Sympathetic Vibratory Physics

Dr. Plum's Visit to Keely's Laboratory, 1893 - "Here is a wooden table, sometimes covered by a heavy slab of glass. Standing on the glass or on the wood, and capable of being moved freely upon it, is a metal standard say a foot high, bearing a copper globe about a foot in diameter. Around the base of the standard project horizontally numbers of small metal rods a few inches long, of different sizes and lengths, vibrating like tuning forks when twanged by the fingers. In the hollow globe is a Chladni plate and various metal tubes, the relation which can be altered by turning a projection like a door-knob, on the outside of the globe, at the outer end of a small shaft, round and round to the right or left. This construction is called a 'sympathetic transmitter.' Some two or three feet distant on the table stands a movable metallic cylindrical case, some six inches by eight in size, composed of certain metal resonating tubes, and certain other metal fixtures. You take it all apart and see there is no magnet there. You place on top of this cylinder a small pocket compass, a brass cup of two inches in diameter with its glass face. The needle points north. From the periphery of the globe of the 'sympathetic transmitter' extends a wire of the size of a common knitting-needle, made of gold and silver and of platinum. The free end of this wire is now attached to the cylinder. The needle is still true to the pole. Then the vibrating rods are twanged, the knob is turned, and on a rude harmonicon trumpet for a moment or two certain sounds are made, when lo! the needle is invisible, it is whirling on its pivots fast. The operator talks of the variant length of waves and of a continuous stream, and in some instances it is half a minute, sometimes three minutes, before the needle comes to rest, and it has kept in swift revolution for many hours; but when it pauses it points no longer to the north, but to a particluar part of the mechanism. You leave it there, and are busy with other wonders for an hour or so. Returning, you find the needle still points to its new master. You lift the compass off, and at once it resumes its normal position. You slowly lower it towards the silent cylinder, and when within an inch or two it obeys the new impulse again, and points as before. So also it veers from the north when you carry it near the knob of the copper globe. As Gladstone says, 'Our hands can lay hold of truths that our arms cannot embrace,' and though it takes a physicist to comprehend this miracle, any careful observer can apprehand it, and, after seeing it repeated many times, if he is measurably well read, is competent to testify that here is a new, subtle, silent, continuous influence, and that it is called into exercise in connection with certain brief musical sounds."

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19.05.11 - Dr. Plums Visit to Keelys Laboratory