When Professor Leidy followed his impulse to leap the hedge which divided his special field of research from the domain that Keely was exploring, his was the first effort made by a man of science to save to the world “the hidden knowledge” bestowed upon one who, in my opinion, is alone capable of completing his system in a form to transmit this knowledge to others. I doubt not that this will seem to you as the language of fanaticism; but my convictions do not come from things hoped for. They are the result of the evidence of things seen, year after year, for nearly a decade of years.
As a school-girl, fifty years ago, I had the privilege of attending courses of lectures at Yale College, where experiments were given in natural philosophy and in chemistry; which kept up the interest that was awakened in earlier years; when, with my mineral hammer and basket, my father took me in his walks, laying the foundation of that love of true science which has made the discoveries of Keely of such intense interest to me.
Superficial as was and still is my knowledge of science, in its various branches, my interest has never abated; and thus, by my course of reading, I have kept myself abreast of the most advanced writers of modern thought, preparing the way for the help that I have been able to give Mr. Keely by putting books into his hands which, after more than twelve years of blind struggles to grapple with the force he had stumbled over, helped him to comprehend its nature, sooner than he would have done had he been left to work out his conjectures unaided, he tells me.
Marvellous as is the extent of Keely’s knowledge of vibratory physics, I doubt very much whether he knows enough of mechanical physics to perform the trickery which Professor Rowland accused him of attempting. “Of course every one is looking for a trick where Keely is concerned,” writes a Baltimore man; and, so long as speculations in the stock of the Keely Motor Company are authorized by the managers of that company, or efforts made to dispose of it before any practical result is attained, so long will Keely be unjustly suspected of being in league with them to obtain money under false pretences.
It was after six or seven years of failure on the part of the stockholders of the company to furnish Keely with one dollar, even, that I made a contract with him in April, 1890, to supply all that he needed for the completion of his system; having first received the assurance of Mr. Keely’s lawyer that he would carry out the united wishes of Mr. Keely and myself. At that time this announcement was made in the public journals:—
“There has been placed in the hands of Professor Leidy a fund for the use of inventor John W. Keely. The stipulation attached is that no use shall be made of the financial assistance for speculative purposes. This provision, which is made in the interests of the Keely Motor Company as well as for science, will end with the first attempt to speculate on the stock by exhibitions given of the operations of unpatentable engines. Professor Leidy holds the fund at his disposition, and will pay all bills for instruments constructed for researching purposes.”
The report issued last month by the directors of the Keely Motor Company annulled this contract; and it now remains for your board to decide whether I shall, in behalf of science, continue to supply Mr. Keely with the means of continuing his researches, under the protecting auspices of the University of Pennsylvania, or leave him in the hands of those who are so blind to their own interests, as holders of stock in the Keely Motor Company, they cannot be made to see that their only hope of commercial success lies in the completion of the system that Keely is developing; and that the course proposed by Professor Leidy, and commended by Professor Hertz and Professor Fitzgerald, for Keely to follow, is the only one that will ever enable him to complete it.
This system is as much a work of evolution as is any one of the slow operations of nature. “Truth can afford to wait:” she knows that the Creator of all things never hurries. In these twenty years of toil Keely’s patient perseverance has been godlike. It is the sharpest rebuke that could be uttered to those whose impatient “hue and cry” has been, “Give us a commercial engine and we will immortalize you;”—grinding from him, meantime, seven-eighths of his interests in his inventions.
But in his labours Keely finds a recompense that, as yet, “the world knows not of;” for day by day he sees the once, to him, obscure domain lit up with ever-increasing glory; a domain the boundaries of which are the boundaries of the universe: the entrance into which promises the fulfilment of the hopes of those who look forward to “a time when we shall no longer go to the blind to lead the blind in our search to make life worth living; but, instead, be able to promote, in accordance with scientific method and in harmony with law, the physical, intellectual and moral evolution of our race.”
As of Newton, with the change of one word only, so one day will it be said of Keely:—