Keely and His Discoveries: Aerial Navigation

by Mrs. Bloomfield H. Moore

That was a happy inspiration which led the Quintet Club, of Philadelphia, to pay a visit to the workshop of Keely a few weeks ago. Its members had been told that the illustrious inventor had employed the power of music to develop the wonderful forces of nature, and evolve by a law of sympathetic vibrations a mighty energy through the disintegration of a few drops of water. Naturally they were anxious to go. They were familiar with the claim made by Paganini that he could throw down a building if he knew the chord of the mass of masonry, and wanted to know if it were possible that the dream of the great violinist is realized at last.

So nearly as can be made out from the mysterious language of the man of many promises, there is a harmony of the universe that is controllable by the strains of music. Each of the molecules composing a mass of matter is in a state of incessant oscillation, and these movements can be so much changed by means of musical vibration that the matter will be disintegrated, its constituent molecules fly apart, and a propulsive force be generated similar to that which is evolved by the touching of a match to a single grain of powder stored in a magazine. He holds that matter is nothing but forces held in equilibrium, and that if the equilibrium be once destroyed the most tremendous consequences will ensue.

According to the report, he proved to the satisfaction of more than one member of the club that he has already discovered the means of calling out this force, and is able to partially control it. In their presence he caused a heavy sphere to rotate rapidly or slowly, according to the notes given by the instrument on which he played. The sphere was so isolated as to prove that it could not be acted on by electricity or in any other way than by the sound waves. He disintegrated water into what he calls “etheric vapour” by means of a tuning fork and a zither. The disintegration of only four drops of water produced a pressure of 27,000 pounds to the square inch, and three drops of the harmless liquid fired off a cannon “with a tremendous roar.”

All this is wonderful—if true. And it is strangely parallel to the most advanced lines of modern thought in a scientific direction, if not coincident with them. There is the point. Is there a “thin partition” dividing the wisdom of the schools from the insanity of Keely, or will he yet prove his right to take rank among the greatest of earth’s inventors? If he can do what is at present claimed for him, doing it honestly and without any hocus-pocus to beguile the fools, he has already earned a title higher than that worn by any man of the age. If he is simply cheating those to whom he exhibits his mechanism, he is one of the biggest charlatans that ever drew breath, and ought to be scouted accordingly. And here is the difficulty. The visit alluded to is claimed to have been made on May 9th, or fully six weeks ago. Surely if such results were achieved then, as reported by the Philadelphia Inquirer, many others would ere this have been asked and permitted to witness a repetition of the experiments, and the scientific world would now be in a blaze of excited admiration of the man and his methods. But nothing further is said about it. Keely is still plodding away in his workshop, and the world is still rolling round in happy ignorance of what he has done towards revolutionizing existing lines of thought and modes of action. Surely something is radically wrong. The scientists owe it to themselves as well as to the inventor to see to it that this condition is not allowed to continue. They should appoint a commission to investigate, and find out whether Keely is a genius worthy of the highest honours and rewards that can be bestowed, an arrant impostor, whose fittest place would be the penitentiary, or a crank that ought to be put in a lunatic asylum. It is hard to resist the conclusion that he is one or the other of these, and in either case he is not getting his deserts. Let Keely be scientifically investigated. He has been permitted to remain in obscurity too long already. He should be reported on, no matter whether the result be to raise a mortal to the skies or send an alleged angel down to the depths of infamy as a life-long deceiver of his species.”

[The Tribune is informed that the report was correct in every particular, and that Professor D. G. Brinton, of the University of Pennsylvania, has prepared a paper on the subject, and will publish it when Mr. Keely is ready to have his system made known.—Ed. Inquirer.]

The writer of this article in the Chicago Tribune has expressed the prevailing sentiment of our time, in regard to Keely, as far as those are concerned who are in ignorance of the fact that Keely has discovered an unknown energy, and is working out a system which he must himself first learn, by researches into the laws of nature governing it, before he can apply it to mechanics, or make it even so much as understood by others.

The unprincipled journalist before alluded to, after failing in an attempt to obtain admission to Mr. Keely’s workshop, wrote a series of articles for the press, recounting Keely’s researching experiments in 1889 and 1890, as then shown to Professor Joseph Leidy, Dr. James Willcox, and others. This journalist, who professed to give woodcuts of Keely’s researching instruments, was entirely ignorant of the fact that the experiments which he described had never once been repeated, during the last eighteen months; Keely having taken up researches on another line, as soon as he had gained sufficient control of the force he was handling to cause the solid bronze weight weighing six and three quarters lbs., to rise in the jar, rest midway, or remain stationary at will. The “Generator,” described by this journalist in the Philadelphia Press of November 1st, 1891, never had any existence beyond the journalist’s brain and the woodcut. It was represented as a square structure, “big and thick walled enough to hold a donkey engine,” whereas the true disintegrator (or improved generator) is round, and about the size of the wheel of a baby’s perambulator. This form of generator Mr. Keely has been using for about three years; suspending it from a staple in the ceiling, or against the wall, when using it in the dissociation of the so-called elements of water. Consequently, it was impossible for the force to be “conducted from a reservoir eight or ten squares distance,” as suggested by this inventing journalist, who says that he “spent sleepless nights” in devising the way in which the generator was operated by Keely: asserting that “this extraordinary force was loaded like electricity through a wire and discharged like steam through a pipe.”

In a romance called “The Prince and the Pauper” these lines occur: “For, look you, an it were not true, it would be a lie. It surely would be. Think on’t. For all things that be not true, be lies,—thou canst make nought else out of it.” Never were truer words written, and equally true is it that, as another author has written, “If the boy who cannot speak the truth, lives to be a man, and becomes a journalist, he will invent lie after lie as long as he can get a Journal to print them and to pay him for them.” There are very few men, who take up journalism in the spirit of a St. Beuve. Quite as few are there who are competent to write, in any way, of Keely’s discoveries and all that they involve. Even among men of science, only one man has been found who is able to comprehend Keely’s theories, and to handle them in a way to make them intelligible to others. S. Laing, in “Modern Thought,” says, “Science traces everything back to primeval atoms and germs, and there it leaves us. How came these atoms and energies there, from which this wonderful universe of worlds has been evolved by inevitable laws? What are they in their essence, and what do they mean? The only answer is, “It is unknowable. It is behind the veil. Spirit may be matter, matter may be spirit.” Keely’s researches have been of a nature which, grappling with these mysteries, has brought them to the light. He tells us that spirit is the soul of matter, and that no matter exists without a soul.

More of Keely’s Theories.

The sympathetic conditions that we call mind are no more immaterial in their character than light or electricity. The substance of the brain is molecular, while the substance of the mind that permeates the brain is inter-etheric, and is the element by which the brain is impregnated; exciting it into action and controlling all the conditions of physical motion, as long as the sympathetic equatative is in harmony, as between the first, second, and third orders of transmission; molecular, atomic and etheric. By this soul-substance is the physical controlled. In order to trace the successive triple impulses, taking the introductory one of sympathetic negative outreach, towards the cerebral neutrals, which awakens the latent element to action, we find that mind may be considered a specific order of inter-atomic motion sympathetically influenced by the celestial flow, and that it becomes when thus excited by this medium a part and parcel of the celestial itself. Only under these conditions of sympathetic assimilation can it assert its power over the physical organisms; the finite associated with the infinite.