Keely and His Discoveries: Aerial Navigation

by Mrs. Bloomfield H. Moore

Answer.—“No foot-pounds at all. The force necessary to excite disintegration when the instrument is sensitized, both in sensitization and developments, would not be sufficient to wind up a watch.”

II. “What is the amount of energy that you get out of that initial amount of water, say twelve drops, when decomposed into ether?”

Answer.—“From twelve drops of water a force can be developed that will fill a chamber of seven pint volume no less than six times with a pressure of ten tons to the square inch.”

III. “In other words, if you put so many pounds of energy into vibratory motion, how many foot-pounds do you get out of this?”

Answer.—“All molecular masses of metal represent in their interstitial molecular spaces incalculable amounts of latent force, which, if awakened and brought into intense vibratory action by the medium of sympathetic liberation, would result in thousands of billions more power in foot-pounds than that necessary to awaken it. The resultant development of any and all forces is only accomplished by conditions that awaken the latent energy they have carried with them during molecular aggregation. If the latent force that exists in a pound of water could be sympathetically evolved or liberated up to the seventh subdivision or compound inter-etheric, and could be stored free of rotation, it would be in my estimation sufficient to run the power of the world for a century.”

This statement gives another of Keely’s discoveries to the world, viz., that molecular dissociation does not create energy, as men have asserted Keely has claimed, but supplies it in unlimited quantities, as the product of the latent energy accumulated in molecular aggregation. This is to the physicist as if Keely had asserted that two and two make a billion, but as a man of science, who is held to be “the scientific equal of any man in the world,” has come forward to make known that, in his opinion, “Keely has fairly demonstrated the discovery of a force previously unknown to science,” the discoverer at lasts feels at liberty to make public the nature of his discoveries. Until Dr. Joseph Leidy had taken this stand, Mr. Keely could not, without jeopardizing his interests, and the interests of the Keely Motor Company, have made known in what particulars his system conflicts with the systems upheld by the age in which we live.

After the warning given in the history of Huxley’s “Bathybius,” we may feel quite sure that if Keely had failed to demonstrate the genuineness of his claims by actual experiment, no scientist would have risked the world-wide reputation of a lifetime by endorsement of the discovery of an unknown force, as Professor Leidy has done, while Keely himself was under such a cloud that, to advocate his integrity and uphold the importance of his discovery, has hitherto been enough to awaken doubts as to the sanity of his upholders. Among many others who have written of it from the standpoint of Keely’s accountability for the mistakes of the managers of the Keely Motor Company—men who made no pretence of caring for anything but dividends—was one who asserted, in the New York Tribune, that it was a “remarkable delusion, full of tricks too numerous to mention, the exposure of which ought to be made to bring the Keely craze to an end.” In the same journal an editorial states that “Mr. Keely appears to have no mechanical ingenuity, his strong point being his ability as a collector. He has one of the largest and best arranged collections of other people’s money to be found in the United States. Having, a number of years ago, during a fit of temporary insanity, constructed a machine which, if any power on earth could start it, would explode and pierce the startled dome of heaven with flying fragments of cog-wheels and cranks, he now sits down calmly, and allows this same mechanical nightmare to make his living for him. This is genius; this is John W. Keely; he toils not, neither does he spin, but he has got an hysterical collection of crooked pipes and lob-sided wheels tied up in his back room that extract the reluctant dollar from the pocket of avarice without fail.”

This is a specimen of the nature of the ridicule which was encountered by Keely’s “upholders,” as well as by himself. Until Professor Leidy and Dr. Willcox came to the front, in March, 1890, Mr. Keely had no influential supporters, and not one scientist could be found who was ready to encounter the wasps.

Such is the position of all defenders of the truth in all ages; but the torch being held aloft, in such hands as have now seized it, the opportunity is given to see what Keely proclaims as truth.

We know that science denies the divisibility of atoms, but Keely affirms and demonstrates that all corpuscules of matter may be divided and subdivided by a certain order of vibration. During all these years in which he has given exhibitions of the operation of his generators, liberators, and disintegrators, in turn, each being an improvement, successively, on the preceding one, no one has attempted to give to the public any theory, or even so much as a sensible conjecture, of the origin of the force.