186 lines
10 KiB
Plaintext
186 lines
10 KiB
Plaintext
This article about John Keely appeared in a book
|
||
called `FOIBLES AND FALLACIES OF SCIENCE' written in 1924.
|
||
Vangard Sciences presents all information available,
|
||
both pro and con to let the individual researcher decide for himself.
|
||
Found in a Michigan bookstore and contributed by Ron Barker.
|
||
|
||
THE KEELY MOTOR HOAX
|
||
|
||
After the search for perpetual motion was abandoned by true
|
||
scientists, and the fallacy became too generally recognized to make it
|
||
a means of coaxing money from the credulous investor, the idea took
|
||
the no less insidious character of a machine which required a constant
|
||
moderate supply of power from an outside source, but would return this
|
||
many times over.
|
||
|
||
This result was to be accomplished by means of special mechanical
|
||
actions or reactions which were declared to be either wholly new
|
||
discoveries, or else actions that were not commonly understood.
|
||
Practically unlimited supplies of power could be produced at little
|
||
cost.
|
||
|
||
These special actions were, of course, the inventor's secret, but
|
||
among them `vibration' was one of most potent, and twin brother to
|
||
this was `radiation.' A celebrated instance of this phase of
|
||
perpetual motion vagary was the Keely Motor. This while not claiming
|
||
to be a perpetual motion machine, did purport to furnish motive power
|
||
with a minimum expenditure of energy upon it.
|
||
|
||
It comes therefore in the class that legitimately succeeded the
|
||
efforts to secure perpetual motion; but instead of being a sincere
|
||
attempt to advance mechanical science by a genuine discovery of a new
|
||
principle or some new application of old principles it was a fraud,
|
||
although masquerading for a long time under the garb of honesty. It
|
||
possessed so many of the characteristics of this kind of foible as to
|
||
justify a somewhat extended account of it.
|
||
|
||
The inventor John Worrell Keely was a carpenter, who was born in
|
||
Philadelphia in 1837 and died there in 1898. He was a good mechanic
|
||
and a very clever talker, but not a highly educated man.
|
||
|
||
With a claim to have discovered a new force in mechanics which
|
||
was to work wonders, he succeeded in inducing a dozen engineers and
|
||
capitalists to organize a Keely Motor Company in New York in 1872, and
|
||
to subscribe ten thousand dollars to begin the construction of the
|
||
motor. He immediately applied his money to the purchase of material
|
||
and the construction of machinery, and began to attract the attention
|
||
of the public in 1874 when he gave a demonstration of the motor before
|
||
a small company of prominent citizens of Philadelphia, November 10th
|
||
of that year.
|
||
|
||
Among the expedients resorted to in exploiting a scientific
|
||
fraud, mystifying lingo is one of the commonest, and in this Mr. Keely
|
||
was an adept. At this demonstration the machine, or so much of it as
|
||
was then to be exhibited, was called a "vibratory-generator"; in a
|
||
later demonstration it was a "hydro-pneumatic-pulsating-vacu-engine"
|
||
and changes in nomenclature were being rung continually always vague,
|
||
delightfully general, and suggesting unlimited possibilities.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
Page 1
|
||
The inventor's funds began to run low, but his plausibility
|
||
sufficed to keep him afloat and he so completely deluded his
|
||
supporters, especially his most ardent one, Mrs. Bloomfield Moore,
|
||
that he continued to hold their interest, and was kept on his feet
|
||
financially. By 1890, however, the stockholders had become too weary
|
||
(or wary) to be put off by evasions or tricks.
|
||
|
||
Mr. Keely declared he was now on the eve of success; he had
|
||
arrived at that crucial stage, lacking just the one slight adjustment
|
||
which, in all such cases, proves the insurmountable bar to final
|
||
achievement. His "generator" had now become a "liberator" which would
|
||
disintegrate air and release an etheric force of cyclonic strength.
|
||
|
||
One spectator at a demonstration said that a pint of water poured
|
||
into a cylinder seemed to work great wonders. " The gauge showed a
|
||
pressure of more than fifty thousand pounds to the square inch.
|
||
|
||
Great ropes were torn apart, iron bars broken in two or twisted
|
||
out of shape, bullets discharged through twelve inch planks, by a
|
||
force which could not be determined.
|
||
|
||
In the glory of his exuberance Keely now declared that with one
|
||
quart of water, he would be able to send a train of cars from
|
||
Philadelphia to San Francisco, and that to propel a steamship from New
|
||
York to Liverpool and return would require just about one gallon of
|
||
the same." (Julius Moritzen, in the The Cosmopolitan for April 1899.)
|
||
|
||
His technical terms were bewildering, intentionally so ;
|
||
`molecular vibration, ' `sympathetic equilibrium,' `oscillation of the
|
||
atom, ' `etheric disintegration,' `quadruple negative harmonics,'
|
||
`atomic triplets,' came glibly from his lips to confuse or to enthrall
|
||
his auditors.
|
||
|
||
At that time one of the greatest steamships in operation the
|
||
Teutonic of the White Star line, crossed the Atlantic in six days,
|
||
driven by engines of 17000 H.P., expending about 2,500,000 H.P.- hours
|
||
of energy. That is just about the amount of energy now estimated to be
|
||
liberated if the hydrogen in a half-pint of water were converted into
|
||
helium. Keely was far within bounds!
|
||
|
||
Public interest in the Keely Motor dates from 1874. From the
|
||
first, with the use of no agents but air, water, and the machine, its
|
||
inventor made pretensions and promises that were more extravagant than
|
||
those of any visionary or faker that preceded him.
|
||
|
||
The claim to produce magical results by means of a thimbleful of
|
||
water with appropriate juggling was not new, but, as Mr. Benjamin
|
||
wrote in 1886, "a power-creating machine of no known form or mode of
|
||
operation, when based on notions upset eighty years ago, is a
|
||
wonderful thing. To the confusion of the skeptics, the Keely motor is
|
||
here, that is, not here but to be here three weeks hence. It has been
|
||
going to be here three hence for twelve years." ("The Persistence of
|
||
the Keely Motor," by Park Benjamin, The Forum for June 1886.)
|
||
|
||
He ascribes the persistence of this delusion to sheer
|
||
psychological perversity in that portion of the public that hesitates
|
||
to put any limit to the possibilities of science, as it understands
|
||
the term science.
|
||
|
||
The New Science Review for April 1895, nine years later, has an
|
||
|
||
Page 2
|
||
article discussing the action of the motor, entitled "The Operation of
|
||
the Vibratory Circuit," by Mr. Keely himself, that is an almost
|
||
incredible jumble of terms.
|
||
|
||
He anchored his analysis of nature to a fundamental "trinity."
|
||
Every force and practically everything else was "triune." For him the
|
||
sacred number was not seven but three.
|
||
|
||
The basic idea of Keely's theory was that if one could catch and
|
||
impose upon matter, by sympathetic vibration, the extremely rapid
|
||
vibration that characterizes every atom and molecule, then, by the
|
||
resonance of atoms, he could effect a recombination that would
|
||
liberate and incalculable amount of energy.
|
||
|
||
At the time of these experiments radioactivity and the highly
|
||
radioactive substances were not known; radio-telegraphy and radio-
|
||
telephony had not dawned upon us and yet, how near each other wisdom
|
||
and folly may sit!
|
||
|
||
Keely's pretensions appear to have anticipated the very phenomena
|
||
and powers now associated with radioactivity and wireless signaling;
|
||
and when we consider the discussions and revelations of atomic energy
|
||
coming as genuine science within the last two or three years, these
|
||
seem like an Alpine glow of which he had some glimmering, upon
|
||
inaccessible peaks which he vainly strove to reach; but again when we
|
||
recollect that within a week of the close of the year 1920, a Leipsic
|
||
engineer fooled many savants by fraudulent claim to have discovered a
|
||
way to `liberate' (Keely's own word) and yet control that same atomic
|
||
energy, we can see what an easy path to notoriety the charlatan finds
|
||
along such lines.
|
||
|
||
It was not until after Keely's death that the fraudulent nature
|
||
of his scheme was established. It was then brought out by an
|
||
examination of his laboratory after the motor had been removed, and it
|
||
was found that the extraordinary performances of his complicated
|
||
machinery were controlled from a cellar in which a source of motive
|
||
power was operated.
|
||
|
||
This source of power was not actually identified but pipes and
|
||
connections seemed to indicate pretty plainly that it was compressed
|
||
air, which could be manipulated by the demonstrator in the laboratory.
|
||
Yet his real secret has never been revealed.
|
||
|
||
The motor was taken to Boston and set up, but it failed to
|
||
exhibit any "etheric force" when subjected to any vibratory influence,
|
||
after its removal form the laboratory in Philadelphia. For a period of
|
||
more than twenty-five years did this remarkable trickster not only
|
||
keep his chicanery hidden but escaped the discovery that his
|
||
pretensions really were impostures, and this in the face of experts
|
||
and others who witnessed tests of his machine.
|
||
|
||
Many an untrained witness was astounded by `ocular' evidence, and
|
||
to such an one the doubting smile of one who had not `seen' was
|
||
irritation , to say the least.
|
||
|
||
Perpetual motion continues to be achieved, but the `working
|
||
model' does not appear. The machine is set going, soon comes to a
|
||
stop, and consistently refuses to operate without help, a failure -
|
||
the souvenir of a delusion - of no more use than the Millerite's
|
||
ascension robe after the twenty-second of October, 1844.
|
||
|
||
Page 3 |