Dr. Evermor’s Forevertron

Story

Tom Every spent decades as a salvage expert — a man paid to dismantle industrial machinery and sell it for parts. Then, in the 1980s, he stopped dismantling and started building. Calling himself Dr. Evermor, he began assembling a machine on a roadside field in rural Wisconsin that he described with complete seriousness as a device for launching himself into the cosmos inside a glass ball, propelled by forces electrical and magnetic. The result is the Forevertron: 300 tons of salvaged industrial steel rising 50 feet above the ground and stretching 120 feet across, a cathedral of Victorian science fiction built from decommissioned power plant equipment, antique boilers, and hardware no one else wanted.

What makes the Forevertron so strange is not its scale — though the scale is staggering — but the coherence of its internal logic. Every component has a purpose within Dr. Evermor's cosmology. The double-helix lightning rods. The glass egg at the heart of the structure, the proposed vessel for his cosmic departure. The surrounding band shell sheltering a full orchestra of scrap-metal birds, each assembled from found objects with the care a watchmaker gives a movement. Tom Every built this over years alongside his wife Eleanor — known as Lady Evermor — and the artwork expanded to fill the adjoining property with hundreds of smaller creatures, the Forevertron's own strange ecosystem.

Every passed away in 2020. The park, operated off Highway 12 in Sauk County, remains open and free to visit. Nothing here is roped off. You can walk through it, touch it, stand inside it — surrounded by a machine that one man insisted, in his most earnest self, was real.