It's a universal human desire to want to get something for nothing.

Unfortunately, just about everything worthwhile turns out to have

some sort of price tag-especially the power needed to run a motor.

That hasn't stopped inventors from trying, for a good many centuries

now, to get something for nothing by inventing a so-called perpetual

motion machine. Such a machine is not intended to go on moving

forever, as the name might imply.

Rather, its purpose is to do useful work without drawing on an

external energy source, or, at the very least, to give off more

energy than is needed to run it.

Modern physics casts a very doubtful eye on such an enterprise. The

first law of thermodynamics holds that it's impossible to create

energy, and no one has yet managed to find a loophole in that law.

Such seeming perpetual motion machines as have been built all turn

out to have some secret power source, or to be drawing on energy in

some way that even the inventor perhaps does not realize.

The laws of thermodynamics, though, are simply the result of

centuries of observation. They report on the nature of things, but

they are not universal laws handed down by some infallible

authority. Many clever men have entertained sneaking hopes that

there might somewhere be an exception to them.

Most of the early perpetual motion machines depended on gravity to

generate energy. One type consisted of a closed wheel divided by

spokes into compartments, each compartment containing a weighted

ball.

The idea was that once the wheel was given a starting push, the

weight of the balls would keep it turning indefinitely. Eventually,

though, energy lost through friction tends to slow the wheel down

and halt it-requiring another push to start the wheel going again.

Not very productive!

As early as the thirteenth century, a Parisian architect observed,

"Many a time have skilful workmen tried to contrive a wheel that

shall turn of itself," and he suggested a way to do it by weighting

it with quicksilver or with "an uneven number of mallets." Leonardo

da Vinci apparently experimented along these lines several hundred

years later, without results.

Page 1

In the seventeenth century, the Marquis of Worcester built an

elaborate wheel fourteen feet across, weighted by metal balls of

fifty pounds apiece.

A German inventor a century later constructed a similar device, but

in neither case was perpetual motion achieved. A mill turned by

waterpower is a classic producer of energy. The mill will only turn

so long as the millstream is flowing; in order to get energy out of

the system, energy must go in, and if the stream runs dry, the mills

stops.

A number of inventors tackled the problem of constructing a

recycling mill system; water would run past the mill's wheel, making

it turn, and then somehow would be lifted back to its starting point

to turn the wheel again. Alas, the lifting process required energy

too, and so the inventors who tried to build such installations

found that they were out of luck so far as free energy was

concerned.

Many other ingenious-sounding gadgets were designed, based on this

principle and that, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. All

of them foundereed on the same point. No matter what method was

used to keep the motor going, that method demanded energy in some

fashion. Every one of these perpetual motion machines required an

energy input.

Then a clever Yankee named John Worrell Keely came along in 1872 and

showed the world how it could be done.

Keely proposed to use the energy of atoms as his power source.

Nobody in 1872, least of all Keely, knew anything about the

phenomenon we call radioactivity, which makes possible the release

of energy from heavy elements like uranium. He meant to draw energy

from simpler, more easily available substances-such as water.

All atoms, Keely said, were in CONSTANT VIBRATION. (Which is true,

by the way.) The trick was to harness and CHANNEL THIS RANDOM

VIBRATION.

Keely claimed to be able to make the atoms in a given substance

vibrate together, IN UNISON. He could then draw on the "etheric

force" of these vibrating atoms to run any motor of any size.

In 1872, Keely began to seek funds for his invention. He went on a

far-ranging lecture tour, telling the world his wonderful tale. The

great discovery, he declared, had had its origin when he picked up a

violin and fiddled a few notes.

The notes set in motion HARMONIC VIBRATIONS, and he saw, in a flash

of inspiration, how the VIBRATIONS OF ATOMS COULD BE USED TO CREATE

ENERGY.

He set up the Keely Motor Company in New York and held a meeting at

the plush Fifth Avenue Hotel. It was attended by bankers,

businessmen, engineers, lawyers-a group of wealthy, adventurous

individuals looking for a good investment. This was an era when

great fortunes were being made in America by sharp-witted men.

John D. Rockefeller was building his billion-dollar oil empire; Jay

Page 2

Gould, the Vanderbilts, E.H. Harriman, and others were earning

millions from their railroad operations; and Andrew Carnegie was

growing rich manufacturing steel. Miraculous inventions were just

around the corner; Alexander Graham Bell and his telephone, Thomas

Alva Edison and electric lights, phonographs, motion pictures. The

Wright Brothers would soon be dreaming of airplanes. Other men

would seek ways to build gasoline-powered "horseless carriages."

And here was John Worrell Keely, offering a fantastic new source of

power!

The investors flocked to his side. The day after his first meeting

at the Fifth Avenue Hotel, Keely was given ten thousand dollars to

continue his research, with the assurance that more funds would be

forthcoming as he needed them.

He had awed his audience with phrases like "quadruple negative

harmonics," "etheric disintegration," and "atomic triplets." He

explained that his machine was a "hydro-pneumatic, pulsating vacuum

engine," which was hooked up to a device he called a "liberator."

The "liberator" was a series of HIGHLY SENSITIVE TUNING FORKS, whose

vibrations disintegrated air and water, liberating "etheric force"

of great power.

Keely demonstrated a model of his vacuum engine. He poured a glass

of water into its intake, and moments later the engine rumbled to

life. A gauge attached to it showed that a pressure of fifty

thousand pounds per square inch had been created.

The audience gasped as etheric force ripped thick cables apart, bent

iron bars, and fired bullets through foot-deep planks. The whole

thing seemed incredible.

Speaking glibly and rapidly, Keely reeled off the wonders of his

invention:

"With these three agents alone [air, water and machine], unaided

by any and every compound, heat, electricity and galvanic

action, I have produced in an unappreciable time by a simple

manipulation of the machine, a VAPORIC SUBSTANCE at one

expulsion of a volume of ten gallons having an elastic energy of

10,000 pounds to the square inch....It has a vapor of so fine an

order IT WILL PENETRATE METAL....It is LIGHTER THAN HYDROGEN and

more powerful than steam or ANY EXPLOSIVES KNOWN....I once drove

an engine 800 revolutions a minute of forty horsepower with LESS

THAN A THIMBLEFUL OF WATER and kept it running fifteen days WITH

THE SAME WATER."

This, obviously, was NOT the same old perpetual motion that all

intelligent people knew was an impossibility. Keely was not

depending on such hopeless methods as weighted wheels or endlessly

cycling water. A man had only to look in the ENCYCLOPAEDIA

BRITANNICA to find out why those devices COULD NOT WORK. No, Keely

had something brand new-etheric force.

The stockholders of the Keely Motor Company smiled knowingly at one

another, quietly congratulating themselves for their perception and

farsightedness. They all knew that John W. Keely was going to make

them millionares.

Page 3

Which financial backing assured, Keely set up a laboratory at 1420

North Twentieth Street in Philadelphia, and this became the

headquarters of the Keely Motor Company.

Money poured in, and he began to build full-scale machines. Within

two years, on November 10, 1974, Keely was showing off to a proud

group of stockholders his first "vibratory generator."

This was a preliminary model for an even more ambitious machine, on

which he would spend the next fourteen years. A newspaperman who

attended the 1874 demonstration of the wonderful machine wrote that

the generator operated,

"out of a bath tub from which a stream of water, passing

through a goose-quill, sets the entire contrivance in

motion."

The years went by, Keely toiled on. The Keely Motor Company showed

no profits and paid no dividends, but Keely explained that he was

still deep in research and development. One day soon, he said, the

patience of the stockholders would be rewarded by a golden flow of

cash.

Some of the stockholders were restless. By now, Bell's telephone

was in public use, Edison had produced wonder after profitable

wonder, and the first sputtering automobiles were chugging down

highways at a hesitant pace. Meanwhile, their hero, Keely, had not

yet put his motor into commercial use.

The investors journeyed down to Philadelphia regularly. Keely

received them graciously, showed them around the laboratory,

demonstrated his machines. He invited them to watch him at work.

"You won't disturb me," he assured them as he became involved with

humming generators and throbbing tuning forks.

From time to time, of course, Keely required new funds for "further

research." The stockholders usually obliged. Keely would call a

meeting of the board of directors, and generally would enhance his

progress report by throwing in a few new technical terms each time.

The old investors voted new funds; fresh capital came into the

company too, from men anxious to get in on the eventual bonanza.

With power from his motor, Keely declared, it would be possible to

send a train of cars from Philadelphia to San Francisco with no fuel

OTHER THAN A SINGLE CUP OF WATER. (Actually, Keely was being

conservative, We now know that if the energy contained in a gallon

of water could be COMPLETELY LIBERATED, it could keep trains or

ocean liners running for several years instead of just a few trips.)

One of Keely's most enthusiastic backers was a well-to-do widow

named Mrs. Clara Jessup Bloomfield-Moore. Whenever the other

stockholders fretted at the lack of results, Mrs. Bloomfield-Moore

urged them to have faith in Keely. She invested heavily in the

company herself, and encouraged friends to do the same.

Then, too, she wrote glowing, hig-flown articles about Keely that

appeared in the most widely read magazines of the day. In one, she

said that Keely's etheric force was "like the sun behind the clouds,

the source of all light though itself unseen. It is the latent

basis of all human knowledge..."

Page 4

As president of the Keely Motor Company, Keely found it necessary to

live in high style at the stockholders' expense. It would not do,

he told them, for the head of such an important enterprise to dress

shabbily, to ride in broken-down carriages, or to live in a squalid

house. They agreed. So a good deal of the investors' money went to

support Keely in a manner he thought suitable for a company

president. The rest was spent on ever more complex machinery.

His new prize was a "shifting resonator"-a forbidding-looking affair

of wires, tubes, and adhesive plates, enclosed in a hollow brass

sphere. This was linked by a series of wires to the famous motor

itself, and to a transmitter that bristled with steel rods in such

numbers that it looked like a mechanical porcupine.

The resonator, Keely explained, carried SEVER DIFFERENT KINDS OF

VIBRATION, each "being capable of infinitesimal division." Keely

would set the whole contraption going in a variety of ways;

sometimes by playing a few notes on his violin, sometimes with a

zither or a harmonica, sometimes by striking an ordinary tuning

fork. Whatever the method, etheric force came forth, starting the

motor.

The motor itself was a sturdy IRON HOOP encircling a DRUM with EIGHT

SPOKES. When etheric force began to radiate, the big drum would

begin to spin rapidly-dramatic testimony to the power of Keely's

machine.

Keely declined to take out any patents on his masterpiece, however.

Some of the stockholders were worried by this. Should he not

protect their rights with a patent?

No, Keely said. A patent application would have to contain the

essential information about the workings of his invention. But the

invention, though it obviously worked, was not quite ready for

commercial development.

Keely told the investors that he feared some unscrupulous pirate

might study his patent application, steal his basic ideas, adapt

them in some slightly different form, and beat the Keely Motor

Company to the market. It was far better, he insisted, to keep

every detail of the project a secret until the grand moment arrived

when etheric force could be put to moneymaking use. Otherwise,

there was a good chance that the investment of the stockholders, and

Keely's long years of toil, would all go for nothing.

By this time, many leading scientists and engineers had heard about

Keely's wonderful motor, and they wanted to know how it worked. Was

there such a thing as etheric force? Did Keely's vibrators really

tap the energy of the atoms? Perhaps-but Keely's refusal to explain

his methods was suspicious. Other engineers began to wonder about

the possibility of a hoax. Was there some way of duplicating

Keely's results through known techniques?

Yes, said the magazine SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN. In 1884, it ran an

article describing a series of experiments aimed at discrediting

Keely. Everything that Keely had done, the magazine said, could be

duplicated using compressed air as the source of energy. Did Keely

have a hidden compressed-air supply somewhere near his motor?

Page 5

Keely sidestepped the attacks. The other engineers, he told his

backers, were petty, envious, disappointed men.

Unable to meet his enigmatic challenge, they were reduced to trying

to pull him down to their level. He reminded them how scoffers had

laughed at the inventors of the steamship, the telegraph, and the

telephone. Every startling new advance, Keely said, was accompanied

by this sort of sniping by prejudiced, ignorant men.

The hubbub died down. Keely went on experimenting, his secret

undivulged. Mrs. Bloomfield-Moore, though her loyalty to Keely

remained unshaken, came to him with a suggestion.

Perhaps, she said, Keely ought to take Thomas Edison in as a partner

and confide the secret in him. Edison was the world's most famous

inventor; nobody dared to sneer at him any more. If Edison lent his

great prestige to the Keely Motor Company, it would mean an end to

the attacks on Keely himself.

Keely may have seen that it would be good public relations to make

use of Edison's name, but he refused to hear of the idea. He would

tell his secret to no one, CERTAINLY not to Edison. He had no need

for another man's prestige, he insisted. Those who attacked him

today would praise him wildly tomorrow. And he went on asking the

stockholders for money and building ever more grandiose machines.

He printed up a mysterious chart, as occult as anything ever drawn

by a medieval astrologer, and handed it out to his long-suffering

investors. It showed overlapping circles, cones of radiating lines,

various oddly shaped figures, and a series of musical notations.

Supposedly, the secret of the etheric vibrations was contained on

the chart, and many of the stockholders framed their copies and

displayed them with great satisfaction. What did it all mean? No

one knew. But it looked very profound, terribly significant.

By 1898, Keely had kept his company running for twenty-six years

without ever once putting a product on the market. It had not

earned a penny in all that time.

An army of investors had thrown hundreds of thousands of dollars

into the Keely Motor Company, enabling its president and founder to

live a comfortable and luxurious life while building his vibrators

and liberators and generators.

From year to year, he performed a delicate juggling act with the

stockholders , persuading them that prosperity was just around the

corner. And they believed him, for who could fail to be awed by the

demonstrations he gave, by his glib talk, by his air of self-

confidence?

Then, in 1898, Keely died. And his secret had died with him, the

horrified investors found out. Nowhere had he set down any clue to

the workings of his motor.

Mrs. Bloomfield-Moore, his most ardent supporter, followed him to

the grave soon afterward. Upon her death, he son, Clarence B.

Moore, rented the building that had housed Keely's laboratory.

Page 6

Clarence Moore had been forced to stand by helplessly for years

while his mother showered Keely with cash; now he wanted to see just

what the fast-talking inventor had been up to.

Moore got together an investigating group consisting of a well-known

electrical engineer and two professors from the University of

Pennsylvania. They prowled through Keely's building.

The liberators and generators and other apparatus had been carried

away by Keely's supporters. But one clue of the mystery still

remained.

They found a big steel globe, weighing three tons, hidden in the

cellar. It had an opening on its upper surface. Pipes and tubes

lay nearby. It looked very much like some sort of compressed air

device-just as the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN article had guessed, back in

1884!

Moore and his associates ripped up the flooring of the room in which

Keely had conducted his demonstrations. Brass tubes ran downward

through the floor, through cunningly designed holes in the walls, to

the cellar-leading to the giant steel globe. The secret was out.

Keely's motor had been powered by gusts of compressed air, rising

from the globe in the cellar. PERHAPS he had controlled the

apparatus by using a foot-operated pedal in the floor, THEY GUESSED.

When he picked up his violin or harmonica to create the "harmonic

vibrations" that supposedly triggered the motor, he MIGHT well have

tapped on the pedal, as though beating time with his foot.

For a quarter of a century, Keely's financial backers had solemnly

swallowed his brand of hokum. They did not change their minds now.

They refused to accept Clarence Moore's expose'. Moore was

"embittered," they declared, because his mother had invested heavily

in Keely's company against his own wishes. He had deliberatesly set

out to SMEAR THE DEAD KEELY by way of proving his mother's folly.

Some of Keely's supporters went on insisting, to the end of their

days, that if Keely had lived only a few more years he would have

brought about a new industrial revolution.

No one talks of etheric force today, and we have more effective ways

of getting energy out of atoms. But the STRANGE THING about John

Worrell Keely is that he had an undeniable knack for gadgetry. If

he had so chosen, he might perhaps have made a real contribution to

technology employing compressed air-which eventually came to have

considerable industrial use. His years of research might have

produced something of true benefit.

Instead, he hoodwinked a group of foolish, money-hungry investors

for a quarter of a century while doing nothing but constructing

clever but useless machines. The investors probably got no more

than they deserved. And Keely, who might have been another Edison,

attained high rank in America's gallery of rogues.

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Page 7

References

Encyclopaedia Brittanica. Article, "Perpetual Motion," 14th editon

Klein, Alexander. "Atomic Energy, 1872-1899: R.I.P." Included in

Grand Deception, edited by Alexander Klein,

Philadelphia and New York: J. B. Lippincott

Company, 1955.

MacDougall, Curtis D. - Hoaxes. New York: Dover Publications, Inc.

1958

Schwartz, Julius. "John Worrell Keely," Fantastic Adventures,

September, 1939.

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From Scientists and Scoundrels, A Book of Hoaxes

by Robert Silverberg

published by Thomas Y. Crowell Company

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Vangard notes...

The above article shows a typical cascading of errors resulting

from an incomplete understanding or study of Keely and his work.

One of the most tedious is the continual claim that Keely

claimed to be building a "perpetual motion machine." Keely AT

NO TIME in his life said he was working on a "perpetual motion

machine." In fact, he hotly denied it.

His claim was that he could tap energy from the "interstitial

regions of molecules and atoms." The contention that he was

drawing energy from the vibrations which occur continually in

all things, specifically on an atomic level is partially true.

Keely said he could tap energy from any of several different

levels, molecular, atomic or etheric. Energy from each level

was of successively higher quality in that it was more potent.

This was based on the fact that the frequencies would

necessarily be much higher (thus of greater amplitude) as the

physical size of the particles became smaller.

Another MAJOR ERROR is the primitive contention that Keely was

referring to ATOMIC ENERGY. Those of us who stay abreast of the

newer discoveries clearly recognized ZERO POINT ENERGY and the

TACHYON FIELD as being synonymous with "etheric force" and

"ether."

It is amazing that Keely recognized this so long ago and it is

just now coming to a point of understanding and soon to become

realization in practical devices.

Yet another error is the statement that compressed air was the

source of his power. No one challenged Keely nor DUPLICATED HIS

FEATS during his lifetime. The steel globe was explained in a

newspaper article many years earlier as being an old piece of

equipment from his early researches.

He had advanced far beyond requiring a STORAGE DEVICE for the

Page 8

etheric vapor and now GENERATED IT ON THE SPOT instead of

requiring an accumulator.

In the interest of openness and fairness, we include this file

on KeelyNet because it is written in a popular fashion and gives

some interesting observations on the reasons people think Keely

was a fraud.

We have long since come to the conclusion that Keely was

advanced FAR BEYOND even modern physics. Unfortunately, he most

likely DID CHEAT on some of his demonstrations in an effort to

garner more money for his ever more intense researches.

Over his lifetime, Keely developed COMPLETE SYSTEMS, not just

isolated devices. During his research, he found a definite

mind/matter link which was a major reason he could not release

it to the public. The incredibly sensitive tuning of his

devices acted to amplify the energy of the operator.

We now KNOW that the effects can be achieved without using tuned

masses but through the use of forced vibrations from magnetic,

acoustic or electric techniques.

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If you have comments or other information relating to such topics

as this paper covers, please upload to KeelyNet or send to the

Vangard Sciences address as listed on the first page.

Thank you for your consideration, interest and support.

Jerry W. Decker.........Ron Barker...........Chuck Henderson

Vangard Sciences/KeelyNet

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If we can be of service, you may contact

Jerry at (214) 324-8741 or Ron at (214) 242-9346