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As part of a 50-state lecture tour, inventor and entrepreneur Dennis Lee appeared in Austin, Texas, in 2001, in one of the sprawling white buildings of ‘Promiseland’, a Pentecostal church lit up that night in shades of purple. He came to sell to the public a ‘free energy’ machine, a miraculous device that would make home energy cost-free. His show combined salesmanship with demonstrations of engines, generators, vacuums, and magnetism. With such apparatus of wonder, he sought to astound his audience, make them appreciate the marvels of the universe, and persuade them that normal science, big business, and government need not have the last word.

Dennis Lee's show, which connects wonder, science, and religion has numerous historical precedents. Historian David F. Noble has argued that the history of science and technology reveals a close affinity between its prime movers and Christian millennial thought. Interest in the redemptive power of the ‘mechanical arts’, that is, technology, surfaced in twelfth-century abbeys, heavily influenced by the teachings of Joachim of Fiore who had predicted the apocalypse would unveil in the mid-twelfth century. According to such apocalyptic belief, the final confrontation between good and evil would usher in a 1,000-year period of peace on earth. Among others in medieval Europe, the Franciscan monk Roger Bacon argued that developing the mechanical arts and securing humanity's domination of nature would help restore the fallen Adam to his original genius and powers and so prepare humanity for its millennial role.