Keely and His Discoveries: Aerial NavigationMoore, Bloomfield H., Mrs.
Religion
Keely and His Discoveries: Aerial Navigation
Moore, Bloomfield H., Mrs.
Keely motor; Keely, John Ernest Worrell, 1827-1898
For fifteen years the donkey has been ridden by Keely with the cabbage
on a pole held just in front of his hungry mouth, and now the donkey
is told that the cabbage after all is only sham, but that the new
cabbage is real, and if he will only consent to run fast enough and
far enough he certainly will reach it and grow fat.
It would seem that the donkey ought to pause and consider before he
begins another fifteen-year race after perpetual motion, and it is here
proposed to assist him in his reflections by a few facts. More than
fifteen years ago Keely made himself known to the public by exhibiting
an apparatus in which a great pressure was manifested, which, he said,
resulted from the discovery by him of a new force the nature of which
was his secret. Several people, as usual, were astonished at the show,
and bought and paid for shares in the patent which was promised. To
give colour to the pretence, Keely applied for a patent before 1876,
but did not assign to the purchasers their shares; whereupon some of
them protested against the issue of the patent unless their shares
were recognized in the grant. The Patent Office replied to these
protests that it could not recognize the rights claimed unless there
was a written assignment filed in the office, which the claimants did
not have. The Commissioner, however, called upon Keely to furnish a
"working model" of his invention, which, of course, he could not do,
and his application was rejected. The specification and drawings of
this apparatus show a very silly form of the common perpetual motion
machine, of which there are thousands. It was open to the public for
some years, when, under a new rule of the office, it, along with all
other rejected applications, was withdrawn from inspection; but it is
in the office, together with the protests of those who had paid Keely
for a share in it. I examined it years ago, and informed Mr. Lamson,
and others of Keely's stockholders, of it. Mr. Lamson told me that he
had charged Keely with deception, because he had always said that he
never had applied for a patent, and that Keely explained it by saying
that he had purposely concealed his invention from the Patent Office
in that application to which he had made oath.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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