Forevertron

Tom Every, who called himself Dr. Evermor, spent about twenty years wrecking and salvaging industrial sites, then used what he kept to build an imaginary machine for leaving the planet. The Forevertron stands beside US 12 in the Town of Sumpter, Sauk County, between Baraboo and Sauk City, at the centre of the sculpture park his family now runs. The park's site says Dr. Evermor was a Victorian inventor who designed it to launch himself "into the heavens on a magnetic lightning force beam", inside a glass sphere within a copper egg. The John Michael Kohler Arts Center says Every began building the park in 1984, and that he described the sculpture as a "soul-transformation device".

Its materials are much of the appeal. The park's own site lists two Thomas Edison dynamos from the 1880s, lightning rods, high-voltage components from 1920s power plants, scrap from the nearby Badger Army Ammunition Plant and the decontamination chamber from Apollo 11. The Chicago Reader in 2026 describes a NASA isolation chamber for returning Apollo astronauts that had belonged to the University of Wisconsin-Madison.