Hendershot's Fuelless Motor: Claims, Witnesses and the Hochstetter Counter-Demonstration

This source is a compilation of 1928 press reports on Lester J. Hendershot's "fuelless motor," together with a later retrospective account written by his son, Mark M. Hendershot. It is a record of claims, demonstrations and counter-claims, not a record of verified performance. The central subject is a small electromagnetic device that Hendershot said drew usable power from the Earth's magnetic field. The compilation preserves the New York Times coverage of February and November 1928, quoted remarks by witnesses, and the son's narrative of the Selfridge Field tests and the Pittsburgh counter-demonstration staged by Dr. F. W. Hochstetter.

What the device was claimed to be

Hendershot described his invention as a "magnetic induction" motor. According to the November 1928 New York Times report, it had "no visible means of power": it obtained an initial impulse from a precharged magnetic core and its "secondary and greatest power impulse by magnetic induction from the earth." The son's account gives the mechanism in more detail. Hendershot had taken up flying in 1925 and first tried to build a reliable compass. He reasoned that a magnetic compass does not point to true north and that an induction compass had to be reset before each flight. Experimenting with a pre-magnetized core, he found that cutting the same line of magnetic force north and south gave an indicator of true north, while cutting the field east and west produced rotary motion. On that principle he turned from the compass to a generator.

The February 28, 1928 New York Times headline summarized the claimed mechanism: shifting the magnet's field to east and west causes rotary motion. The first model was built around a ring magnet less than three inches in diameter, with coils wound around it in a manner only Hendershot knew and another set of coils passing through the center. The second model used a ring magnet with a seven-inch outside diameter and a six-inch inside diameter.

The Selfridge Field demonstrations

The demonstrations took place at Selfridge Field, Michigan, under Major Thomas G. Lanphier, commandant of the field and leader of the First Pursuit Group. Hendershot's associate D. Barr Peat, manager of Bettis Field at McKeesport, was present. William B. Stout, president of Stout Air Service and designer of the all-metal plane used by Ford, called the demonstration "very impressive" and "actually uncanny," and said he would like to see a large model designed to lift an airplane. He described the model as about the size of the tiny motors used in vacuum cleaners, and reported being told that the novel feature was a previously unknown manner of winding the armature.

Lanphier's reported performance figures are the most concrete in the compilation. He said the first model, hooked to a small sewing-machine motor, not only ran the motor but burned it out, and that it kept a 6-watt lamp going for 26 hours. The larger model, which he helped build from parts picked up at the field, lit two 110-watt lamps; he judged it had "enough electricity in this second model to kill a man." Asked whether the device was stealing power from a radio broadcasting station, Lanphier said they had thought of that, but ran it for 26 hours when stations were transmitting and when they were not, with the same results.

The son's account adds that Hendershot first showed the military how his model worked, then supervised Army technicians in building their own model, which "worked perfectly." Lanphier is quoted saying that electrical men laughed at the way it was wired and said it would not work — "Then it DID work." The son reports that the technicians' model reached as high as 1,800 revolutions per minute and that it was estimated the motors would run 2,000 to 3,000 hours before the magnet center needed recharging. He also reports later models lighting a 120-volt bulb and a table radio simultaneously, and running a television set and a sewing machine for hours in the family living room.

The generator-versus-motor correction

A February 27, 1928 New York Times report is explicit: the Hendershot "fuelless motor" is "not a motor at all but a generator," according to Lanphier. The son makes the same correction, noting that newspapers called the earlier invention a "motor" but that it was actually a generator powered by the Earth's magnetic field. This distinction matters because the press framing and the technical description point in different directions: a motor consumes power to produce motion, while the claim here is that the device produces electrical power from an ambient field. The compilation preserves both usages, and the discrepancy should be kept visible rather than smoothed over.

The Congressional patent proposal

In November 1928 the New York Times reported that Representative M. Clyde Kelly of Pennsylvania planned to seek a Congressional patent for the device if five scientists approved it as practical. A Congressional patent would give the patentee full protection for 17 years. Hendershot said several motors had been built and that one developing 60 horsepower had run for two weeks without recharging the magnetic core. The source reports only a proposed Congressional patent; it does not report that any patent was granted.

The Hochstetter counter-demonstration

Dr. F. W. Hochstetter of the Hochstetter Research Laboratories in Pittsburgh called a news conference and displayed models he said were the "Hendershot Motor." When they would not work, he declared Hendershot a fake and said the motors worked only because of power from concealed pencil batteries. He said his models would not generate enough electricity to "light a 1-volt fire-fly" or "stitch a fairy's britches." Asked why he was so interested in discrediting the demonstrations, he said he had "come to expose a fraud which would be capable of destroying faith in science for 1,000 years," and claimed his only motive was that "pure science might shine forth untarnished."

Hendershot's response, as reported by his son, was a partial admission: "Dr. Hochstetter is correct, to a degree. I have concealed batteries in a model or two because I found that I could not trust some of my visitors, and I also had evidence that someone had tampered with my work." He said he put batteries in on occasion to mislead intruders. He then pointed to the Army-built model as his defense: "I didn't build the motor that was demonstrated at Detroit. That was built by Army men under orders from Major Lanphier and under my direction. I didn't even so much as wind the motor. They built the motor and it works."

The son's account characterizes the pro-Hendershot reading of Hochstetter's motive: it seemed obvious to supporters that someone wanted the innovation ridiculed. That is an assertion about motive, not an established fact, and the source offers no evidence of who, if anyone, was behind Hochstetter.

Lindbergh's peripheral role

The press headlines of the period tied the story to Charles A. Lindbergh — "Gasless Motor Tested for Lindy," "Lindy Inspects Fuelless Motor for Airplanes," "Lindbergh Tries Motor That The Earth Runs." One story said Lindbergh and Lanphier were flying to New York to show the motor to the Guggenheim Foundation for the Promotion of Aeronautics. The son's account states that anything connected with Lindbergh was front-page news whether he had an active interest or merely happened to be in the area, and that later reports emphasized Lindbergh had nothing whatsoever to do with the experiments and had only witnessed a couple of demonstrations as a guest of his friend Lanphier. Lanphier is quoted directly: "Lindbergh has nothing to do with it, although he saw it." The headline framing is therefore not evidence of participation.

Evidence quality and unresolved questions

Everything in this compilation is testimonial or press-reported. There is no independent instrumented measurement, no third-party replication under controlled conditions, and no patent grant. The strongest single point in Hendershot's favor is the claim that Army technicians built a model themselves under Lanphier's orders — but that too is a claim by interested parties, and the compilation does not include an Army test report. The Hochstetter counter-demonstration is itself unverified: his models may not have replicated Hendershot's design, and a failed replica is not proof that the original was fraudulent. Hendershot's admission that he concealed batteries in "a model or two" cuts against his own claim while he simultaneously cites the Army-built model as proof, an internal tension the record leaves unresolved. Whether any patent was ever granted to Hendershot is not answered here; the source reports only the proposed Congressional patent.

Related work

The dossier sits alongside other ambient-energy claims of the same era in this archive, notably the Radiant Energy Receiver Claim attributed to T. Henry Moray: same period, same structure of a device said to draw power from an ambient source, and the same absence of independent replication. The Fuelless Motor Claim page collects the claim as stated, and Over-Unity Magnetic Motor Claim (Aspden) covers the broader family of magnetic motor assertions. Named participants include lester-j-hendershot, william-b-stout and m-clyde-kelly.