The Seven Follies of Science [2nd ed.]: A popular account of the most famous scientific impossibilities and the attempts which have been made to solve them. To which is added a small budget of interesting paradoxes, illusions, and marvelsPhin, John
History
The Seven Follies of Science [2nd ed.]: A popular account of the most famous scientific impossibilities and the attempts which have been made to solve them. To which is added a small budget of interesting paradoxes, illusions, and marvels
Phin, John
Geometry -- Famous problems; Scientific recreations
But while the inventors of these schemes may have been honest, there is
another class who deliberately set out to perpetrate a fraud. Their
machines work, and work well, but there is always some concealed source
of power, which causes them to move. As a general rule, such inventors
form a company or corporation of unlimited "lie-ability," as De Morgan
phrases it, and then they proceed by means of flaring prospectuses and
liberal advertising, to gather in the dupes who are attracted by their
seductive promises of enormous returns for a very small outlay. Perhaps
the most widely known of these fraudulent schemes of recent years was
the notorious Keeley motor, the originator of which managed to hoodwink
a respectable old lady, and to draw from her enormous supplies of cash.
At his death, however, the absolutely fraudulent nature of his
contrivances was fully disclosed, and nothing more has been heard of
his alleged discovery. But, while he lived and was able to put forward
claims based upon some apparent results, he found plenty of fools who
accepted the idea that there is nothing impossible to science.
It is true that the Keeley motor was examined by several committees and
some very respectable gentlemen acted in such a way as to give a seeming
endorsement of the scheme, but it must not be supposed for an instant
that any well-educated engineers and scientific men were deceived by Mr.
Keeley's nonsense. The very fact that he refused to allow a complete
examination of his machine by intelligent practical men, ought to have
been enough to condemn his scheme, for if he had really made the
discovery which he claimed there would have been no difficulty in
proving it practically and thoroughly, and then he might have formed
company after company that would have rewarded him with "wealth beyond
the dreams of avarice."
The Keeley motor was not put forward as a perpetual motion; in these
days none of these schemes is admitted to be a perpetual motion, for
that term has now become exceedingly offensive and would condemn any
invention; but the result is the same in the end, and the whole history
of perpetual motion is permeated with frauds of this kind, some of them
having been so simple that they were obvious to even the most unskilled
observer, while others were exceedingly complicated and most ingeniously
concealed. Many years ago a number of these fraudulent perpetual-motion
machines were manufactured in America and sent over to Great Britain for
exhibition, and quite a lucrative business was done by showing them in
various towns. But the fraud was soon detected and the British police
then made it too warm for these swindlers.
Mr. Dircks, in his "Perpetuum Mobile," has given accounts of quite a
number of these impostures. The following are some of the most notable:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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