Sympathetic Vibratory Physics

Scientific American magazine published a number of negative articles about Keely and his motors. From the article below it can be seen these negative articles were nothing other than yellow journalism. Note below where Scientific American "refused the most urgent invitation extended to them to come to Philadelphia and witness the operations of his discoveries before ridiculing them." In other words SA wrote and published articles it never made an effort to research.

Keely
JOHN ERNST WORRELL KEELY - the discoverer of compound interetheric force, as the result of more than 20 years of persistent effort to apply this force to the operation of machinery has, at last, been enabled to produce partial continuity of motion in his engine, but up to this time, he has not so mastered this subtle force as to control reversions. The development of his various discoveries has been one uninterrupted work of evolution, reaching, within the last year, he thinks, the sphere of perfect vibratory sympathy, both theoretically and practically. The proof of this is found in the fact that he now transmits vibrations along a wire, connected at one end with the vibratory machine which is the source of power and at its other end with the engine or cannon, as the case may be, which is operated by such vibratory power. Until recently Keely stored force, as he generated it, in a receiver, and experiments were made by him in the presence of thousands at various times for the purpose of testing the operations of this force, liberated in the presence of the audience and stored up in this small receiver. The editor of the Scientific American thus describes what took place: [Snell Manuscript - The Book, page 3]

“That he uses compressed air or any known gas, as charged and insisted upon in the Scientific American, is absurd and totally impossible to conceive of, when we consider the available space for such compressed gas or air in all the cylinders put together which Mr. Keely employs. Besides, the phenomena accompanying the discharges of this gas or vapor after each experiment are entirely different from those of compressed air or ordinary gas.

“Mr. Keely justly complains that the Scientific American editors keep up the hue and cry of humbug and fraud against him, and at the same time have refused the most urgent invitation extended to them to come to Philadelphia and witness the operations of his discoveries before ridiculing them. It is a withering disgrace to the boasted progress of this age that any editor of a paper which flaunts “scientific” as a part of its title, should be afraid to witness and investigate a claimed new discovery before expressing an opinion upon it, lest it should render his journal unpopular with the unprogressive fogies of his patronage. Such spirit of journalistic cowardice is not only reprehensible, but detestable in the highest degree, and no paper pretending to be progressive should be considered worth reading by any thinking man so long as it fears to investigate any and all questions of science, philosophy, and mechanics which may come under its notice, and then give its readers the benefits of its unprejudiced opinion, let it strike where it will." [A Visit to Mr Keely - Astounding Performance of the Keely Motor]

Robert MacDougall
"To Keely’s critics, especially the magazine Scientific American, Keely was an irritant but also a useful foil. He offered them the opportunity to defend the legitimacy of the new industrial economy by performing their indignation at his scheme.

Keely’s most relentless critic was the magazine Scientific American, which had a history of debunking perpetual motion devices well before the Keely Motor came on the scene. From the 1870s through the 1890s, Scientific American would write about Keely constantly—always critically, always attacking him as a swindler and a fraud. Yet in so doing, they gave him endless publicity. At the height of his fame, Scientific American was publishing something about Keely in almost every weekly issue.

Why did Scientific American pursue this crusade? What work, we might ask, did the Keely Motor do for Scientific American? The simplest answer is that it sold magazines. In the late 1870s, the Keely Motor and related devices generated two or three times as many letters to Scientific American as any other topic.39 Keely also provided Scientific American with frequent opportunities for sport. Its writers had more than a little fun mocking his never-ending delays and his idiosyncratic jargon. “You see,” one article imagined Keely saying, “the flibber snatcher … acts directly on the hatchway and the slam-bang, causing them to … start the get-up-and-get motion of the flunker-flopper, which in turn communicates its energy to the button hook and the wapperchock.” When other inventors came forward with their own perpetual motion devices, Scientific American declared them, with mock indignation, to be “bare-faced infringement[s] on Keely.”

"Another piece compared the Keely Motor to “attempts to lift one’s self over a fence by one’s boot straps”—a reminder that this idiom once meant something manifestly impossible, rather than something everyone should be expected to do.43 A letter to Scientific American debunking a different perpetual motion machine opined: “In this remunerative world, we must pay, in some way, not only for corn and potatoes, but for all the enjoyment we receive, and all the power we able to exert, moral or material: Something for everything, nothing for nothing.”44 This was the steady theme running through all of Scientific American’s coverage of Keely and of every perpetual motion scheme from the 1840s through the 1890s: you cannot produce something from nothing.

Nineteenth-century ideas about industry and the economy were of course bound up in a
Protestant ethic of virtue, merit, and hard work. Scientific American had particular reason to preach this gospel. From the 1840s through the 1890s, the magazine was owned and published by Orson Desaix Munn and Alfred Ely Beach, who also operated the patent law firm Munn and Company. Munn & Co. was the largest patent agency in the United States, representing approximately one third of all patents issued by the U.S. Patent Office in those years.57 Keely’s success was an insult to the American patent system and to the idea, axiomatic at Scientific American, that the market would reward useful innovation while discarding follies and fakes. So Scientific American railed against Keely for decades, never admitting the extent to which he served them as a foil, or to which their publicity helped to power his machine." [Robert MacDougall]

Bridging Science and Spirituality

Search

Scientific American