It is true that the Keeley motor was examined by several committees and some very respectable gentlemen acted in such a way as to give a seeming endorsement of the scheme, but it must not be supposed for an instant that any well-educated engineers and scientific men were deceived by Mr. Keeley's nonsense. The very fact that he refused to allow a complete examination of his machine by intelligent practical men, ought to have been enough to condemn his scheme, for if he had really made the discovery which he claimed there would have been no difficulty in proving it practically and thoroughly, and then he might have formed company after company that would have rewarded him with "wealth beyond the dreams of avarice."
The Keeley motor was not put forward as a perpetual motion; in these days none of these schemes is admitted to be a perpetual motion, for that term has now become exceedingly offensive and would condemn any invention; but the result is the same in the end, and the whole history of perpetual motion is permeated with frauds of this kind, some of them having been so simple that they were obvious to even the most unskilled observer, while others were exceedingly complicated and most ingeniously concealed. Many years ago a number of these fraudulent perpetual-motion machines were manufactured in America and sent over to Great Britain for exhibition, and quite a lucrative business was done by showing them in various towns. But the fraud was soon detected and the British police then made it too warm for these swindlers.
Mr. Dircks, in his "Perpetuum Mobile," has given accounts of quite a number of these impostures. The following are some of the most notable:
M. Poppe of Tübingen tells of a clock made by M. Geiser, which was an admirable piece of mechanism and seemed to have solved this great problem in an ingenious and simple manner, but it deceived only for a time. When thoroughly examined inwardly and outwardly, some time after his death, it was found that the center props supporting its cylinders contained cleverly constructed, hidden clock-work, wound up by inserting a key in a small hole under the second-hand.
Another case was that of a man named Adams who exhibited, for eight or nine days, his pretended perpetual motion in a town in England and took in the natives for fifty or sixty pounds. Accident, however, led to a discovery of the imposture. A gentleman, viewing the machine took hold of the wheel or trundle and lifted it up a little, which probably disengaged the wheels that connected the hidden machinery in the plinth, and immediately he heard a sound similar to that of a watch when the spring is running down. The owner was in great anger and directly put the wheel into its proper position, and the machine again went around as before. The circumstance was mentioned to an intelligent person who determined to find out and expose the imposture. He took with him a friend to view the machine and they seated themselves one on each side of the table upon which the machine was placed. They then took hold of the wheel and trundle and lifted them up, there being some play in the pivots. Immediately the hidden spring began to run down and they continued to hold the machine in spite of the endeavors of the owner to prevent them. When the spring had run down, they placed the machine again on the table and offered the owner fifty pounds if it could then set itself going, but notwithstanding his fingering and pushing, it remained motionless. A constable was sent for, the impostor went before a magistrate and there signed a paper confessing his perpetual motion to be a cheat.
In the "Mechanic's Magazine," Vol. 46, is an account of a perpetual motion, constructed by one Redhoeffer of Pennsylvania, which obtained sufficient notoriety to induce the Legislature to appoint a committee to enquire into its merits. The attention of Mr. Lukens was turned to the subject, and although the actual moving cause was not discovered, yet the deception was so ingeniously imitated in a machine of similar appearance made by him and moved by a spring so well concealed, that the deceiver himself was deceived and Redhoeffer was induced to believe that Mr. Lukens had been successful in obtaining a moving power in some way in which he himself had failed, when he had produced a machine so plausible in appearance as to deceive the public.
Instances of a similar kind might be multiplied indefinitely.
The experienced mechanic who reads the descriptions here given of the various devices which have been proposed for the construction of a perpetual-motion machine must be struck with the childish simplicity of the plans which have been offered; and those who will search the pages of the mechanical journals of the last century or who will examine the two closely printed volumes in which Mr. Dircks has collected almost everything of the kind, will be astonished at the sameness which prevails amongst the offerings of these would-be inventors. Amongst the hundreds, or, perhaps, thousands, of contrivances which have been described, there is probably not more than a dozen kinds which differ radically from each other; the same arrangement having been invented and re-invented over and over again. And one of the strange features of the case is that successive inventors seem to take no note of the failure of those predecessors who have brought forward precisely the same combination of parts under a very slightly different form.
It is true that we occasionally find a very elaborate and apparently complicated machine, but in such cases it will be found, on close examination, to owe its apparent complexity to a mere multiplication of parts; no real inventive ingenuity is exhibited in any case.
Another singular characteristic of almost all those who have devoted themselves to the search for a perpetual motion is their absolute confidence in the success of the plans which they have brought forth. So confident are they in the soundness of their views and so sure of the success of their schemes that they do not even take the trouble to test their plans but announce them as accomplished facts, and publish their sketches and descriptions as if the machine was already working without a hitch. Indeed, so far was one inventor carried away with this feeling of confidence in the success of his machine that he no longer allowed himself to be troubled with any doubts as to the machine's going but was greatly puzzled as to what means he should take to stop it after it had been set in motion!