Clara Bloomfield Moore's Keely and His Discoveries: The 1882 Stockholder Letter and the Keely Motor Company's Finances

Keely and His Discoveries: Aerial Navigation is a book-length defence of the Philadelphia inventor John W. Keely by Clara Sophia Jessup Bloomfield Moore, who wrote it as his advocate. Its dedication, to the chemist James Dewar, is dated 16th May, 1893, from Great Stanhope Street, Mayfair. In its opening chapters Moore sets out her account of why a motor promised to investors never arrived, and reprints three Philadelphia newspaper pieces, including a long letter from a stockholder about the Keely Motor Company's money.

What do the preface and introduction set out to do?

They argue Keely's case, and they defer any technical account of how his apparatus worked. Three things are worth knowing before reading the financial material.

First, the method is put off to a later date. The preface, by the Rev. John Andrew of Belfast, says the exposition is left for Keely to give himself in due course, and Moore's introduction says Keely is prepared to demonstrate his claims mechanically without itself supplying such a demonstration. Her stated reasons for the delay are that the work is unfinished, pending the completion of his experiments on a twenty-seventh and last group of depolar disks, and that the world will not grasp the discovery until an aerial ship is operating.

Second, what these opening pages offer in place of a method is a history and a philosophy. Andrew describes the volume as an account of the researches meant to explain the hostility Keely met. His version is that Keely, short of money, was pushed into trying to drive machinery with a power he did not yet understand, failed, and was then called an impostor; he calls this a passing mistake, since corrected. He also credits the generous financial help of a supporter whom he does not name. Moore's introduction is largely religious and philosophical. It presents the etheric force, as she calls it, as one universal substance linking mind and matter, and draws on Macvicar's Sketch of a Philosophy and the writings of a Mr. Sinclair.

Third, the forward-looking statements are expectations. Moore writes that Professor Dewar, of the Royal Institution of Great Britain, will be instructed in Keely's dissociation processes when he goes to America that summer. That is a promise made in the introduction, not a report of something done.

Moore's timeline, 1872 to 1885

According to Moore, Keely came upon an unknown energy while experimenting with vibrations in 1872, and needed six years before he could produce it at will. The Keely Motor Company was meant to turn that energy into a working engine. Moore says its founders had seen the force demonstrated, proposed a company to fund a machine that would use it as motive power, and expected quick results. Keely, whose own money was gone by then, agreed.

No engine followed, and Moore writes that in 1882 Keely was sued for failing to fulfil his contract. She attributes the lost decade to a wrong turn: he was trying to invent a machine when he should have been investigating the force. By her account none of the engines built in that period could sustain the rotary motion of the ether that the design needed. The failures were scrapped, and there were repeated explosions, some of which put him out of action for weeks. Two more years, she says, went into an automatic arrangement intended to make the machine usable by any operator, and she dates steady progress only from 1884.

Moore also records a press claim. On August 5th, 1885, the New York Home Journal announced that Keely had imprisoned the ether. She adds that the announcement rested on a supposition she regards as mistaken: the unknown force was then taken to be the ether itself, whereas in her account the ether is only the medium of the force.

There is a small inconsistency in the dating. Moore calls 1882 about ten years after the company was formed, while the letter she reprints puts the company's start in 1874.

The stockholder's letter of 1882

The letter appeared in the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin of March 30th, 1882, signed only with the single word One. Its author writes as one of the unlucky investors in the Keely motor speculation, who says that interest led them to look into both the inventor and the company's management. Moore introduces it as a truthful explanation of the position.

What is alleged?

That the company's promoters, and not its inventor, profited from the stock and should answer for it. The letter holds the men who recommended and sold the shares responsible to the people who bought them, and says those most eager to prosecute Keely have the least cause for complaint. In the writer's words: "If Mr. Keely is guilty of deception, they are to say the least equally so."

Around that central charge sit several others. The letter speaks of a ring that now controls the company with stock that cost its members nothing. It denies public reports that Keely had drawn large sums from the company, and claims instead that a half dozen or more of the people commonly regarded as his dupes made, on average, at least $50,000 each. It says the company owes Keely fifty thousand dollars lent early in its history, with more added since. And it suggests that if anyone has a case against Keely, it is the men who bought territorial rights from him. Of the stockholders, whom the writer puts at perhaps a thousand, most are said to have no part in the legal action.

How is the financing said to have worked?

On the letter's account, in two stages.

The first stage was the founding in 1874, with 20,000 shares. The writer says Keely gave about three-fourths of them to the organisers, who put no money in, and kept about one-seventh himself, a good part of which he was later cheated out of. The capital Keely contributed is said to have come from selling territorial rights to men who went on to form other companies. Only 400 shares were reserved for the treasury. The holders of the free shares are said to have sold out quickly and kept the proceeds, which wrecked the market, so that the treasury shares raised very little. The young company was close to bankruptcy, and the organisers who had profited would not put anything back.

The second stage was the reorganisation of 1879, which the letter calls the consolidation. Keely made over two inventions other than the motor, and the stock was raised to 100,000 shares. Of the 80,000 new shares, 40,000 were assigned to Keely as the price of the inventions and 40,000 went to the company free. From then on, the writer says, every dollar the company raised came from selling its block. The letter alleges that this block was sometimes sold for far less than comparable stock fetched on the market, and that only part of the proceeds was passed on to Keely, sparingly.

Keely received no cash from the arrangement, and little stock. Fewer than 5000 of his 40,000 shares are said to have reached him, the rest going to claims the letter calls fraudulent while a trustee held the stock. Much of what did arrive had already been pledged to keep the work going, leaving him under 1000 shares once claims were settled.

What is documented?

Very little beyond the complaint itself. The letter is a dated newspaper item, and it shows what one stockholder was prepared to allege in print in 1882. It and Moore's own narrative both refer to a legal action against Keely that year. The writer appeals to the promoters' official records but only asserts what they show, namely disregard for stockholders and for the inventor.

What is not?

Everything that would allow the figures to be checked. The letter reproduces no accounts, share registers or contracts. It names no one: the organisers, the trustee, the members of the ring and the supposed dupes who profited are all unidentified, as is the writer. The share counts, the debt and the profits are stated without supporting accounts. The author is an interested party, and the letter reaches the reader through a book written by Keely's advocate.

What the two 1886 editorials say

Moore follows the letter with two Philadelphia editorials, each responding to a demonstration Keely had recently given to visitors. They agree that he should not be laughed off and disagree about what a demonstration is worth.

What the Daily News accepted. Its editorial of May 25th, 1886, headed What has Keely Discovered?, takes the visitors' account largely at face value. It concludes that Keely appears to have earned respectful investigation in place of ridicule, and thinks it frivolous to suppose trained observers could be fooled by hidden springs or buried pipes carrying compressed air. It grants that mockery of such a claim was bound to persist until a thorough practical demonstration put an end to it.

The striking numbers come from this piece: a substance produced almost instantly with an elastic energy of 10,000 to 20,000 pounds per square inch, released without heat on production or cold on discharge. The paper gives these on the united report of those present, and it draws a strong inference from them: in its view the phenomena by themselves would appear to show that Keely was working with a substance not previously known to science. That inference rests on what unnamed visitors reported. No observer, gauge or procedure is identified, so the figures are reported hearsay, not measurements.

What the Public Ledger accepted, and what it demanded. Its leader of July 28th, 1886, grants that a recent display of a rapidly whirling sphere puzzled those present, and declines to reject Keely merely because his claims were new or because experts called them impossible. What it will not do is credit a display with practical value. It complains of his secrecy and of language that, the Ledger says, sounds like "meaningless jargon", and it sets a plain test: connect the motor to a shaft driving lathes or planers and let it do useful work every day. High gauge pressures and great lifting force, it observes, are already available by ordinary means.

Moore's reply is that Keely had not yet reached the stage where he could meet that test.

What this does and does not establish

The financial account rests on one anonymous letter, and its effect in Moore's hands is to move blame from Keely to the company's promoters. It is evidence of what a stockholder alleged in 1882, not of what the company's books contained. The label Keely Motor Bubble is one Moore applies in her own text, not the letter writer's; the contents list gives it as the title of a later chapter covering 1881 to 1891.

The newspaper pieces Moore reprints contain no instrumented measurement of the motor doing work. The pressure figures come from a newspaper summary of what visitors reported. The compressed-air suspicion appears only as something the Daily News waves away; it is neither tested nor refuted. The contents list also shows that the volume's conclusion is an essay on Keely's physical philosophy by Professor D. G. Brinton of the University of Pennsylvania.

Further reading

• The Hydro Vacuo Engine Specification Bearing John W. Keely's Name: Vacuum, Water Pressure and Eleven Claims — an undated specification signed by Keely that describes an engine in terms of water pressure, trapped air and a vacuum, with no reference to etheric force.
• The Compressed-Air Question in the Keely Motor Record: Demonstrations, Court Orders and the 1899 Philadelphia Press Investigation — a dated chronology of the 1882 stockholders' suit, the sceptical witnesses' proposed tests, and the 1899 Philadelphia Press report of concealed tubes and a compressed-air sphere under Keely's workshop.
• Keely in the New York Times, 1881–1899: A Mocking Editorial, a Sworn Answer, the Sandy Hook Interview and the Press Exposure — the Times view of the same 1882 suit: a mocking December 1881 editorial on the stockholders' complaints and Keely's sworn answer of May 1882.
• John Ernst Worrell Keely (1837–1898): Changing Names for a Force, Private Patronage and Repeatedly Postponed Engines — a biographical page that gives the sums Moore is reported to have paid Keely from 1881 to December 1890 and the dated sequence of engine deadlines announced to the stockholders.