This document is a specification in the form of a patent application for something it calls a Hydro Vacuo Engine. It is a transcription published on SVPwiki, and it bears the name John W. Keely. It lists nine drawings, describes the parts by reference letter, explains how the engine is started, run and stopped, and ends with eleven claims and an inventor's oath. It is a statement of a design. It is not a record of the engine running, and it carries nothing that shows it was ever filed or granted as a patent.
What does the specification claim to be?
Its opening sentence gives the purpose: an engine in which "the actuating power is produced by a vacuum in connection with water pressure". That is the whole of the stated principle. The specification offers no vibratory or etheric theory of operation. The one "vibration" in it is the motion of a lever, and the word "pulsating" is applied to the diaphragms and chambers. The working substances it names are water from a supply pipe, air trapped and compressed inside the machine, an evacuated chamber, and the atmosphere.
The nine figures are listed as a side elevation, an end elevation, a plan view, a sectional side elevation, three cross-sections taken through that sectional view, a section of the valve chest, and a drawing of the valve plug.
What is the engine meant to do in one cycle?
As described, it is a single-cylinder piston engine with a pressure side and a vacuum side. On the up stroke, water backed by compressed air is let in beneath the piston and raises it. At the top of the stroke the valve cuts off that supply and opens the cylinder to the evacuated space, and the specification says the air and water in the cylinder are drawn into the vacuum. The atmosphere, acting on the piston through openings in the cylinder head, then makes the down stroke.
What does each group of parts contribute?
The pressure side. Water from the supply pipe enters an inner vessel and, through a connecting pipe, the upper part of a second vessel hung in the bed of the engine. Air is trapped in two places: in a cone-shaped chamber that opens into the inner vessel, and in the lower part of the second vessel. Each pocket of air is bounded by a diaphragm, and a pipe joins the two. A weighted lever bears on the stem of the cone's diaphragm, so that the trapped air is squeezed against the water. This is the store of pressure that drives the up stroke.
The vacuum side. An outer vessel enclosing the inner one, a vacuum chamber communicating with it, and a pipe running from the valve chest are described as forming one continuous vacuum. This is where the cylinder empties at the end of each up stroke.
The valve. A rotating plug in the valve chest connects the cylinder first to the pressure side and then to the vacuum side. It is turned from the crank shaft by an eccentric, working through a gear wheel and a toothed sector.
The linkage. The piston drives a crank shaft. Two further shafts are geared to turn at the same speed; one carries a flywheel and the other a crank wheel. A compensating lever joins that crank wheel to the weighted lever on the diaphragm. The specification says the crank wheel should be set so that the diaphragm is relieved of its load as the piston rises.
How is it started, kept running and stopped?
To start, some water is let in, which pushes the air it displaces into the cone. An air pump applied to the vacuum chamber then exhausts the whole vacuum side at once. With full water pressure admitted, the text says the trapped air is compressed until it equals the pressure of the water, and a weight chosen to give the pressure wanted is hung on the lever.
Once running, the specification says a few revolutions clear the remaining air from the valve ports and from the space beneath the piston. Spent water is drawn off through an exhaust pipe tapped into the outer vessel, with its far end dipped in water to keep air out. The text warns that water rising into the pulsating chamber would reduce the volume of air and interfere with the engine's capacity. To stop the engine, an air cock on the vacuum pipe is opened, which destroys the vacuum.
What do the eleven claims cover?
Every claim is for a combination of named parts. The first six cover the vessels and chambers with their diaphragms, pipes, valve chest and cylinder; the seventh and eighth cover the plug valve with its gear, sector and eccentric; the ninth the three shafts with their gearing and balance wheel; the tenth the crank wheel with its rod and compensating lever; and the eleventh the air cock on pipe X2.
None of the claims is for a new source of power. They are claims to an arrangement of vessels, diaphragms, valves and linkages.
What does the document not establish?
Its authorship and provenance. The transcription prints the name John W. Keely beneath the claims and again in the oath. It does not document where the text came from, and by itself it does not establish that Keely wrote or signed it.
Its date and legal status. The text bears no patent number, no filing or issue date and no place. It refers to two subscribing witnesses without naming them. The closing oath describes Keely as a petitioner and has him swear that he believes himself the original and first inventor and that he is a citizen of the United States. That is the language of an application. Nothing in the document shows that it was filed or that a patent was issued on it.
The reliability of the lettering. The text as transcribed is uneven. A few passages are marked as doubtful, and several reference letters are used inconsistently: the conical chamber is introduced as F but is E in the claims, where E had earlier meant the waist of vessel D; the eccentric is both G and Q; the stopping air cock is L in the description and Z in the claims; and the labels W2 and W3 for the weighted lever and its connecting rod change places.
Whether the engine worked, or how well. The specification gives no dimensions, pressures, speeds or power figures, and reports no trial. As written, the machine draws on an external water supply under pressure and on a vacuum first made with an air pump. A specification is an inventor's description of what a machine is meant to do; it is not evidence that it did so.
How does this fit the rest of the dossier?
The financial history in Clara Bloomfield Moore's Keely and His Discoveries: The 1882 Stockholder Letter and the Keely Motor Company's Finances records that Clara Bloomfield Moore dated Keely's discovery of an unknown energy to 1872, and that the stockholder letter she reprints speaks of two inventions other than the motor being made over to the company in 1879. Because this specification is undated, it cannot be placed on that timeline or identified with any of those inventions from its own text. Nor does it say that the Hydro Vacuo Engine is the motor Moore's book concerns.
What it offers is a difference of register. The opening pages of Moore's book, as that page reports, defer any technical account of how Keely's apparatus worked. This transcription, bearing Keely's name, describes an engine in conventional terms: pressurised water, an air cushion, a weighted diaphragm, a vacuum and the atmosphere. Compressed air, which the 1886 Daily News editorial reprinted by Moore mentions only as a suspicion of hidden pipes, appears here as an openly declared working part. The specification neither supports nor refutes that suspicion, and it does not connect itself to the demonstrations that editorial discussed.
Further reading
- The Compressed-Air Question in the Keely Motor Record: Demonstrations, Court Orders and the 1899 Philadelphia Press Investigation — how the compressed-air suspicion was pressed by witnesses during Keely's lifetime and by the Philadelphia Press investigation of his workshop in 1899.
- John Ernst Worrell Keely (1837–1898): Changing Names for a Force, Private Patronage and Repeatedly Postponed Engines — a biographical page listing the names Keely gave his apparatus over time, among them a hydro-pneumatic-pulsating-vacu-engine, and his reported 1895 decision to take out no patents.
Source notes & attribution
- https://svpwiki.com/Hydro-Vacuo-Engine-Patent