12/1/1887 - That our if-you-see-it contemporary, The Sun, should, in an editorial paragraph, misspell the name of the Hon. TRUXTUN BEALE is, of course a cause of sorrow - sorrow for the demise of the cat which once read The Sun's proofs and cleared them of errors of this sort. It is with something more than sorrow, however, with something very much like indignation, that we see, in the same issue of The Sun that turns "TRUXTUN" into "TRUXTON," a dispatch from Philadelphia about "HENRY W. KEELY, the motorman."
This is really too much. JOHN ERNEST WORRELL KEELY has devoted many years of his precious life to the construction of a machine for testing the limits of human credulity, and it is indeed poor recognition of his brilliant success to call him HENRY W. This is more than a mistake; it is a cruel insult, and it must have been because he had a premonition of what was going to happen that he has been making a flying machine on which to wing his way to other and more appreciative lands. Mr. Keely has our profoundest sympathy, and we sincerely hope that his new device will carry him fast and far. And we haven't a doubt of its powers. Just listen to a part of his explanation of its principle:
"This machine will be capable of making a sympathetic outreach of a distance great enough about itself to not only neutralize the effects of gravitation, but to permit the engine and its equipment, no matter how heavy or heavily burdened, to keep it."
The divided infinitive in this sentence is, we are sure, a specimen of Sun editing, but that concluding "it" is Keely at his best, and proves conclusively that his control of nature's forces - and language - is at last complete. What the "it" means we do not know, unless the reference is to Mrs. BLOOMFIELD MOORE, and that is a supposition which we should hesitate to proffer, but nothing could be more satisfying in its way than this use of the word, nothing could express more - or less - and nothing could give stronger proof of sympathetic outreach. Obviously, the problem of aerial navigation is solved. 12/1/1887
See Also
Aerial Navigation
aerial navigator
Air-ship
Chronology
Gravity
Levitation
Pittsburg Dispatch April 07-1890