The Best of John Keel: Volume I by John Keel

Author:John Keel [Keel, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Galde Press
Published: 2013-08-12T04:00:00+00:00

December 1990

Something for Nothing

Despite his illustrious name, John Keely is remembered as a rotten, lowdown swindler of wealthy widows—hardly a fitting epitaph for a man who claimed to have invented a machine that would revolutionize the industrial world. It performed amazing wonders in his laboratory, but Keely never managed to get it onto the market. He just kept raising more money. Some say he peddled as much as five million dollars in stocks in his ill-fated Keely Motor Company…an astounding sum in the 1890s when he was at his peak.

Without an apparent source of power, the Keely apparatus was capable of bending heavy bars of steel in front of skeptical scientists, engineers, and industrialists. Keely used tuning forks and musical instruments to set his machinery in motion, and his frequent demonstrations made him one of the most controversial people of the Victorian Age. But after he passed away in 1898, disgruntled investors ripped his home apart and found a curious system of pipes, valves, and spherical tanks hidden in the walls and floorboards. They concluded that Keely had somehow used compressed air to power his wonderful machines. He had presumably exploited one of humanity’s oldest dreams—the dream of obtaining “free energy,” of getting something for nothing, of perpetual motion.

The search for perpetual motion probably began soon after a cave man invented the wheel. At least one man, a German clock maker who called himself “Orffyreus,” reputedly developed the world’s first successful self-propelled wheel around 1715 after building some three hundred failures. To prove that it worked, it was sealed in a room in a castle in Hesse after being set in motion. When the room was reopened two months later, the wheel was still spinning merrily by itself. Assorted professors and authorities examined it and wrote about it but “Orffyreus” eventually smashed the wheel to pieces and that was the end of it. It is generally assumed that it was driven by some hidden clockwork mechanism. We’ll never know because the inventor got miffed when the government tried to tax it. Governments haven’t changed much since. Nor have perpetual motion inventors.

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