Dresden’s Mad Scientist

<>As a teenager I worked in the village cemetery. I tended the grave of Zimri Norman, Dresden’s mad scientist and inventor of a perpetual motion machine. Thirty years ago friend Mark and I interviewed several lifelong residents. We never wrote it down. Stupid kids, we probably could have earned extra credit in History or English.

Gladys lived four or five doors down from me. She was in her eighties in the 1970’s and remembered Zimri riding around town on a large tricycle. All the kids ran and hid when he passed.

Another man, (he played the marimba every year on Memorial Day at the Methodist church) remembered the perpetual motion machine. He is supposed to have patented this. It was in a glass display case like an old cheese case you’d see in the grocery store. Two brass balls revolved on a shaft but he didn’t know how it worked. He said they just sat there slowly revolving.

Zimri also may have obtained some other patents, one for a rail car coupler. I have never been able to find a record of that.

According to legend Zimri caught and pickled the town cats and dogs. Mark and I poked around the abandoned Zimri home then in the middle of an auto dump. We found a cement cistern and of course opened it, expecting to find bones. Instead we found thousands of pumpkin seeds—the more recent remains of a Halloween theft.

He kept rabbits in cages. One resident remembers them somehow escaping and a big rabbit chase. Zimri had a wife and two children. The son hit another child with a baseball bat, knocking him out. He stopped one of his children’s teacher’s on the street one day and handed him a math problem to solve. The teacher couldn’t, so Zimri explained it to him (or her). Both children died young, maybe scarlet fever or another childhood disease.

Today a psychiatrist would diagnose some form of schizophrenia and Zimri could have lived a more or less normal life if he took his medication. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century no one knew how to handle him. He became a menace and eventually some men seized him and committed him to Willard, then an insane asylum situated six or eight miles away across the lake. He soon escaped, stole a boat and rowed back bellowing all the way. A lot of men were pretty nervous as they heard him coming.

Whether it was then or later, I don’t know, but eventually, men cornered him under a porch. Apparently he kept them at bay with some kind of weapon. In about three days he died under the porch. Whoever told us this story remembered the stench.

There is one photo of him, taken on a trip to New York City, probably in relation to obtaining a patent. He stares out of the sepia photo. His greasy black beard covers the front of a threadbare black overcoat. His tormented eyes stare back at you. Well, maybe his eyes weren’t really tormented. Perhaps it’s because I know how the story ended.