NYT - 11/27/1885 - The Keely motor Directors announce that they are again about "to submit Mr. Keely's discoveries and inventions to a party of unprejudiced men - men competent to judge and reliable in their statements, and who have no pecuniary interest therein." They have selected the Superintendent of Fairmount Park, the Superintendent of Transportation of the Pennsylvania Railroad Company, the President of an express company, the manager of the Bell Telephone Company, a mechanical engineer, and a few other men, as the committee. This will be about the twentieth time a committee has investigated Keely and his alleged motor, and if the test is honest it promises to show again the supreme idiocy of the claims of Keely and his backers.
The test need not be a prolonged one. Let the committee insist on Keely's opening up every portion of his apparatus, and not alone a part. He should take his machine apart and set it up somewhere else than in the ramshackle stable which he has converted into a workshop. Then a proper and scientific dynamometer should be provided. The pressure gauge need not be one constructed for more than 10,000 pounds pressure, and Keely's own absurd contrivance for the purpose should not be employed.
When the apparatus is put together and a pressure is exhibited in the cylinders, some of the vapor should to collected in the usual way for collecting gases and subjected to chemical analysis. If the substance is found to be atmospheric air, carbonic acid gas, nitrogen gas, or some other well known, it will dispose at once of Keely's pretension. If the cylinders contain "interatomic ether" in a high state of tension. That ought to be manifest. A competent chemist could settle the business in half an hour.
Above all, let the Directors and their aiders and abbetors, including the counsel, be absent from the test. Their presence and their conduct on previous occasions did much to convey the impression that they were parties to an intended fraud and a hindrance to an honest investigation.
The public, too, would have more confidence in the proposed test if the committee contained some well known engineer and a competent chemist. It would also, perhaps, be as well if others than Philadelphians were selected. And by all means let them make sure that the investigators "have no pecuniary interest therein." (The New York Times)
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