This page covers a web transcription, hosted on svpvril.com, of four New York Times items about John W. Keely. Each records a different kind of reporting. A satirical editorial of December 1881 shows the stockholders' grievances and the paper's own scorn. A short report from May 1882 records what Keely admitted in his sworn answer to the stockholders' suit. A long interview from September 1884, after the Sandy Hook gun trial, gives Keely's claims in his own words. A January 1899 item relays the Philadelphia Press investigation of his workshop and the opinions of the experts who helped it.
What were the stockholders complaining about in 1881?
The editorial, dated 12/16/1881, is ironic from start to finish. It describes stockholders who had paid for six or seven years and now found $19.48 in the treasury. At a meeting they complained that their questions to Keely got deception and misrepresentation, and they threatened to go to law so that his secret would not die with him. The paper reports their reminder that Keely himself called his "generator" perfected a year earlier and his "multiplicator" also perfect. Meanwhile he was building costly "phenomena", six or seven of them nearly finished. The writer sums up what was already known of Keely's method: that he made a cold vapour from water by vibration, and that he alternated positive and negative vibrations mixed with "anthropomorphic and interconvertible strata". The editorial presents this as the part of the explanation Keely did not care to keep secret. The piece closes with a joke. The hidden knowledge, the writer says, is a small thing of the Yale pattern, in fact the key to the cellar door under the room where the motor was exhibited. It is a jest about secrecy, not a finding.
What did Keely concede under oath?
According to the newspaper report dated Philadelphia, May 24, 1882, Keely's sworn answer to the equity suit largely accepted the formal parts of the complaint about his contract. He also admitted that, because of what he called abstruse difficulties in the nature of the force, he had so far failed to put his inventions to practical use or to reach the utility the law required. He said he still believed he would succeed. As reported, then, Keely conceded under oath that he had so far failed to bring his inventions into practicable use.
What did Keely claim after Sandy Hook?
The interview is dated Philadelphia, September 21, 1884, following the Saturday gun trial at Sandy Hook before government officials. It was given to a reporter of the Press, the paper that would later dig up his workshop. Keely told the reporter that his experimenting days were over and that his motor would be finished in under two months.
His account of the process went like this. Vibration acting on water and air freed an "inter atomic ether" which he said was about four times lighter than hydrogen. A hollow steel "vibrator", shaped like a policeman's billy, hummed like a tuning fork when tapped, while an ordinary bar stayed silent; he said etheric vapour had been flowing through the core for seven years. He put its vibrations at an average of 300,000 per second and spoke of a range of 40 octaves. To fire a gun, he said, the "chord" of the gun's vibration had to agree with that of the vibrator. A mallet blow then released the ether behind the projectile.
Grouped by subject, the figures he gave were these:
- The gun. The Sandy Hook weapon, he said, was a specially built 500-pound breechloading rifle. Its five-gallon wrought-iron reservoir, one and a half inches thick, took under four seconds to charge. Six drops of water and about a pint of air were enough for 20 lead bullets of nearly five ounces each at over 450 feet a second, and he claimed the tube ended with more power than it started with. He first put the force at three times that of gunpowder and later in the same interview at four times.
- Pressure. He claimed to have often reached 10,000 pounds per square inch in a quarter of a second, and to have generated 56,000 pounds to the inch, enough to tear apart a Shaw gauge.
- Vacuum. He claimed a "vacuum of 31 pounds", against what he called the previous best of 15, and distinguished his "etheric" vacuum from the ordinary atmospheric kind.
- Telegraphy. He said a force sent along 8,000 feet of wire in one-eighth of a second could make holes in pasteboard at the far end, and asserted he could disturb a wire 25,000 feet long within a second.
- Engines. He said his large motor was complete and needed only adjusting, that he was building a 500 horse-power engine, and that a 250 horse-power engine was finished except for its "vitalizing process".
These are Keely's assertions, reported without any check, and the interview gives no independent way to measure the etheric vacuum or any of the other figures. The promised public test in two months is one of the deadlines tracked in John Ernst Worrell Keely (1837–1898): Changing Names for a Force, Private Patronage and Repeatedly Postponed Engines.
What did the 1899 investigation report?
The Times item, dated Philadelphia, January 19, 1899, summarises an illustrated Press article about the late inventor's dismantled workshop. The Press claimed its search, which ran for more than a week, proved the motor a delusion and its mysterious forces the product of trickery.
What was found
To search the building, the investigators lifted the workshop floor and knocked out an internal brick wall. According to the Press, they found narrow brass pipework hidden in the walls and beneath the floor, of a type it described as built for high pressure. The week before, a large steel sphere had turned up in the laboratory, and the experts suggested it had stored compressed air or gas.
Why the pipes mattered
The report notes that for many years Keely and his friend had maintained that his machines required no tubing whatever. The Press argued that the hidden pipes could have carried power from the sphere to the motor in the exhibition room. That connection is offered as a possibility, not something the report says was demonstrated.
Who took part, and what they concluded
The paper's helpers were Carl Hering, a consulting engineer; Arthur W. Goodspeed, assistant professor of physics at the University of Pennsylvania; Lightner Witmer, professor of experimental psychology there; and Dr M. G. Miller, whose experience of mound digging put him in charge of the excavation. Clarence B. Moore, son of Keely's backer Mrs Bloomfield Moore, looked on.
Only Hering and Witmer are quoted directly. Hering's signed statement notes that the tubes and couplings closely matched photographs of Keely's apparatus and were recognised by some who had seen the experiments. On that basis he says the finds leave little doubt that Keely "probably lied and deceived". He then speaks for himself more firmly: "Personally I am satisfied now that he used highly compressed air." He adds that he is satisfied Keely deceived the public intentionally at the exhibitions, and that none of the experiments he had read about would be remarkable if compressed air was used.
Goodspeed's view comes only in the Times summary, which says he and Hering took the tubing and sphere to indicate ordinary forces and possible deception, and that Moore agreed. Witmer's position is likewise summarised by the paper as holding that the possibility of trickery confirmed what psychologists had diagnosed. In his own words, he argues the hardware was hardly needed: on critical reading, Keely's jargon, Mrs Bloomfield-Moore's writings and the company's official reports already showed the doctrine to be unsound. He lists its promises, from untold power to making gold, curing the sick and founding a religion, and treats the whole as a pathological product of the mind. These are opinions as reported, not the results of tests.
What remains untested
The Times summary reports no pressure test of the pipes, and does not say that the sphere and tubes were connected and used to reproduce any of Keely's demonstrations.
What this record does and does not show
The 1882 answer is the strongest single document here, because it is Keely's own sworn statement that the motor was not yet practical. The 1884 interview shows how large his claims were and how precise they sounded. None of the numbers was measured independently in the report. The 1899 summary gives conclusions that range in strength. The Press offers the link between pipes and sphere only as something that could have been so. Hering says the finds leave little doubt Keely probably deceived, and separately that he is personally satisfied Keely used compressed air and deceived the public on purpose. Goodspeed's and Moore's views reach the reader only through the newspaper's summary.
Nor does the summary carry any response from the Keely Motor Company. President B. L. Ackerman's denial of January 25, 1899, and the 1895 report of a tube passed off as wire, are covered in The Compressed-Air Question in the Keely Motor Record: Demonstrations, Court Orders and the 1899 Philadelphia Press Investigation. The 1882 suit that the sworn answer responds to is also seen from Moore's side in Clara Bloomfield Moore's Keely and His Discoveries: The 1882 Stockholder Letter and the Keely Motor Company's Finances.
Source notes & attribution
- https://www.svpvril.com/svpweb25.html