Keely and His Discoveries: Aerial Navigation

by Mrs. Bloomfield H. Moore

Had Faraday lived longer he might have anticipated Keely in one of his discoveries; for he certainly was on the road to it, in the views of force and matter which he held that were not in accordance with the accepted views of his time; and which were then set aside as “wild speculations,” by the physicists who complained of his “want of mathematical accuracy,” of his “entertaining notions altogether distinct from the views generally held by men of science,” who continued their experimental researches on their own lines.

In 1885, before Keely’s scientific explorations had taught him that no engine can ever be constructed by which the ether can be used and controlled, as we now use and control steam, he wrote, in a letter to a friend, “I shall not forestall an unproved conclusion, but fight step by step the dark paths I am exploring, knowing that, should I succeed in proving one single fact in science heretofore unknown, I shall in so doing be rewarded in the highest degree. In whatever direction the human mind travels it comes quickly to a boundary line which it cannot pass. There is a knowable field of research, bordered by an unknown tract. My experience teaches me how narrow is the strip of territory which belongs to the knowable, how very small the portion that has been traversed and taken possession of. The further we traverse this unknown territory, the stronger will become our faith in the immovable order of the world; for, at each advancing step, we find fresh fruits of the immutable laws that reign over all things,—from the falling apple, up to the thoughts, the words, the deeds, the will of man: and we find these laws irreversible and eternal, order and method reigning throughout the universe. Some details of this universal method have been worked up, and we know them by the names of ‘gravitation,’ ‘chemical affinity,’ ‘nerve-power,’ &c. These material certainties are as sacred as moral certainties …. The nearest approach to a certainty is made through harmony with nature’s laws. The surest media are those which nature has laid out in her wonderful workings. The man who deviates from these paths will suffer the penalty of a defeat, as is seen in the record of ‘perpetual motion’ seekers. I have been classed with such dreamers; but I find consolation in the thought that it is only by those men who are utterly ignorant of the great and marvellous truths which I have devoted my life to demonstrate and to bring within reach of all. I believe the time is near at hand when the principles of etheric evolution will be established, and when the world will be eager to recognize and accept a system that will certainly create a revolution for the highest benefits of mankind, inaugurating an era undreamed of by those who are now ignorant of the existence of this etheric force.” These views which have guided Keely in all his researches cannot be made known to any just, discerning mind without an accompanying perception of the gross way in which he has been misrepresented by his defamers; as well as some appreciation of the scientifically cautious manner in which he has pursued his investigations, since he abandoned his efforts to construct an engine that would hold the ether in rotation.

At the present time Keely is concentrating his efforts on the perfecting of his mechanical conditions to that point where, according to his theories, he will be able to establish, on the ninths, a sympathetic affinity with pure, polar, negative attraction, minus magnetism. In his own opinion he has so nearly gained the summit, or completion of his “graduation,” as to feel that he holds the key to the control of the infinitely tenuous conditions which lie before him to be conquered, before he gains mastery of the group of depolar disks that he is now working upon. Twenty-six groups are completed, and when the twenty-seventh and last group is under equal control, Keely expects to establish a circuit of vibratory force, for running machinery: both for aerial navigation and for terrestrial use. If this result be obtained, Keely will then be in a position to give his system to science; and to demonstrate the ever-operative immanence of the Infinite builder of all things of whom our Lord said, “My Father worketh hitherto, and I work.”

In commercial use Keely expects that when the motion has been once set up, in any of his machines, it will continue until the material is worn out. It is this claim which has caused Keely to be classed with perpetual-motion seekers.

For years Keely has been trying to utilize his discoveries for the material and moral advantage of humanity: and yet he feels, as Buckle has said of the present acquirements of science, that the ground only is broken, that the crust only is touched. The loftiest pinnacle which has been reached by the men who are foremost in their constructions of the method by which the one source of all energy works in the material world, is too insignificant a position to obtain even an outlook towards the vast realm that Keely figuratively describes as the infinite brain; or the source from which all “sympathetic-leads” emanate, that connect mind with matter. Realizing that all conditions of matter are but as vain illusions, he never falters in his determination to reach after the hidden things of God, if haply he may find them. Even the goal which he seeks to attain lies, in his own estimation, on the outermost border of this crust; and well he knows that it never can be reached in any other way than by principles of exact science and by pursuing a path that is at all times lighted by reason.

Believing that “the horizon of the world of matter, which has been thought to rest over hydrogen, extends to infinite reaches, including substances which have never been revealed to the senses,” he knows how unfathomable is the ocean that lies beyond, and like Newton compares himself to one who is gathering pebbles on its shore.

Science, which has ever been interested both in the infinitely small and infinitely great, has in our age dropped the only clue that can guide through the obscure labyrinth which leads into depths of nature lying beyond the knowledge of our unaided senses.

The evolution of the human race, says Nesbit, has passed from the physiological into the psychological field; and it is in the latter alone that progress may be looked for.

This is the realm into which Keely’s efforts, to give to the world a costless motive power, have slowly conducted him through the black darkness of the region in which he has been fighting his way, for a score of years, in behalf of true science and humanity.

Lord Derby has said that modern science, on its popular side, is really a great factory of popular fallacies; that its expounders in one decade are kept busy refuting the errors to which the preceding decade has given currency. There is hardly a branch of science, he says, susceptible of general and wide-reaching conclusions, which might not be revolutionized by some discovery to-morrow.