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"Enough Energy in a Quart of Water
To Drive a Steamship to Europe!"
By Rita Buday
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In 1873 at New York's Fifth Avenue Hotel, John Worrell Keely (1827-98) told potential investors he'd discovered that playing certain music notes at particular pitches and intensities shattered glass and disintegrated crockery by "molecular motion." Much more research was needed of course, but when he found the way to harness that "molecular motion," he believed there was enough energy in a quart of water to drive a steamship to Europe!
It was a radical idea, but not so far-fetched, considering the improbable-sounding ideas that were now practical, patented inventions: George Westinghouse used plain, ordinary air to stop railroad cars automatically!; Collis P. Huntington, with three other small-time merchants, bamboozled their way into building the Central Pacific Railroad through tunnels and over the tops of Sierra Nevada Mountains! to join up with the Union Pacific in Utah, making the first transcontinental railroad; Carnegie found how Bessemer blew air through molten iron! to make steel girders and long-wearing railroad rails; Morse's telegraph wires carried messages across the country in minutes--not weeks!; and the 1876 Centennial Exposition would mark not only 100 years of American independence, but our inventive genius znd booming industrial growth!
Once Keely developed his discovery, there would be a gold mine of profits! Hard-nosed investors promptly organized Keely Motor Company.
By November 1874 he had demonstrated a small working model that developed enough power to tear apart brand-new inch-thick manila ropes. More investors waved checks.
Mr. and Mrs. Keely lived modestly. Investors' money mostly went for more machinery and materials for improved models. He was in his workshop night and day--cutting, machining, and assembling new devices to capture the elusive "oscillation of atoms," though results were very slow in coming. Increasingly, investors called it quit and wrote off their losses.
Keely Motor Company needed someone with deep faith and deeper pockets.
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After a year of mourning her husband, recently-widowed Clara Bloomfield-Moore took a renewed interest in life as she looked for investment possibilities. Keely Motor Company came to her attention; for many years she regularly sent checks.
In 1890 Keely demonstrated his "hydro-pneumatic pulsating vacuo" model; it developed such tremendous force from a pint of water that lead pellets were driven through 12-inch-thick oak planks--with ample power to spare!
By 1895, even a long-term investor might need reassurance. Clara asked visiting English physicist Lascelles-Scott to inquire into Keely's theories and workshop models. Tho' his report was never made public, she promptly withdrew further support. The assumption was--she had been prepared to wait, but not to be made a fool.
After Keely died three years later, Company Directors discovered why--for twenty-five years--demonstrations always took place in his workshop. Pipes concealed in workbench legs went through the floor to hydraulic pumps and compressors in the cellar to make things work.
At some point, Keely must have known his theory of using intense, high-pitched sound to release untold energy simply did not work. Whether he kept at it because he was a charlatan, or because investor money was always available, or because he really believed the next model
would finally be the answer--no one who knew the facts ventured to say.
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Summer 1945--frighteningly enormous energy was unleashed over the New Mexico desert, not by using sound as Keely had envisioned, but by splitting atoms. Later, on two different days in August, a similar device exploded-- first over Hiroshima...then over Nagasaki, Japan. /// Those events ushered in today's Nuclear Energy Age.
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