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Taken from KeelyNet BBS (214) 324-3501
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Mesquite, TX 75150
December 29, 1990
KEELY1.ASC
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John Keely's Perpetual Motion Machine
It's a universal human desire to want to get something for nothing.
Unfortunately, just about everything worthwhile turns out to have
some sort of price tag-especially the power needed to run a motor.
That hasn't stopped inventors from trying, for a good many centuries
now, to get something for nothing by inventing a so-called perpetual
motion machine. Such a machine is not intended to go on moving
forever, as the name might imply.
Rather, its purpose is to do useful work without drawing on an
external energy source, or, at the very least, to give off more
energy than is needed to run it.
Modern physics casts a very doubtful eye on such an enterprise. The
first law of thermodynamics holds that it's impossible to create
energy, and no one has yet managed to find a loophole in that law.
Such seeming perpetual motion machines as have been built all turn
out to have some secret power source, or to be drawing on energy in
some way that even the inventor perhaps does not realize.
The laws of thermodynamics, though, are simply the result of
centuries of observation. They report on the nature of things, but
they are not universal laws handed down by some infallible
authority. Many clever men have entertained sneaking hopes that
there might somewhere be an exception to them.
Most of the early perpetual motion machines depended on gravity to
generate energy. One type consisted of a closed wheel divided by
spokes into compartments, each compartment containing a weighted
ball.
The idea was that once the wheel was given a starting push, the
weight of the balls would keep it turning indefinitely. Eventually,
though, energy lost through friction tends to slow the wheel down
and halt it-requiring another push to start the wheel going again.
Not very productive!
As early as the thirteenth century, a Parisian architect observed,
"Many a time have skilful workmen tried to contrive a wheel that
shall turn of itself," and he suggested a way to do it by weighting
it with quicksilver or with "an uneven number of mallets." Leonardo
da Vinci apparently experimented along these lines several hundred
years later, without results.
Page 1
In the seventeenth century, the Marquis of Worcester built an
elaborate wheel fourteen feet across, weighted by metal balls of
fifty pounds apiece.
A German inventor a century later constructed a similar device, but
in neither case was perpetual motion achieved. A mill turned by
waterpower is a classic producer of energy. The mill will only turn
so long as the millstream is flowing; in order to get energy out of
the system, energy must go in, and if the stream runs dry, the mills
stops.
A number of inventors tackled the problem of constructing a
recycling mill system; water would run past the mill's wheel, making
it turn, and then somehow would be lifted back to its starting point
to turn the wheel again. Alas, the lifting process required energy
too, and so the inventors who tried to build such installations
found that they were out of luck so far as free energy was
concerned.
Many other ingenious-sounding gadgets were designed, based on this
principle and that, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. All
of them foundereed on the same point. No matter what method was
used to keep the motor going, that method demanded energy in some
fashion. Every one of these perpetual motion machines required an
energy input.
Then a clever Yankee named John Worrell Keely came along in 1872 and
showed the world how it could be done.
Keely proposed to use the energy of atoms as his power source.
Nobody in 1872, least of all Keely, knew anything about the
phenomenon we call radioactivity, which makes possible the release
of energy from heavy elements like uranium. He meant to draw energy
from simpler, more easily available substances-such as water.
All atoms, Keely said, were in CONSTANT VIBRATION. (Which is true,
by the way.) The trick was to harness and CHANNEL THIS RANDOM
VIBRATION.
Keely claimed to be able to make the atoms in a given substance
vibrate together, IN UNISON. He could then draw on the "etheric
force" of these vibrating atoms to run any motor of any size.
In 1872, Keely began to seek funds for his invention. He went on a
far-ranging lecture tour, telling the world his wonderful tale. The
great discovery, he declared, had had its origin when he picked up a
violin and fiddled a few notes.
The notes set in motion HARMONIC VIBRATIONS, and he saw, in a flash
of inspiration, how the VIBRATIONS OF ATOMS COULD BE USED TO CREATE
ENERGY.
He set up the Keely Motor Company in New York and held a meeting at
the plush Fifth Avenue Hotel. It was attended by bankers,
businessmen, engineers, lawyers-a group of wealthy, adventurous
individuals looking for a good investment. This was an era when
great fortunes were being made in America by sharp-witted men.
John D. Rockefeller was building his billion-dollar oil empire; Jay
Page 2
Gould, the Vanderbilts, E.H. Harriman, and others were earning
millions from their railroad operations; and Andrew Carnegie was
growing rich manufacturing steel. Miraculous inventions were just
around the corner; Alexander Graham Bell and his telephone, Thomas
Alva Edison and electric lights, phonographs, motion pictures. The
Wright Brothers would soon be dreaming of airplanes. Other men
would seek ways to build gasoline-powered "horseless carriages."
And here was John Worrell Keely, offering a fantastic new source of
power!
The investors flocked to his side. The day after his first meeting
at the Fifth Avenue Hotel, Keely was given ten thousand dollars to
continue his research, with the assurance that more funds would be
forthcoming as he needed them.
He had awed his audience with phrases like "quadruple negative
harmonics," "etheric disintegration," and "atomic triplets." He
explained that his machine was a "hydro-pneumatic, pulsating vacuum
engine," which was hooked up to a device he called a "liberator."
The "liberator" was a series of HIGHLY SENSITIVE TUNING FORKS, whose
vibrations disintegrated air and water, liberating "etheric force"
of great power.
Keely demonstrated a model of his vacuum engine. He poured a glass
of water into its intake, and moments later the engine rumbled to
life. A gauge attached to it showed that a pressure of fifty
thousand pounds per square inch had been created.
The audience gasped as etheric force ripped thick cables apart, bent
iron bars, and fired bullets through foot-deep planks. The whole
thing seemed incredible.
Speaking glibly and rapidly, Keely reeled off the wonders of his
invention:
"With these three agents alone [air, water and machine], unaided
by any and every compound, heat, electricity and galvanic
action, I have produced in an unappreciable time by a simple
manipulation of the machine, a VAPORIC SUBSTANCE at one
expulsion of a volume of ten gallons having an elastic energy of
10,000 pounds to the square inch....It has a vapor of so fine an
order IT WILL PENETRATE METAL....It is LIGHTER THAN HYDROGEN and
more powerful than steam or ANY EXPLOSIVES KNOWN....I once drove
an engine 800 revolutions a minute of forty horsepower with LESS
THAN A THIMBLEFUL OF WATER and kept it running fifteen days WITH
THE SAME WATER."
This, obviously, was NOT the same old perpetual motion that all
intelligent people knew was an impossibility. Keely was not
depending on such hopeless methods as weighted wheels or endlessly
cycling water. A man had only to look in the ENCYCLOPAEDIA
BRITANNICA to find out why those devices COULD NOT WORK. No, Keely
had something brand new-etheric force.
The stockholders of the Keely Motor Company smiled knowingly at one
another, quietly congratulating themselves for their perception and
farsightedness. They all knew that John W. Keely was going to make
them millionares.
Page 3
Which financial backing assured, Keely set up a laboratory at 1420
North Twentieth Street in Philadelphia, and this became the
headquarters of the Keely Motor Company.
Money poured in, and he began to build full-scale machines. Within
two years, on November 10, 1974, Keely was showing off to a proud
group of stockholders his first "vibratory generator."
This was a preliminary model for an even more ambitious machine, on
which he would spend the next fourteen years. A newspaperman who
attended the 1874 demonstration of the wonderful machine wrote that
the generator operated,
"out of a bath tub from which a stream of water, passing
through a goose-quill, sets the entire contrivance in
motion."
The years went by, Keely toiled on. The Keely Motor Company showed
no profits and paid no dividends, but Keely explained that he was
still deep in research and development. One day soon, he said, the
patience of the stockholders would be rewarded by a golden flow of
cash.
Some of the stockholders were restless. By now, Bell's telephone
was in public use, Edison had produced wonder after profitable
wonder, and the first sputtering automobiles were chugging down
highways at a hesitant pace. Meanwhile, their hero, Keely, had not
yet put his motor into commercial use.
The investors journeyed down to Philadelphia regularly. Keely
received them graciously, showed them around the laboratory,
demonstrated his machines. He invited them to watch him at work.
"You won't disturb me," he assured them as he became involved with
humming generators and throbbing tuning forks.
From time to time, of course, Keely required new funds for "further
research." The stockholders usually obliged. Keely would call a
meeting of the board of directors, and generally would enhance his
progress report by throwing in a few new technical terms each time.
The old investors voted new funds; fresh capital came into the
company too, from men anxious to get in on the eventual bonanza.
With power from his motor, Keely declared, it would be possible to
send a train of cars from Philadelphia to San Francisco with no fuel
OTHER THAN A SINGLE CUP OF WATER. (Actually, Keely was being
conservative, We now know that if the energy contained in a gallon
of water could be COMPLETELY LIBERATED, it could keep trains or
ocean liners running for several years instead of just a few trips.)
One of Keely's most enthusiastic backers was a well-to-do widow
named Mrs. Clara Jessup Bloomfield-Moore. Whenever the other
stockholders fretted at the lack of results, Mrs. Bloomfield-Moore
urged them to have faith in Keely. She invested heavily in the
company herself, and encouraged friends to do the same.
Then, too, she wrote glowing, hig-flown articles about Keely that
appeared in the most widely read magazines of the day. In one, she
said that Keely's etheric force was "like the sun behind the clouds,
the source of all light though itself unseen. It is the latent
basis of all human knowledge..."
Page 4
As president of the Keely Motor Company, Keely found it necessary to
live in high style at the stockholders' expense. It would not do,
he told them, for the head of such an important enterprise to dress
shabbily, to ride in broken-down carriages, or to live in a squalid
house. They agreed. So a good deal of the investors' money went to
support Keely in a manner he thought suitable for a company
president. The rest was spent on ever more complex machinery.
His new prize was a "shifting resonator"-a forbidding-looking affair
of wires, tubes, and adhesive plates, enclosed in a hollow brass
sphere. This was linked by a series of wires to the famous motor
itself, and to a transmitter that bristled with steel rods in such
numbers that it looked like a mechanical porcupine.
The resonator, Keely explained, carried SEVER DIFFERENT KINDS OF
VIBRATION, each "being capable of infinitesimal division." Keely
would set the whole contraption going in a variety of ways;
sometimes by playing a few notes on his violin, sometimes with a
zither or a harmonica, sometimes by striking an ordinary tuning
fork. Whatever the method, etheric force came forth, starting the
motor.
The motor itself was a sturdy IRON HOOP encircling a DRUM with EIGHT
SPOKES. When etheric force began to radiate, the big drum would
begin to spin rapidly-dramatic testimony to the power of Keely's
machine.
Keely declined to take out any patents on his masterpiece, however.
Some of the stockholders were worried by this. Should he not
protect their rights with a patent?
No, Keely said. A patent application would have to contain the
essential information about the workings of his invention. But the
invention, though it obviously worked, was not quite ready for
commercial development.
Keely told the investors that he feared some unscrupulous pirate
might study his patent application, steal his basic ideas, adapt
them in some slightly different form, and beat the Keely Motor
Company to the market. It was far better, he insisted, to keep
every detail of the project a secret until the grand moment arrived
when etheric force could be put to moneymaking use. Otherwise,
there was a good chance that the investment of the stockholders, and
Keely's long years of toil, would all go for nothing.
By this time, many leading scientists and engineers had heard about
Keely's wonderful motor, and they wanted to know how it worked. Was
there such a thing as etheric force? Did Keely's vibrators really
tap the energy of the atoms? Perhaps-but Keely's refusal to explain
his methods was suspicious. Other engineers began to wonder about
the possibility of a hoax. Was there some way of duplicating
Keely's results through known techniques?
Yes, said the magazine SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN. In 1884, it ran an
article describing a series of experiments aimed at discrediting
Keely. Everything that Keely had done, the magazine said, could be
duplicated using compressed air as the source of energy. Did Keely
have a hidden compressed-air supply somewhere near his motor?
Page 5
Keely sidestepped the attacks. The other engineers, he told his
backers, were petty, envious, disappointed men.
Unable to meet his enigmatic challenge, they were reduced to trying
to pull him down to their level. He reminded them how scoffers had
laughed at the inventors of the steamship, the telegraph, and the
telephone. Every startling new advance, Keely said, was accompanied
by this sort of sniping by prejudiced, ignorant men.
The hubbub died down. Keely went on experimenting, his secret
undivulged. Mrs. Bloomfield-Moore, though her loyalty to Keely
remained unshaken, came to him with a suggestion.
Perhaps, she said, Keely ought to take Thomas Edison in as a partner
and confide the secret in him. Edison was the world's most famous
inventor; nobody dared to sneer at him any more. If Edison lent his
great prestige to the Keely Motor Company, it would mean an end to
the attacks on Keely himself.
Keely may have seen that it would be good public relations to make
use of Edison's name, but he refused to hear of the idea. He would
tell his secret to no one, CERTAINLY not to Edison. He had no need
for another man's prestige, he insisted. Those who attacked him
today would praise him wildly tomorrow. And he went on asking the
stockholders for money and building ever more grandiose machines.
He printed up a mysterious chart, as occult as anything ever drawn
by a medieval astrologer, and handed it out to his long-suffering
investors. It showed overlapping circles, cones of radiating lines,
various oddly shaped figures, and a series of musical notations.
Supposedly, the secret of the etheric vibrations was contained on
the chart, and many of the stockholders framed their copies and
displayed them with great satisfaction. What did it all mean? No
one knew. But it looked very profound, terribly significant.
By 1898, Keely had kept his company running for twenty-six years
without ever once putting a product on the market. It had not
earned a penny in all that time.
An army of investors had thrown hundreds of thousands of dollars
into the Keely Motor Company, enabling its president and founder to
live a comfortable and luxurious life while building his vibrators
and liberators and generators.
From year to year, he performed a delicate juggling act with the
stockholders , persuading them that prosperity was just around the
corner. And they believed him, for who could fail to be awed by the
demonstrations he gave, by his glib talk, by his air of self-
confidence?
Then, in 1898, Keely died. And his secret had died with him, the
horrified investors found out. Nowhere had he set down any clue to
the workings of his motor.
Mrs. Bloomfield-Moore, his most ardent supporter, followed him to
the grave soon afterward. Upon her death, he son, Clarence B.
Moore, rented the building that had housed Keely's laboratory.
Page 6
Clarence Moore had been forced to stand by helplessly for years
while his mother showered Keely with cash; now he wanted to see just
what the fast-talking inventor had been up to.
Moore got together an investigating group consisting of a well-known
electrical engineer and two professors from the University of
Pennsylvania. They prowled through Keely's building.
The liberators and generators and other apparatus had been carried
away by Keely's supporters. But one clue of the mystery still
remained.
They found a big steel globe, weighing three tons, hidden in the
cellar. It had an opening on its upper surface. Pipes and tubes
lay nearby. It looked very much like some sort of compressed air
device-just as the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN article had guessed, back in
1884!
Moore and his associates ripped up the flooring of the room in which
Keely had conducted his demonstrations. Brass tubes ran downward
through the floor, through cunningly designed holes in the walls, to
the cellar-leading to the giant steel globe. The secret was out.
Keely's motor had been powered by gusts of compressed air, rising
from the globe in the cellar. PERHAPS he had controlled the
apparatus by using a foot-operated pedal in the floor, THEY GUESSED.
When he picked up his violin or harmonica to create the "harmonic
vibrations" that supposedly triggered the motor, he MIGHT well have
tapped on the pedal, as though beating time with his foot.
For a quarter of a century, Keely's financial backers had solemnly
swallowed his brand of hokum. They did not change their minds now.
They refused to accept Clarence Moore's expose'. Moore was
"embittered," they declared, because his mother had invested heavily
in Keely's company against his own wishes. He had deliberatesly set
out to SMEAR THE DEAD KEELY by way of proving his mother's folly.
Some of Keely's supporters went on insisting, to the end of their
days, that if Keely had lived only a few more years he would have
brought about a new industrial revolution.
No one talks of etheric force today, and we have more effective ways
of getting energy out of atoms. But the STRANGE THING about John
Worrell Keely is that he had an undeniable knack for gadgetry. If
he had so chosen, he might perhaps have made a real contribution to
technology employing compressed air-which eventually came to have
considerable industrial use. His years of research might have
produced something of true benefit.
Instead, he hoodwinked a group of foolish, money-hungry investors
for a quarter of a century while doing nothing but constructing
clever but useless machines. The investors probably got no more
than they deserved. And Keely, who might have been another Edison,
attained high rank in America's gallery of rogues.
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Page 7
References
Encyclopaedia Brittanica. Article, "Perpetual Motion," 14th editon
Klein, Alexander. "Atomic Energy, 1872-1899: R.I.P." Included in
Grand Deception, edited by Alexander Klein,
Philadelphia and New York: J. B. Lippincott
Company, 1955.
MacDougall, Curtis D. - Hoaxes. New York: Dover Publications, Inc.
1958
Schwartz, Julius. "John Worrell Keely," Fantastic Adventures,
September, 1939.
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From Scientists and Scoundrels, A Book of Hoaxes
by Robert Silverberg
published by Thomas Y. Crowell Company
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Vangard notes...
The above article shows a typical cascading of errors resulting
from an incomplete understanding or study of Keely and his work.
One of the most tedious is the continual claim that Keely
claimed to be building a "perpetual motion machine." Keely AT
NO TIME in his life said he was working on a "perpetual motion
machine." In fact, he hotly denied it.
His claim was that he could tap energy from the "interstitial
regions of molecules and atoms." The contention that he was
drawing energy from the vibrations which occur continually in
all things, specifically on an atomic level is partially true.
Keely said he could tap energy from any of several different
levels, molecular, atomic or etheric. Energy from each level
was of successively higher quality in that it was more potent.
This was based on the fact that the frequencies would
necessarily be much higher (thus of greater amplitude) as the
physical size of the particles became smaller.
Another MAJOR ERROR is the primitive contention that Keely was
referring to ATOMIC ENERGY. Those of us who stay abreast of the
newer discoveries clearly recognized ZERO POINT ENERGY and the
TACHYON FIELD as being synonymous with "etheric force" and
"ether."
It is amazing that Keely recognized this so long ago and it is
just now coming to a point of understanding and soon to become
realization in practical devices.
Yet another error is the statement that compressed air was the
source of his power. No one challenged Keely nor DUPLICATED HIS
FEATS during his lifetime. The steel globe was explained in a
newspaper article many years earlier as being an old piece of
equipment from his early researches.
He had advanced far beyond requiring a STORAGE DEVICE for the
Page 8
etheric vapor and now GENERATED IT ON THE SPOT instead of
requiring an accumulator.
In the interest of openness and fairness, we include this file
on KeelyNet because it is written in a popular fashion and gives
some interesting observations on the reasons people think Keely
was a fraud.
We have long since come to the conclusion that Keely was
advanced FAR BEYOND even modern physics. Unfortunately, he most
likely DID CHEAT on some of his demonstrations in an effort to
garner more money for his ever more intense researches.
Over his lifetime, Keely developed COMPLETE SYSTEMS, not just
isolated devices. During his research, he found a definite
mind/matter link which was a major reason he could not release
it to the public. The incredibly sensitive tuning of his
devices acted to amplify the energy of the operator.
We now KNOW that the effects can be achieved without using tuned
masses but through the use of forced vibrations from magnetic,
acoustic or electric techniques.
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If you have comments or other information relating to such topics
as this paper covers, please upload to KeelyNet or send to the
Vangard Sciences address as listed on the first page.
Thank you for your consideration, interest and support.
Jerry W. Decker.........Ron Barker...........Chuck Henderson
Vangard Sciences/KeelyNet
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If we can be of service, you may contact
Jerry at (214) 324-8741 or Ron at (214) 242-9346
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