.

What happened next, nobody knows. There is a complete and total media blackout. The next article about Lester would appear in a single paper a full two years later. This article was titled “Power Out of Nothing Machines: Perpetual Motion Hoaxes.”

The write-up pointed to the pencil batteries Dr. Hochstetter found inside old experimental devices created by Lester.

According to Lester’s son, decades after the 20-year silence demand had ended, in 1960, a last attempt was made to promote the generator when Dr. Lloyd Cannon of the US Navy “convinced Lester Hendershot that he had the opportunity to transfer the project to the U.S. Navy for research and development. Cannon said that he was the CEO of his own company, and explained that his group consisted of scientists from various fields who invested a lot of their time and knowledge in powerful research projects. The range of Cannon’s experimental work covered electronics, astronautics, free energy, motion, and parapsychology.

So, under the leadership of Lester, two models were built, and 100 copies of the 56-page proposal were printed to be sent to various government agents.” Hendershot believed this really was it - this was the time his incredible invention would change the world… but before he could get word back from any of the proposals, tragedy again struck.

On April 21st of 1961, the media reported Hendershot had been found dead by his wife. They said he had committed suicide by inhaling carbon monoxide from the exhaust of his car.

And now Mr. Hendershot, along with his invention, is censored from the internet.

Hendershot has no Wikipedia page, no space in high school or college textbooks, and is never spoken of aside from being laughed at on sites like Kook Science. Kook refers to him as an “exposed imposter” who had hidden little batteries inside devices. Kook does not mention that these supposedly concealed batteries duped the military, aviation experts, New York investors, and the entirety of Ford Motor Company’s aviation division. One would think that hidden batteries would be the very first thing these skilled men would look for in an invention of this nature. Kook also does not mention the shadow corporation that showed up at the hospital, the payout, or even the bizarre suicide that took place at a time when Lester was hopeful of his technology finally being brought to the world.

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