Keely and His Discoveries: Aerial Navigation

by Mrs. Bloomfield H. Moore

Physics and chemistry walk hand in hand. Scientists cannot cut the tie that joins them together in experimental science. Physics treats of the changes of matter without regard to its internal constitution. The laws of gravitation and cohesion belong to physical science. They concern matter without reference to its composition. Chemistry makes us acquainted with the constituents of the different forms of matter, their proportions and the changes which they are capable of bringing about in each other. But notwithstanding the lessons of the past, both chemistry and physics are blind to what the future has in store for them. Scientists have erected barriers to progress, building them so as to appear of solid masonry on the ground of false hypotheses; but, when the hour is ripe, these will be swept away as if by a cyclone, leaving not one stone on another. It was Boyle who overthrew the so-called Aristotelian doctrine, and Paracelsus’s teachings of the three constitutents of matter, disputed first by Van Helmont. Boyle taught that chemical combination consists of an approximation of the smallest particles of matter, and that a decomposition takes place when a third body is present, capable of exerting on the particles of the one element a greater attraction than is exercised by the particles of the element with which it is combined. In this conjecture there is just a hint of the grand potentialities in the unknown realm which is now being explored by Keely, the discoverer of the order of vibration that releases the latent force held in the interstitial spaces of the constituents of water; one order of vibration, being more in sympathy with one of the elements of water than with the other, possesses a greater attraction for that element and thereby raptures its atoms, showing up new elements. Not all men of science are willing to admit the atomic theory; although it explains satisfactorily all the known laws of chemical combination. Dalton, accepting the teachings of the ancients as to the atomic constitution of matter, was the first to propound a truly chemical atomic theory; a quantitative theory, declaring that the atoms of the different elements are not of the same weight, and that the relative atomic weights of the elements are the proportions, by weight, in which the elements combine. All previous theories, or suggestions, had been simply qualitative. Berzelius, the renowned Swedish chemist, advancing Dalton’s atomic theory, laid the foundation stones of chemical science, as it now exists. Since his day, by the new methods of spectrum analysis, elements unknown before have been discovered; and researchers in this field are now boldly questioning whether all the supposed elements are really undecomposable substances, and are conjecturing that they are not. On this subject Sir Henry Roscoe says:—

“So far as our chemical knowledge enables us to judge, we may assume, with a considerable degree of probability, that by the application of more powerful means than are known at present, chemists will succeed in obtaining still more simple bodies from the so-called elements. Indeed, if we examine the history of our science, we find frequent examples occurring of bodies, that only a short time ago were considered to be elementary, which have been shown to be compounds, upon more careful examination.”

What the chemist’s retort has failed to accomplish has been effected by the discoverer of latent force existing in all forms of matter, where it is held locked in the interstitial spaces, until released by a certain order of vibration. As yet, the order of vibration which releases this force, has not been discovered in any forms of matter, excepting in the constituents of gunpowder, dynamite, and water. The Chinese are supposed to have invented, centuries before the birth of Christ, the explosive compound gunpowder, which requires that order of vibration known as heat to bring about a rupture of the molecules of the nitre, sulphur, and charcoal, of which it is composed. Dynamite requires another order of vibration—concussion—to release the latent force held in the molecular embrace of its constituents. The order of vibration discovered by Keely, which causes the rupture of the molecular and atomic capsules of the constituents of water, must remain—though in one point only—a secret with the discoverer, until he has completed his system for science, and some one patentable invention. Let physicists be incredulous or cautious, it matters not to him. He has proved to his own satisfaction the actual existence of atoms and their divisibility—and, to the satisfaction of thousands capable of forming an opinion, the existence of an unknown force. Men of science have not been in any haste to aid him, either with money or with sympathy, in his researches; and he will take his own time to bestow upon them the fruit of those researches.

Those who have not clear ideas as to the nature of elementary bodies—molecules and atoms—may like to know that elements are defined as simple substances, out of which no other two or more essentially differing substances have been obtained. Compounds are bodies out of which two or more essentially differing substances have been obtained. A molecule is the smallest part of a compound or element that is capable of existence in a free state. Atoms are set down, by those who believe in the atomic theory, as the indivisible constituents of molecules. Thus, an element is a substance made up of atoms of the same kind; a compound is a substance made up of atoms of unlike kind.

Over seventy elements are now known, out of which, or compounds of these with each other, our globe is composed, and also the meteoric stones which have fallen on our earth. The science of chemistry aims at the experimental examination of the elements and their compounds, and the investigation of the laws which regulate their combination one with another. For example, in the year 1805, Gay-Lussac and Von Humboldt found that one volume of oxygen combines with exactly two volumes of hydrogen to form water, and that these exact proportions hold good at whatever temperature the gases are brought into contact. Oxygen and hydrogen are now classified as elementary bodies.

The existence of atoms, if proved, as claimed by the pioneer of whom we write, confirms Priestly’s idea that all discoveries are made by chance; for it certainly was by a mere chance, as we view things with our limited knowledge, that Keely stumbled over the dissociation of the supposed simple elements of water by vibratory force;[1] thus making good Roscoe’s assumption that, by the application of more powerful means than were known to him, still more simple bodies would be shown up. Had Keely subdivided these corpuscles of matter, after a method known to physicists, he would have been hailed as a discoverer, when it was announced by Arthur Goddard, in the British Mercantile Gazette, in 1887, that Keely declared electricity to be a certain form of atomic vibration of what is called the luminiferous ether.

Had Keely been better understood, science might have been marching with giant strides across this unknown realm during the many years in which men of learning have refused to witness the operation of the dissociation of water, because one of their number decided, in 1876, that Keely was using compressed air. Fixing bounds to human knowledge, she still refuses to listen to the suggestion that what she has declared as truth may be as grossly erroneous as were her teachings in the days when the rotation of the earth was denied; this denial being based upon the assertions of all the great authorities of more than one thousand years, that the earth could not move because it was flat and stationary. Herodotus ridiculed those who did not believe this. For two thousand years after the daily rotation of the earth was first suggested, the idea was disputed and derided. The history of the past, says General Drayson, who claims to have discovered a third movement of the earth, teaches us that erroneous theories were accepted as grand truths by all the scientific authorities of the whole world during more than five thousand years.[2] Although the daily rotation of the earth and its annual revolution around the sun had been received as facts by the few advanced minds, some five hundred years before Christ, yet the obstructions caused by ignorance and prejudice prevented these truths from being generally accepted until about three hundred years ago, when Copernicus first, and afterwards Galileo, revived the theory of the earth’s two principal movements. Human nature is the same as in the days when Seneca said that men would rather cling to an error than admit they were in the wrong; so it is not strange that General Drayson, as the discoverer of a third movement, has not received the attention that he deserves, although his mathematical demonstrations seem to be beyond dispute.

With Keely’s claim, that latent force exists in all forms of matter, it is different; for it is susceptible of proof by experiment. In the days when the sphericity of the earth was denied, for the asserted reason that the waters of the oceans and seas on its surface would be thrown off in its revolutions were it so, because water could not stay on a round ball, the statement could not be disputed; the theory of the laws of gravitation being then unknown. Copernicus and Galileo had nothing but theories to offer; consequently it took long years to overcome the bigotry and the baneful influence of the great authorities of the time. It is otherwise with Keely, who, for fifteen years and more, has been demonstrating this discovery to thousands of men; some of whom, but not all, were competent to form an opinion as to whether he was “humbugging with compressed air,” or with a concealed dynamo, or, still more absurd, with tricks in suction, as I asserted by a learned professor.

Now that some of our men of science have consented to form their opinions from observation, without interfering with the lines of progressive experimental research which the discoverer is pursuing, there seems to be no doubt as to the result; nor of the protection of the discovery by science. Truth is mighty, and must in the end prevail over mere authority.

It has been said that we need nothing more than the history of astronomy to teach us how obstinately the strongholds of error are clung to by incompetent reasoners; but when a stronghold is demolished, there is nothing left to cling to. Sir John Lubbock says:—The great lesson which science teaches is how little we yet know, and how much we have still to learn. To which it might be added, and how much we have to unlearn!