“Not as I will.”
The next “helper on the road” was an Austrian nobleman, the Chevalier Griez de Ronse, who printed a series of papers on Keely’s discoveries in a journal in Vienna, then owned by him—The Vienna Weekly News. One of these articles mentions that the attention of Englishmen of science had been drawn to Keely’s claims, in regard to having imprisoned the ether, by Professor Henri Hertz’s experiments in ether vibrations at the Bonn University. “Keely, like the late Dr. Schuster,” says The Vienna Weekly News, “claims on behalf of science the right to prosecute its investigations until a mechanical explanation of all things is attained. The public are still but the children of those who murdered Socrates, tolerated the persecution of Galileo, and deserted Columbus. This remark is now illustrated by the imprisonment with felons last month of Inventor Keely in Moyamensing Prison, Philadelphia, where Judge Finletter committed him for contempt of court, without the shadow of an excuse in the opinions of men who had followed the proceedings against him.
Under the heading, “Keely’s Sunday in Jail,” says a Philadelphia journal, Inventor Keely spent a quiet Sunday in Moyamensing Prison. The outside iron doors of his cell were thrown open, when the religious services of the morning began. The imprisoned inventor listened with deep interest. The soft peals of the organ and the melody of the choir, singing “Nearer, my God, to Thee,” floated into the narrow cell. Keely sat near the grated door while the minister read selections from the Scriptures and preached his sermon. While the inventor was resting in his cell, during the afternoon, a number of persons made inquiries at the “Untried Department.” They were all told that no one could be admitted on Sunday, but a young man with a pallid face lingered. He told the gate-keeper that he was an inventor himself, and had been waiting for eight years for a patent from Washington; adding that, when he read of Keely’s commitment, he was reminded of Galileo who was thrown in a dungeon because he said, “The world moves.”
The following day Keely was released by order of the Judges of the Supreme Court. His imprisonment exalted him, instead of degrading him as “the unjust judge” hoped to do; drawing the sympathies to him of all men who know what it is to be “persecuted for righteousness’ sake;” of all men, in all parts of the world, who are truth-loving, justice-loving men.
The Keely Motor Company should learn a lesson in this experience. Tyndall said, long since, that the community that severs itself from great discoveries, that merely runs after the practical application without reference to the sources of a discovery, would by-and-by find itself at the end of its tether. This has been verified in the fate of the Keely Motor Company, which was organized for the purpose of reaping financial benefit from Keely’s grand discovery of an unknown force before his “work of evolution,” in obtaining mechanical results, had fairly commenced. This company has thrown upon the discoverer’s shoulders the burden of its stock-jobbing operations, until Keely is looked upon by men of science, as well as by men ignorant of the A B C of science, as a man working for personal ends; instead of, as he should be regarded, a Prometheus seeking to give to his fellow-men a costless motive force; and who, whether he succeeds financially or not, is entitled to the admiration of all who believe, with Browning, that “effort, not success, makes man great.” If the Keely Motor Company managers would profit by this lesson, they will in future seek to find, among scientific men of world-wide renown, some one man, broad enough in mind to care nothing for the ridicule of the ignorant, who will investigate the nature of Keely’s discoveries, as demonstrated by his experiments, instead of inviting reporters to witness the demonstrations, in their efforts “to boom the stock” of their company, by a reporter’s accounts of the marvels he has witnessed. For years Keely had nothing to show, beyond the generation of the force, the production of a 30 lb. vacuum and the discharge of a gun. When once his giant mind had grasped the knowledge, which again by seeming chance was imparted to him, he made colossal strides across that unknown tract, the boundaries of which others are now but beginning to explore. Colonel Le Mat was no false prophet, Le Figaro was no untrustworthy herald, when the announcement was made by this French inventor to Monsieur Chevreul, and by this French journal to the public on the 1st day of September, 1888, that the chain which holds the aerial ship to the earth would be broken asunder by Keely’s discovery. The nineteenth century holds in its strong arms the pledge, that sooner or later the aerial navy, so long waited for, will traverse the trackless high roads of space from Continent to Continent.
It has been supposed by many, Dr. Franz Hartmann among the number, that it requires Keely himself, or another person constituted like him, to set his machinery in motion. Therefore, it has been reasoned that the commercial success of an engine is only possible in case Keely is himself the engineer; or if another man possessing the same seemingly abnormal power could be the engineer. For this reason, says Dr. Hartmann, it is impossible for Keely to instruct any one in his method, so as to enable that one to do what he does. There has been ground in the past for such a statement, it is true, but not now. Keely asserts that when his system is completed, the knowledge of all that is needed for its commercial employment will be more easily acquired than is the necessary skill demanded to enable one to safely operate a steam-engine. When Dr. Hartmann’s opinion was made known to Keely, he replied, “Dr. Hartmann’s whole conception, in regard to other men being unable to control the operations of my inventions on the sympathetic attractive system, is as incorrect as would be the same conception in reference to operating an electric battery by anyone but its inventor.”
Let anyone imagine the years on years of research that would have been necessary before Gilbert (who, after Thales, discovered electricity) could have perfected a system which would have enabled men to accomplish all that is accomplished in our age, with electricity as a motive power. Keely’s labours would be better understood by those who accuse him of “always promising, and never performing,” under such a conception. The inventor must be sanguine of success; he must day by day think that he is on the eve of perfecting his invention, in order to keep up his courage to persevere to the end; otherwise, how could he work, year after year, in the face of obstacle after obstacle that seems, each one, to be insurmountable? After Keely’s imprisonment when, among the men who knew that he was incapable of fraud, there was one so incensed by Keely’s repeated failures to perfect his engine that he had said he “hoped to live to see Keely rotting in a gutter,” Mr. R. Harte wrote: “And now that it has been proved in a hundred ways and before thousands of persons competent to judge of the merits of Keely’s claims, that he has really discovered previously unknown forces in nature, studied them, mastered some of their laws, invented and is perfecting researching apparatus that will make his discoveries of practical application in numerous ways—now that he has actually done this, how does the world treat him? Does Congress come forward with a grant to enable him to complete his marvellous work? Do men of science hail him as a great discoverer, or hold out the hand of fellowship? Do people do honour to the man whose sole entreaty to them will be to receive from his hands a gift a thousand times more precious to them than steam engine or dynamo? It is a literal fact that if Keely fell exhausted to-day, in the terrible struggle he has so long maintained, his failure to establish his claims would be received with a shout of malignant delight from nearly every lecture-hall, pulpit, counting-house and newspaper office in the so-called civilized world. The world has hardly ever recognized its benefactors until it has become time to raise a statue to their memory, ‘in order to beautify the town.’ Jealousy, stupidity, the malignity which is born of conscious inferiority, are at this moment putting in Keely’s road every impediment which law and injustice can manufacture. Two hundred years ago he would have been burned, a century since he would have probably been mobbed to death; but thank God we are too civilized, too humane now to burn or mob to death those who make great discoveries, who wish to benefit their fellow-men, or whose ideas are in advance of their age—we only break their hearts with slander, ridicule, and neglect, and when that fails to drive them to suicide, we bring to bear upon them the ponderous pressure of the law, and heap upon them the ‘peine forte et dure’ of injunctions, and orders, and suits, to crush them out of a world they have had the impertinence to try to improve, and the folly to imagine they could save from suffering, without paying in their own persons the inevitable penalty. Had it not been for the obligations incurred by Keely, in accepting the aid of the Keely Motor Company—in other words, had scientists, instead of speculators, furnished him with the means necessary to carry on his work of evolution, the secrets which he has so carefully guarded would now have been public property, so little does he care personally for financial results. As it is, those who have witnessed his beautiful experiments in acoustics and sympathetic vibration were often too ignorant to comprehend their meaning, and, consequently, even after expressing gratification to him, went away from his workshop to denounce him as a Cagliostro; while others, competent to judge, have refused to witness the production of the ether, as Sir William Thomson and Lord Raleigh refused, when they were in America a few years since. The company here mentioned has been a thorn in the inventor’s side ever since it was organized. It has been ‘bulled and beared’ by greedy speculators, in whose varying interests the American newspapers for years have been worked, the results of which the inventor has had to bear. For many years the Company has contributed nothing towards Keely’s expenses or support, and in the opinion of many lawyers it is virtually dead. How far it is entitled to his gratitude may be gathered from the fact, as stated, that ‘when Mr. Keely abandoned his old generator of etheric force, baffled in his attempts to wrest from nature one of her most carefully guarded secrets, harassed by his connection with the Keely Motor Company, some of the officers and stockholders of which had instituted law proceedings against him, which threatened him with the indignity of imprisonment, he destroyed many of his marvellous models, and determined that, if taken to prison, it should be his dead body and not himself.
“Those who argue, if Keely had really obtained knowledge which contributes towards making man master of the material world, that science would hail the glad tidings with great joy, know but little of modern science and its votaries. An Anglican bishop never ignored a dissenting preacher with more dignified grace than the professor of orthodox science ignores the heterodox genius who has the audacity to wander beyond the limitations which ‘received opinion’ has placed upon the possibilities of nature. The fact is that men of science have persistently ignored, and know absolutely nothing about, the great department of nature into which Keely penetrated years ago, and in which he has now made himself at home. Not long ago a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Major Ricarde-Seaver, went to Philadelphia to convince himself as to the nature of Keely’s discovery. He returned, saying that Keely was working with, and had the apparent command over forces, the nature, or even the very existence, of which was absolutely unknown to him, and, so far as he is aware, to modern science.
“Beyond disintegration lies dispersion, and Keely can just as easily disperse the atoms of matter as disintegrate its molecules. Disperse them into what? Well,—into ether, apparently; into the hypothetical substratum which modern scientists have postulated, and about whose nature they know absolutely nothing but what they invent themselves, but which to Keely is not hypothesis, but a fact as real as his own shoes; and which ether, indeed, seems to be ‘the protoplasm of all things.’ As to the ‘law of gravity,’ it appears in the light of Keely’s experiments, but one manifestation of a law of very much wider application—a law which provides for the reversion of the process of attraction in the shape of a process of repulsion.
“While Major Ricarde-Seaver, F.R.S.,[1] was in Philadelphia, Keely, by means of a belt and certain appliances which he wore upon his person, moved single-handed, a 500 horse-power vibratory engine from one part of his shop to another. There was not a scratch on the floor, and astounded engineers declared that they could not have moved it without a derrick, the operation of which would have required the removal of the roof of the shop. Of course it is but a step in advance of this to construct a machine which, when polarized with a ‘negative attraction,’ will rise from the earth and move under the influence of an etheric current at the rate of 500 miles an hour, in any given direction. This is, in fact, Keely’s ‘air ship.’