THE ROCHESTER ROOM at the Fifth Avenue Hotel in New York on February 17, 1874 was crowded with reporters.
Some were scribbling in their notebooks. Some were aiming their cameras at a cluster of strange-looking machines and gadgets bolted onto several platforms in the middle of the room.
Some were just watching the tall man with the heavy mustache and long curly sideburns who was busily describing all this mysterious equipment.
“What I’m going to demonstrate is something I call Etheric Force,” John Worrell Keely explained. “It’s going to make every other form of power in this world obsolete. It is more powerful than any explosive known to man. Its vapor is lighter than hydrogen and so fine it can penetrate metal. But most amazing of all—this force can be harnessed using nothing more expensive than a small amount of ordinary water!”
A few reporters looked fascinated, but most looked doubtful. John Keely had no reputation as an inventor, and he’d always been rather vague about his engineering credentials. The only reason the newspapers were interested at all was that a very famous scientist, the German astronomer Johannes Kepler, had prophesied a very similar “force” in 1625—and Keely was now claiming that he’d finally found it.
If Keely noticed the reporters’ doubts, he gave no sign. He calmly went on to describe the astonishing new Etheric Force engine he was currently developing. He claimed it would require no more than a single liter (quart) of water to drive a 30-car train all the way from New York to San Francisco at a speed of 120 kilometers (75 miles) per hour. Powering a steamship across the Atlantic Ocean from New York to Liverpool would require at most 4 liters (a gallon).
Several reporters snorted, and one jeered openly, saying, “I’ll believe that when I see it.”
Keely replied that he had already run a 40-horsepower test motor at 800 revolutions per minute for more than 15 uninterrupted days, and it had used less than a thimbleful of water.
He led the group to a platform on which he had mounted a large brass globe filled with a mass of wires, tubes, and disks. He explained that this was a “shifting resonator,” which activated the “vibrational energy” in the water. This energy was then passed through a “vibratory liberator-transmitter” (he pointed to a steel casing bristling with variously sized steel rods), which in turn drove his “hydrapneumatic pulsating-vacuum engine.” He indicated a heavy steel drum mounted inside a thick iron hoop.
“Why can’t you use ordinary English?” a reporter complained. “This is all such nonsense. I can’t understand a word you’re saying.”
Keely explained that his concept was so new that words hadn’t been invented for it yet—so he’d had to make them up himself. He apologized for the difficulty. “But I think you’ll have no trouble understanding this,” he said. “Please watch carefully.”
He picked up a small shot glass of water and poured it slowly into an intake port on the resonator. Then he switched on both the resonator and the transmitter. They hummed quietly.
Keely explained that his transmitter could actually accommodate seven different levels of vibration, and that he’d be able to double or even triple those levels as his research progressed.
Then he picked up a tuning fork and struck it against a piece of metal. A strong, clear hum sounded through the room. Keely held the humming fork close enough to the resonator to almost touch it.
Immediately, the steel rods of the transmitter began releasing a fine haze that looked like water vapor. Seconds later, the needle of a pressure gauge on Keely’s engine zoomed from 0 to 23,000 kilograms (50,000 pounds). With a vicious hiss, the motor started to spin, very fast, then violently, its speed increasing to a frightening howl.
Keely pointed meaningfully at a length of thick, steel industrial cable that had been fastened between two enormous iron buckles. Then he threw the lever on a huge hydraulic piston and quickly stepped back.
There was a scary-sounding twang!! as the cable became so rigid, it started to vibrate.
Keely ducked, gesturing for everyone to cover their heads.
There was a brief drop in the howl of the motor, and then individual wires of the steel cable began to snap with small, sharp explosions. An instant later the entire cable ruptured with a stunning, teeth-rattling bang, showering everyone with sparks and tiny bits of red-hot cable. A cloud of acrid dust from the disintegrated cable filled the room.
Keely groped his way through the haze and switched off the resonator, and the awful howl of the motor slowly died away.
As the dust cleared, the reporters straightened up and began shaking bits of blackened metal off their clothes. Some had dropped their notebooks and cameras in fright. Many looked shaken.
“And that,” Keely said with a satisfied grin, “is merely a very small demonstration of the amazing power of Etheric Force. Good day, gentlemen!”
The headlines in New York’s newspapers the next morning were everything Keely could have hoped for.
“Etheric Force Power of Tomorrow,” read one. “Astounding Demonstration of Water Power,” read another. “Simple Tap Water Will Power Trains, Ships,” announced a third. By noon, Keely’s message box at the Fifth Avenue Hotel was bulging with telegrams.
All sorts of people wanted to know more about his amazing machine. Newspaper editors who had ignored his invitation. Scientists and engineers who were fascinated or suspicious. Businessmen looking for a hot new investment opportunity. And everybody wanted to see how a few cups of water could drive an entire freight train from New York to San Francisco!
Keely patiently demonstrated his Etheric Force again and again. Sometimes his motor snapped pieces of industrial cable. Sometimes it twisted iron bars into pretzels. Each time his spectators were enormously impressed.
It wasn’t long before Keely was meeting with some of the richest businessmen in the United States. Charles B. Franklin, head of the Cunard Steamship Line. Henry S. Sergeant, president of the Ingersoll Rock Drill Company. John J. Cisco, head of the Cisco National Bank. John Jacob Astor, son of the richest man in America. They all assembled at Keely’s small machine shop on North Twentieth Street in Philadelphia.
The first thing they wanted to know was whether Keely had taken out a patent on his Etheric Force idea, and whether he would consider teaming up with other inventors in the same field, such as Thomas Edison, who was working on an electric lamp. If Etheric Force could produce electric light, its possibilities were endless!
“Gentlemen, gentlemen,” Keely responded. “The answer to both questions is no. I know nothing about business, and I have no interest in learning anything about it. I simply wish to continue my research. To register a patent, or work with other scientists, I would have to share the details of my discovery, and I cannot take that chance. I am not prepared to risk the loss of my years of work—not to mention the potential profits.”
His listeners nodded. They had all heard of dishonest inventors stealing other people’s scientific discoveries. And they also knew that Keely’s discovery could be worth a tremendous amount of money. Machines in the 1870s ran on steam, which was a very dirty form of power. You had to burn a lot of coal or wood to make steam, and that produced a lot of soot and ashes. Everything near a steam engine got coated with soot. Train stations were black with it. When you took a train, your clothes became smeared with it. If you lived near a railroad, the laundry on your clothesline became black with it.
A new form of power that used only water and produced no smoke at all would be a truly fantastic development.
One of the businessmen suggested incorporation. Research was expensive, but with a group of investors backing him, Keely could improve and speed up his research. “I believe I speak for all the gentlemen present when I say that we’d be interested in making an investment in such a company,” he said. “Call it, perhaps, the Keely Motor Company.”
The Keely Motor Company was duly incorporated on March 15, 1874. Keely’s investors, who became the company’s directors, paid him an astounding $15 million for half of his company’s shares.
For the next three years John Keely worked away busily in his machine shop. No one knew what he was doing in there, because he was a very secretive man and always kept his doors and windows locked. He smeared his windows with white paint and only opened them for ventilation, or to let out the dust and smoke after one of the periodic explosions people in the neighborhood heard coming from the machine shop. Keely never explained the cause of these explosions to anyone.
Every year for the directors’ annual meeting, Keely prepared more demonstrations of his mysterious Etheric Force. He made his magical little engine lift big weights and produce amazing pressures. But after three years of these performances the directors began to grow impatient.
They complained that all this crashing and banging and ripping was certainly entertaining, but what they were waiting for was a commercially usable motor. One they could sell to the builders of ships and locomotives, and most especially automobiles, which were very much the coming thing.
Keely assured them that such a motor was precisely what he’d been working on for the past three years, and that he’d be ready to give a public demonstration of it in three months, on July 1. It would power a circular saw, running at 3,500 revolutions per minute. Five drops of water would be used to cut 10 cords of wood.
But on June 29, 1877, John Keely sent his directors a cancellation telegram. REGRET TO INFORM THAT I HAVE ENCOUNTERED PROBLEMS HARMONIZING NEGATIVE AND POSITIVE VIBRATIONS OF MOTOR’S MAIN SHAFT, STOP. MUST POSTPONE DEMONSTRATION TO A FUTURE DATE, STOP. WILL BE IN TOUCH SOON, STOP.
“Negative and positive vibrations—what on earth is that supposed to mean?” a director demanded. None of the others had a clue.
They didn’t hear from Keely again for over six months.
When they finally did, it was a note from him to explain that he had abandoned work on his Etheric Force engine because he had discovered a newer, even more powerful and efficient form of energy—something he was calling “Vibratory Sympathy.”
The beauty of Vibratory Sympathy, Keely explained, was that it was based on the simple fact that everything on earth vibrates. That was a huge energy source. To tap into it, all you had to do was find the right combination of musical notes to get it started. You didn’t need resonators or transmitters. You didn’t even need water! So that’s what he’d been researching during the past half year.
Now he was working on a motor to harness that energy, and it was almost finished, Keely assured them. He would be demonstrating it in three months’ time, on March 1, 1878. It would be startlingly powerful—more than 250 horsepower!
But no one heard from John Keely on March 1, 1878.
They didn’t hear from him on March 1, 1879 either—despite several queries and reminders.
On March 1, 1880 the directors of the Keely Motor Company ran out of patience.
They sued Keely in court, demanding that he hand over any of his inventions that might have commercial value, and to force him to explain to an audience of engineers or mechanics just exactly what he had been working on in his machine shop for the past six years.
The suit made headlines throughout the American northeast. “Stockholders Tired of Keely Delays,” read one. “Keely Motor Men Disgusted,” read another.
In court, Keely admitted that he hadn’t yet been able to produce a motor that could be used commercially, but that he was very close. He fully expected to be ready to test his latest prototype—a monster motor that could produce 25,000 horsepower using only vibratory attraction and musical notes as its source of power—by June 1, 1880.
He also agreed to try to explain his newest discoveries to an audience of experts. But he warned the judge that even mechanical specialists might find his ideas hard to understand.
He was certainly right about that. Everyone seemed quite intrigued when Keely activated a small test motor by playing mysterious notes on a violin, but after half an hour of listening to him explaining how this machine “diverted the polar current of apergy quite independent of centrifugal action,” most threw up their hands and headed for the door. The few who stayed behind asked to have a closer look at the motor, but Keely absolutely refused to let anyone touch it.
When everyone else had gone, three audience members met at a nearby cafe. One was a professor of physics, John Leidy. The second was a physicist named James Wilcox. The third was a poet named Clara Bloomfield-Moore, the widow of a rich Philadelphia industrialist.
The two physicists were Keely supporters, but his performance had left them worried. Wilcox felt that somehow, whenever he was suspected of being a fraud, Keely managed to behave like one. It tended to make people see everything about him in the worst possible light. And by now he’d spent over $60 million of his investors’ money, almost bankrupting the company.
Leidy’s view was that Keely was probably a decade or more ahead of his time. After all, the entire universe was made up of energy, and scientists were only just beginning to learn how to use it. But he suspected the Keely Motor Company’s directors would never wait that long for results.
“What do you think, Clara?” Leidy asked. “You haven’t said a word all night.”
Clara took her time answering—and when she did, she looked determined. She said she liked what she’d heard and seen that night. She had no idea what Vibratory Sympathy was all about, but she absolutely loved the idea of a motor that was activated by musical notes.
“I believe I’m going to invest some of my money in the Keely Motor Company,” she said.
Reaction in the press to Clara Bloomfield-Moore’s astonishing $8 million rescue of the Keely Motor Company was mixed. The New York Home Journal praised Bloomfield-Moore for her courageous support of scientific research. Scientific American magazine, on the other hand, suggested she was foolishly throwing her money away.
Clarence Moore, Clara’s son, agreed with Scientific American. He demanded to know what his mother was doing, squandering his inheritance on a crackpot.
Clara pointed out that she wasn’t dead yet—and that until she was, how she spent her money was her own business.
Clarence didn’t see it that way. He filed a legal suit against his mother, claiming she was a well-meaning but ignorant woman who had fallen under the influence of a scam artist. He lost the suit.
The two didn’t speak to each other for the next 15 years.
Clara Bloomfield-Moore became John Keely’s most loyal supporter and defender—especially in the press. She wrote enthusiastic articles about him in popular magazines such as Lippincott’s and the New York Home Journal. She hosted elegant parties for him, to introduce him to scientists who might become his supporters, too. She became the only person Keely allowed to wander around his machine shop any time she wanted.
Eventually Bloomfield-Moore wrote an entire book about Keely’s work, entitled Keely and His Discoveries. Like Keely’s lectures, it was so hard to understand that Scientific American called it all a bunch of incomprehensible nonsense. John Keely, however, said the lady had gotten it exactly right.
Keely’s board of directors really didn’t care one way or the other. They just wanted Keely to hurry up and produce that 25,000 horsepower engine! It was now 1887, and they still had absolutely nothing to show for their investment—which had risen to almost $100 million!
It was decided that maybe it was time to take Keely to court again. After all, the only time they’d ever gotten him to cooperate was when they’d used that approach. If they could get the court to order Keely to hand over his test machines, they could hire a real engineer to unpuzzle the technology and build them a commercially salable version.
Hauled into court a second time, Keely was ordered by the judge to comply with his directors’ demands. This time Keely refused outright. The judge ordered Keely to be arrested.
When two sheriffs arrived at Keely’s machine shop to take him away, they couldn’t get in. All the doors and windows were locked. “Open up!” one of them shouted. “Open up in the name of the law!”
There was no answer, but suddenly there was a terrible banging and smashing. Metal crashing into metal. Bursts of glass, and something that sounded like explosions.
“What on earth is going on in there?” a sheriff demanded.
As if in answer, there was another uproar of smashing and banging and bursting. The sharp screech of tearing metal. Thuds and splintering. It went on for at least 10 minutes. Finally the door opened and Keely stepped out.
His hair was hanging into his eyes, his overalls were smeared with oil and soot, and his arms were covered in bleeding scratches. He was carrying a sledgehammer in his fists.
The two sheriffs stepped back abruptly.
“Don’t worry—I’m not planning to hurt anyone,” Keely said in a tired voice. “You want my machines? Well, you can have them. Take whatever you want.”
Inside the shop, it looked as if a bomb had exploded. Everything was smashed to pieces. Cabinets, workbenches, tools, and equipment. Wires, tubes, pipes, and hoses. Shattered glass lay everywhere. And on the floor, in a mangled heap, the remains of Keely’s test machines.
The sheriffs called in several men with a cart to haul the mangled machines away. “We think there may have been 11 machines,” the sheriffs reported to the judge. “But it could have been as many as 15. There were so many pieces, it was impossible to tell.”
Keely spent three days in jail before Clara’s lawyers were able to bail him out. During that time he was a model prisoner, quiet and cooperative. The guards liked him.
The engineers, who were hired by the Keely Motor Company couldn’t make any sense at all of Keely’s machines. They were simply too smashed up to reconstruct.
Faced with the possible loss of their entire $100 million, the directors made a deal with Keely. The inventor promised to rebuild his machines, take out proper patents for them, and then positively and definitely produce a motor for them within five years. In return, the directors agreed to find additional investors to keep the Keely Motor Company afloat for another decade.
Over the next 11 years, after he had rebuilt his machine shop and some of his machinery, Keely began to announce more new and exciting discoveries. He said he had found a way to “vitalize” disks made of a mysterious new metal, which, when charged or “activated” with the proper musical sounds and installed in a special new engine he was building, could produce 250 horsepower of “vibratory thrust” for an entire day on a single charge.
Then he announced he had discovered an astonishing way to use his vitalized disks to enable airships to get off the ground and fly without using huge airbags full of helium gas.
Finally, in 1898, he announced that his “vitalizing” process could be used to fire cannons without using gunpowder. He demonstrated by firing a test cannonball clean through a thick wooden beam, using only a cylinder that had been “vitalized” by the sound of a harmonica. The demonstration impressed both military officials and Keely’s directors—especially the new ones who hadn’t seen his demonstrations before. The value of Keely Motor Company stock rose for the first time in 15 years.
But he still hadn’t filed any patents or produced a commercially salable motor.
Clara Bloomfield-Moore was also becoming anxious. She could sense yet another crisis approaching, and this time she suspected things wouldn’t go well for John Keely. She suggested once again that he consider forming a partnership with someone trustworthy, to speed up his rate of progress.
“My dear Clara,” Keely said patiently, stopping briefly to cough into his handkerchief. “Compared to other great scientific enterprises, my work on vibratory physics is actually progressing at lightning speed!”
That was the last thing John Worrell Keely ever said to his most loyal and enthusiastic supporter. Two weeks later he was dead of pneumonia.
Seemingly within minutes of Keely’s death, a riot broke out in front of the Keely Motor Company’s offices. Investors, reporters, friends, and enemies rushed into Keely’s machine shop, grabbing everything they could get their hands on. Machinery, equipment, papers, models—anything that might contain the secret of Keely’s mysterious energy source. For the next several weeks, urgent meetings were held all over the city, as people tried to fit their various parts and pieces together into a working whole—but without success. No one ever found enough of the pieces to assemble an entire model or test machine.
As its directors had feared, the Keely Motor Company was declared bankrupt with no assets to disburse. John Keely had managed to convince dozens of America’s most sophisticated investors to give him over a quarter of a billion dollars of their money—without ever producing a single patent or salable product of any kind!
But the story didn’t end there. After the affairs of the Keely Motor Company had been wound up, Clarence Moore rented Keely’s old machine shop, determined to examine every square inch of it to get to the bottom of Keely’s secret.
It wasn’t long before he discovered something odd. The floor of the shop had been raised.
There was no question about it. The door to the shop had been shortened, and another step added to the entrance stair.
Moore hurried home to find a crowbar.
Five hours later the shop floor was a wreckage of splintered wood, and Moore was hot on the trail of Keely’s 24-year secret.
What he found between the false and the original floor was a network of heavy-duty pipes and valves. The pipes led into a wall and down to the basement, where Moore found the other part of the equation: a huge steel globe buried deep in the dirt. It weighed more than 3,000 kilograms (3 tons) and was obviously a pressure tank, fitted with connections for a compressor.
So that was the force that had driven Keely’s mysterious-looking motors: nothing more complicated than cleverly camouflaged compressed air! It was a technology as old and well-known as steam power, and certainly no improvement over it. Yes, it could generate a huge amount of energy, but you still had to burn wood or coal to produce it. To use it, Keely had hidden spring valves under the floor, so he could start his motors by pressing his foot down on a particular spot. The violin had just been a method of distracting attention away from his foot!
So Keely’s scam was exposed, and the suspicions of Scientific American magazine, which had at various times suggested that compressed air might be behind Keely’s clever demonstrations, were confirmed.
But after the uproar had died down, some people began to have further suspicions. Was it possible that Keely’s scam had simply been a cover for his real research?
Think about it. Everyone agreed that Keely had spent “day and night” in his machine shop. Could it really have taken him 24 years of day-and-night work to build a few fake test motors that operated on nothing more complicated than compressed air?
Not very likely.
Then what had he been doing in there all the rest of the time?
If you do an Internet search on John Keely, you’ll discover that Keely’s claims for Etheric Force and Vibratory Sympathy haven’t gone away. In fact, his ideas seem to be more popular now than they were in his own day.
Some people suggest that Keely simply cooked up his fake demonstrations to attract enough investment money to pay for the research he was really interested in—research into a form of energy so bizarre and futuristic that he couldn’t possibly have hoped to master it in his own lifetime.
If so, maybe there’s still a chance we’ll see a motor powered by vibratory sympathy in ours.
Could be. It’s not impossible.
And this time, maybe it will be real.