Quick one this week, since I’m in Europe for work.
Newspaper reports describe a bleak scene. Shareholders are confused and nervous, converged in Philadelphia for their first meeting since the great inventor’s death. His widow’s lawyer offers a mixture of news. The bad: he’d left virtually no written insight into his creations. The good: the technology didn’t necessarily have to die alongside John W. Keely.
While the inventor had seemingly done little to prepare for his own mortality, he explained shortly before his death that he trusted exactly one person to continue his research. Keely had felt T.B. Kinraide was the only person who could be feasibly complete his life’s work. The shareholders passed the buck to the board of directors, and within a month, 20 large boxes were shipped to Kinraide’s Boston lab.
The packages contained the necessary components for Keely’s much-hyped perpetual motion machines. In January, Kinraide set out to solve the puzzle. By May, he had abandoned the project altogether. It was a sad, short end to his predecessor’s legacy, due to sheer frustration and investigations from a once-friendly media that had begun to turning up the heat in the wake of Keely’s death from pneumonia at age 61.
The previous decade, journalists across a range of outlets had found plenty of reason to be excited as he announced the discovery of a previously unknown force. He’d harnessed the power of tuning forks, vibrating with frequencies that resonated the ether around them. Investors were enthralled with the experiments. John Jacob Astor IV reportedly purchased a large stake in the company, and soon $5 million was amassed to get the Keely Motor Company up and running.
Keely would later tell the press, “My experimenting days are over,” adding, “this will develop my active enterprise. Complete success is very near at hand. My experiments at Sandy Hook demonstrated that my vaporic force is a fact and not a mere erection of fancy, as many persons have persisted in declaring. I am now able to produce a power of projection thrice greater than that of gunpowder, there is no limit to this force.”
Keely would produce more than 2,000 machines over two decades, all focused on harnessing interatomic ether to perform a range of tasks, like sawing wood and lifting weights. Not all who reported on Keely did so with complete credulity, however. The inventor suggested to one that opening the system up to expose its parts would take far too much time. Another, who believed the machine was powered by compressed air and hydraulics, asked Keely to run the demo for a full 30 minutes. The inventor obliged, noting that his machines had run upwards of 40 days. The demonstration lasted a quarter of an hour before it died outright.
The Philadelphia Press began investigated Keely’s claims shortly after his death. The paper employed a team of university researchers, publishing the results the same month Kinraide agreed to take on the project. Most damning was the presence of secret tubes and switches concealed in the walls and floor of the New York labs.
Engineering professor Carl Hering noted, “The discovery of so many tubes with couplings, which exactly resembled those show in the photographs of Keely’s apparatus, were recognized by some of those who had seen the experiments, seems to leave little doubt that Keely lied and deceived.” The team concluded that air pressure was, indeed, the true force behind his home brewed interatomic ether.
A statement from the Keely Motor Company claimed the tubes were simply the remnants of earlier experiments that had not been properly disposed of. Asked whether the entire pursuit had been fraudulent, Kinraide told reporters, “I have by no means arrived at any such conclusion, but under the circumstances, I have decided to make no further investigations.”
Sources:
Keely Motor Abandoned https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1899/05/07/100442006.pdf
Etheric Vapor
https://cdnc.ucr.edu/?a=d&d=SD18841122.2.65.7&e=-------en--20--1--txt-txIN--------
John E.W. Keely https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-E-W-Keely