SOME RECENT EXPERIMENTS.[2]
Copy of a Letter addressed to Professor Dewar of the Royal Institution of Great Britain.
Dear Professor Dewar,—As I have already informed you, I carried out your wishes in reference to Professor Rowland of the John Hopkins University, as far as extending to him an invitation to witness some of Mr. Keely’s experiments in sympathetic vibration was concerned. Professor Rowland was not able to witness any demonstration whatever, on account of an accident which happened to the disintegrator, and he could not fail to have formed an unfavourable opinion of Mr. Keely from all that transpired on that occasion. I next renewed the invitation to Professor Barker, which had already been extended to him by Professor Leidy, both of these gentlemen being Professors in the Pennsylvania University. Professor Barker was not able to be present. The series of experiments which have been given for scientists, mechanical engineers, and others since my return, closed on the 12th. The steady progress from week to week, since the accident to the disintegrator was repaired, has given beautiful evidence of the wisdom of the plan adopted by Mr. Keely in the winter of 1888–89, which led him to turn his attention to a class of experiments of quite a different nature from those which, up to that time, had been made for commercial ends; experiments which have not failed to convince all who attended the entire series that Mr. Keely is dealing with an unknown force, the laws governing which he is still in partial ignorance concerning. He admits now that he cannot construct a patentable engine to use this force till he has mastered the principle; and a fund, with the approval of scientists, has been appropriated for this end, upon the condition that he will waste no more time upon what is known as the Keely Motor Engine until he has demonstrated his ability to control reversions and in all points to govern the revolutions.
His last engine was built to exhibit the practical nature of his discovery to capitalists, the managers of “The Keely Motor Company”—which company died a natural death years since—hoping thereby to raise the price of its stock, and in this way to furnish Mr. Keely with the funds that he needed. But the exhibition of this engine was premature and did not succeed. There will be no further need for such exhibitions in future, for it is, as it always has been, in the interest of stock-holders that the stock should not rise until the system is completed, when it will rise to remain raised. From this time the interests of stock-holders will not be sacrificed to the interest of stock-jobbers. The experiments conducted on Saturday last surpassed preceding ones in the purity of the demonstrations, the instruments being in better condition.
In demonstrating what seems to be the overcoming of gravity for aerial navigation, Mr. Keely used a model of an air-ship, weighing about eight pounds, which, when the differentiated wire of silver and platinum was attached to it, communicating with the sympathetic transmitter, rose, descended, or remained stationary midway, the motion as gentle as that of thistledown floating in the air.
The experiment illustrating “chord of mass” sympathy was repeated, using a glass chamber, forty inches in height, filled with water, standing on a slab of glass. Three metal spheres, weighing about six ounces each, rested on the glass floor of the chamber. The chord of mass of these spheres was B flat first octave, E flat second octave, and B flat third octave. Upon sounding the note B flat on the sympathetic transmitter, the sphere having that chord of mass rose slowly to the top of the chamber; the positive end of the wire having been attached, which connected the covered jar with the transmitter. The same result followed the sound of the note in sympathy with the chord of mass of the other spheres, all of which descended as gently as they rose, upon changing the positive to the negative.
J. M. Willcox, Ph.D., who was present, remarked,—“This experiment proves the truth of a fundamental law in scholastic philosophy, viz., that when one body attracts or seeks another body, it is not that the effect is the sum of effects produced by parts of one body upon parts of another, one aggregate of effects, but the result of the operation of one whole upon another whole.”
The experiments on the 12th closed with the disintegration of water, twelve drops of which we saw dropped, drop by drop, into the small sphere attached to the disintegrator after exhausting the air by suction. A pressure of over 20,000 pounds to the square inch was shown to the satisfaction of all present, and when Mr. Willcox accepted Mr. Keely’s invitation to take a seat on the arm of the lever, adding his 260 pounds to the weight, applause broke forth. Mr. Keely showed control of the ether, inter-atomic subdivision, by graduating the escape of the residue, as he allowed it to discharge itself with a noise like the rushing of steam to an expulsion as gentle as the breathings of an infant. The three subdivisions acted simultaneously, showing instantaneous association and disassociation. The sympathetic globe was operated upon, 120 revolutions a second, ceasing the instant that the wire was detached.
I regret to say that Professor Ira Remsen was prevented, I fear by Professor Rowland, from witnessing any one of this series of experiments as he intended doing; nor have I been able to get the opinion of any physicist in whom I felt any confidence; but Mr. Keely is satisfied to have the support of such men as J. M. Willcox, Ph.D., and Professor Leidy, LL.D. Dr. Leidy was awarded the Lyell Medal in 1884, when in London, and the Cuvier Prize in 1888, from the Academy of Sciences in France. He is known in America not only as possessing the broadest of minds and the gentlest of natures, but as holding in his heart that love for, and reverence of, truth and justice which alone can confer the power of forming a correct and a just judgment.
I would like to have you make known in England that Mr. Keely is indebted to Macvicar’s Sketch of a Philosophy for turning his attention, in 1884, to researches on the structure of ether, and to Mrs. F. J. Hughes (not Mrs. Watts Hughes), for the suggestions in her work on Harmonies of Tones and Colours Developed by Evolution, which led him into the line of experiment that will enable him to show on a disc the various colours of sound, each note having its colour, and to demonstrate in various ways Mrs. Hughes’ own words “that the same laws which develop musical harmonies develop the universe,” etc., etc.
On the 10th of June, 1890, the Rev. John Andrew, of Belfast, whose pendulographs illustrate the ratios which rule in the domain of atmospheric vibrations, in which audible music has been located by the great numberer, wrote: “I think that now, at last, Keely’s labours are about to be honourably recognized by the world of science. May he live to rejoice in his triumphs.” Mr. Andrew, who was the friend of the late Dr. Macvicar, was instrumental in bringing “A Sketch of a Philosophy” to Mrs. Moore’s notice, and has maintained great interest in Keely’s researches since he first heard of them. Miss Mary Green, a governess in the family of Lord Wimborne, was another instrument used to make known to Keely the important nature of the energy he had liberated from the suspension in which it is always held in our atmosphere. About this time Professor James Dewar, who had been following Keely’s claims as a discoverer since 1884, wrote: “If Mr. Keely succeeds in making his discovery practically useful, as it is said that he is demonstrating to scientists his ability to do—if this information be true, it is strange to contrast the past history of science with the present. Fancy the discoverer of electricity having succeeded in inventing the modern dynamo machine! Such a fact would mean the concentration of hundreds of years of scientific discovery and invention into the single life of one man. Such a result would be simply marvellous.”
At this time a number of the leading journals in various parts of the United States announced that, although Keely’s methods and his failures had combined to engender distrust and arouse ridicule, it could no longer be denied that he had discovered what no other man has discovered. Still “penny-a-liners” continued to employ those “weapons of small souls and narrow minds,” sneers and ridicule and calumny, which Lavater’s allegorical vignette so well depicts: A hand holding a lighted torch is stung by a wasp, and the gnats that swarm around it are consumed in its flame. Underneath are these lines:—
And although it singes the wings of the gnats,
Destroys their heads and all their little brains,
Light is still light;
And although I am stung by the angriest wasp,
I will not yield.
Every defender of the truth, at whom shafts of ridicule are levelled, should recall these words. Never, for one moment, has Keely turned aside from his work to answer his assailants.
It is not to be wondered at that the magical nature of his demonstrations, more inexplicable than any feats of legerdemain, should have brought upon him the suspicion of fraudulent representation, concerning the production of the force and its manipulation; but his persistency alone in seeking to unravel the mysteries of nature, ought to have brought around him sooner men who, like the revered and great Leidy, were able to appreciate his researches in sympathetic vibration, the laws of which govern everything in creation, from the movements of the planets, down to the movements of atoms. From the time in which it was made known to Keely that the same principle underlies harmonies and the motion of heavenly bodies, as announced by Pythagoras, his grasping intellect conceived the idea that planetary bodies have a nerve-system, subject to conditions which govern it and keep it under control, just as our human mechanism is controlled by the law which governs its operation. In Keely’s theories all is mechanical in nature. A molecule of steel, a molecule of gas, a molecule of brain matter are all of the one primeval substance—the Ether.
AERIAL NAVIGATION.