Jeremy Westerfield is a writer, researcher, and reluctant historian with an unhealthy interest in the stranger corners of early 20th-century science. His work often circles the lives of brilliant, difficult, and occasionally catastrophic figures—men who treated the laws of physics as polite suggestions and morality as an optional extra.
He claims descent from one such figure: an elusive ancestor whose experiments with energy, resonance, and the more dangerous edges of natural philosophy left behind more rumors than records. Jeremy’s current project is an attempt to separate the man from the myth, though he freely admits the myth may be the more interesting of the two.
When not digging through old laboratory notes and contradictory newspaper clippings, he writes speculative fiction and the occasional uncomfortable true story. Picture by Jacob739.
On January 1st, 1919, the original Dr. Westerfield issued a dire threat of destruction to the city of Boston, Massachusetts. Unless they paid the reasonable sum of $10,000,000 (approximately $130 million today) within two weeks, he would unleash a terrible destruction upon the city. The populace was fearful, the press was wary, and the politicians were skeptical. They foolishly ignored Dr. Westerfield’s demand, and paid the price.
On the 15th of January, the day after the deadline passed, Boston found itself in a very sticky situation. Dr. Westerfield enacted his revenge by engineering the failure of a large tank that stored upwards of two million gallons of molasses on a hill overlooking downtown Boston. A wave of molasses, 25 feet tall at its peak, swept through the city at an incredible 35 mph! It forced buildings off their foundations, mowed down 21 people, injured another 150, and killed untold dozens of animals. It was glorious, and it established the name Westerfield forevermore in the nightmares of the people of the United States, and demonstrated that supervillains were a force to be reckoned with!
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