John Ernst Worrell Keely (1837–1898): Changing Names for a Force, Private Patronage and Repeatedly Postponed Engines

John Ernst Worrell Keely was born in Chester, Pennsylvania, on September 3, 1837, and died in Philadelphia on November 18, 1898. Wikipedia's biography, which is assembled largely from New York Times reports of the period, introduces him as a fraudster and self-proclaimed inventor who said he had found a new motive power. This page uses that biography to describe the man: where he came from, what he called his force at different times, who paid for the work, how often a finished engine was announced, and what was left when he died. The tests that sceptics proposed, the two lawsuits and the 1899 examination of his workshop are treated separately in The Compressed-Air Question in the Keely Motor Record: Demonstrations, Court Orders and the 1899 Philadelphia Press Investigation.

Who was Keely before the motor?

The biography says he was orphaned young and brought up by his grandparents, and that he had been an orchestra player in a theatre, a painter, a carpenter, a carnival barker and a mechanic before he presented himself as an inventor.

One court filing pushes the story of the motor back before its public debut. In the suit that produced an injunction on January 3, 1888, Bennett C. Wilson said he had first hired Keely to varnish furniture, and that in 1863 the two agreed Wilson would pay for tools, materials and expenses in return for an equal share in whatever Keely invented. Wilson claimed that on August 14, 1869, Keely assigned him half of something already referred to as the Keely motor, and the whole of it later that month. These are a complainant's allegations as reported by the Times. If accurate, they place a machine of that name three years before the 1872 demonstration at 1422 North Twentieth Street with which the biography opens Keely's career.

What did he say the force was?

The name changed repeatedly, and the biography tracks the changes.

• 1872. Keely announced a principle of power production based on the musical vibrations of tuning forks, which he said could resonate with atoms or with the aether.
• 1874–1875. The apparatus was an etheric generator, said to disintegrate water and release a vapour. The Times of June 1875 reported the claim that this vapour was "more powerful than steam, and considerably more economical", and that Keely declined to explain the vapour or how it was produced until worldwide patent protection was secured, which was expected to cost about $30,000. The biography adds that the terminology kept shifting in later demonstrations, "vibratory-generator" being one of the labels.
• 1884. After the Sandy Hook gun trial he described an inter-atomic ether liberated from water and air by vibration.
• 1885. After the June demonstration he spoke of ether adhering to matter by vibratory rotation, and told the Times: "I call it a vibratory negative."
• 1887. His report to the stockholders' meeting of December 14 abandoned etheric force for an unnamed force based on vibratory sympathy.

The biography notes that a luminiferous aether filling space was an ordinary assumption among physicists of the nineteenth century. Keely's vocabulary borrowed a respectable word; the biography does not record any statement of his that an outside party could have used to reproduce an effect.

Who paid for the work?

According to the biography, the Keely Motor Company was formed in New York within months of the 1872 demonstration, with a capital of $5,000,000, a figure it takes from a 1937 guidebook to Philadelphia.

The largest individual backer was Clara Jessup Bloomfield Moore, the widow of a Philadelphia industrialist, who met Keely in 1881. The biography says she put in $100,000 and paid him $250 a month so that he could work on the motor without distraction, and that she wrote articles and books on his behalf. Her family objected that she was carrying obligations that belonged to the company. In 1890 she agreed to a further $2000 a month for household, workshop and instrument costs, to last until Keely could return to building a provisional engine under the company's direction. That arrangement ended in December 1890, when she passed the outstanding bills to the directors.

In November 1895 the Times reported that John Jacob Astor IV had bought a significant interest in the motor from a long-standing advocate of Keely, whom the report does not name. On December 24 of that year Moore said Keely would take out no patents and would license his inventions for royalties instead, at least 30 patents being otherwise required.

How often was a finished engine announced?

The dated record in the biography is a sequence of deadlines.

A motor was shown on June 18, 1897, to the general manager of the Manhattan Elevated Railway, the chief engineer of Western Union and a Metropolitan Traction Company representative. It was reported to weigh about 200 lb and to develop 10 hp. None of the three is reported as giving a judgement on what the motor was worth, although its force is said to have surprised them. A challenge from the trade journal Electricity in June 1895, to reproduce every one of Keely's phenomena within 60 days, went unanswered.

What was left when he died?

Keely died of pneumonia. His will, admitted to probate on December 1, 1898, left an estate of about $10,000 to his widow, Anna M. Keely, and did not mention the motor. At the stockholders' meeting of December 20 her attorney, Charles S. Hill, said no written account of the secret existed, and that Keely had named Thomas Burton Kinraide of Boston as the one person able to continue. Hill offered to confide a further secret to a single director; John J. Smith heard it and reported only that it was encouraging. In January 1899 Kinraide had 20 large packing cases moved to his laboratory at Jamaica Plain. On May 6, 1899, it was reported that he had given up the work and was to return the machines and notes to the company, citing the notoriety the Philadelphia Press report had brought him. Kinraide stopped short of calling the motor a fraud: when the question was put to him, the report has him answering that this was not a view he had come to, and that his own inquiries were over.

The biography lists surviving objects: a model once in the Franklin Institute's collection, an Etheric Force Machine dated 1878 at the American Precision Museum in Windsor, Vermont, and glass plate negatives of the motor taken by Kinraide, found in 2005 by Jeff and Rita Behary at his former home, Ravenscroft.

What this record does and does not show

It shows a pattern of announcement and deferral across some twelve years of dated deadlines (1883–1895), and the funding the biography reports is stockholder capital, Moore's payments and a stock company, reportedly formed by witnesses of the 1874 demonstration, that bought patent rights for the six New England states and paid $50,000 in cash for its share in the invention. The biography does not give a complete account of where the money came from. It does not show an engine delivered to the company or put to commercial work.

What drove the demonstrations remains a contested point in the biography. It reports that Addison B. Burk and E. Alexander Scott, after their visits to the workshop from November 1895, concluded that compressed air had been used in nearly all the experiments they saw, and that Carl Hering, one of the consultants in the Philadelphia Press examination published on January 19, 1899, signed a statement that he was satisfied highly compressed air had powered the demonstrations. It also reports that the company's president, B. L. Ackerman, issued a statement on January 25, 1899, denying the Press report and any trickery. The detail is in The Compressed-Air Question in the Keely Motor Record: Demonstrations, Court Orders and the 1899 Philadelphia Press Investigation.

The biography is a summary at one remove from its newspaper sources, many of whose headlines are openly hostile. Some details are loose: its statement that Edison and Tesla were invited to examine the inventions and declined carries no citation, its summary dates Keely's activity from 1872 although the Wilson claim reaches back to 1869, and the reference for the company's January 25, 1899 denial is dated 1889. Its caption to a photograph of about 1895 calls the engine pictured nonfunctional without saying how that was determined.

Further reading

• Clara Bloomfield Moore's Keely and His Discoveries: The 1882 Stockholder Letter and the Keely Motor Company's Finances — Moore's own account of the lost years, and a stockholder's 1882 allegations about where the company's shares went.
• The Hydro Vacuo Engine Specification Bearing John W. Keely's Name: Vacuum, Water Pressure and Eleven Claims — a specification bearing Keely's name that describes an engine in terms of water pressure, trapped air and vacuum.
• Keely in the New York Times, 1881–1899: A Mocking Editorial, a Sworn Answer, the Sandy Hook Interview and the Press Exposure — Keely's own words in the September 1884 interview, including the promise of a public test within two months, and his sworn answer of May 1882 conceding no practical result.