SPEAKER_00 0:02

If history has a margin, this is where it lives. I'm Wendell Marshant, and this is the footnote. A rented second-floor room, brass fittings on tables that used to serve some other purpose entirely, and a man in his forties with a mustache like a hedge, standing at a machine no larger than a parlor stove. He asks his visitor, a New York engineer named Sgt. Cuttingworth, to hold out his hand. Then he produces a cold vapor. The engineer allows the jet to play across his palm, and Sgt. will later tell the Times in an interview reprinted in the Anderson Intelligencer of July 22nd, 1875, that the vapor was pleasant to the touch. He inhales it, he swallows it, and he says, on the record, you can live on it. That is a senior partner of a New York engineering firm, quoted in a South Carolina Country Weekly, telling readers he had eaten an invisible motive force out of a Philadelphia parlor and found it nourishing. The man producing the vapor was John Ernst Warrell Keeley, and that morning in 1875 was the beginning of Keeley's second decade of a con that would run without meaningful interruption for 25 years. Keeley was born in Chester County, Pennsylvania in 1827, orphaned young. He worked variously as a carpenter, a carnival hand, and a musician. The Freeland Tribune of January 20th, 1896, a small mining paper in eastern Pennsylvania that took an unaccountable interest in his affairs, tells us Keeley began life as a music teacher, and that it was the tuning fork, he said, that gave him his first hint of the new power he claimed to have discovered. He pottered around a good many years, the paper writes, experimenting with the effect of sound vibrations on different metals, making machines, pulling them to pieces, and all the while getting poorer and poorer. Then, according to the Tribune, he built a device that seemed to draw enormous power from a very small input. It required no steam, no compressed air, no electricity. It required, this is the paper, the sound of a fiddlebow. The public have been laughing at this idea ever since, the Tribune concedes. But not everyone laughed. In 1874, a group of well-heeled Philadelphia gentlemen incorporated the Keeley Motor Company. Stock was issued, rooms were rented, machines were built and unbuilt. And for the next quarter century, Keeley's investors watched a man in a leather apron do the strangest things anyone had ever seen. Let me describe the demonstrations, because they are the shape of what came after. The Freeland Tribune lays them out in the flat present tents of the trade press. Hold the dumbbell out at arm's length and drop it, and it falls to the ground. The Keeley motor, the paper reports, can keep it up there in the air at any desired height. Set a cold engine, belts drawn tight, boiler empty, no fire, and the engine will sit. The Keeley motor, the paper explains, will make that engine start up and send its flywheel at four hundred revolutions a minute. Erect a steel wall three inches thick, place a cannonball ten feet away from it, and nothing happens. Until Keeley, without touching anything in the room, blows a trumpet and the ball darts through the air, pierces a hole in the steel, and falls upon the other side. Then, after each of these descriptions, the tribune attaches the small qualifier that ran through Keeley's entire career like a watermark. Not just now, but presently when it is completed. That phrase when it is completed is the whole story in miniature. In eighteen seventy five it was completed by next year. In eighteen eighty, it was completed by the year after. In eighteen ninety six, it was completed as soon as certain refinements to the vibratory link. The motor was always a season away. The season was always the next one. Which is the point at which we return to Mr. Sargent of Sergeant Cuttingworth, Engineers of New York. Sgt. Coast, is the most important document in Keeley's career. I'm reading it as it appeared in the Anderson Intelligencer on July 22nd, 1875, and as it appeared two days later in the Orangeburg News and Times. It is the same text. It ran everywhere. Because Sgt was not a mark, he was an expert. And he was, on his own account, a skeptic. The more he learned, he says, the more skeptical he got. He begins by describing the pitch. One year ago today, Sergeant tells the Times, I began an investigation into the powers and properties of what is termed the Keeley Motor. He was at first an utter skeptic, his spelling, and Keeley's claims, he says, were errantly absurd. That is his word. Errantly. But he traveled to Philadelphia on his own dime to see. And Keeley, he reports, was very jealous of his secret. It took considerable pressure from the investors, Sergeant calls them stockholders, before Keeley would let him watch the machine work. And when Keeley finally consented, he had in the room a man named Beckle, who had worked for him a number of years, whose job was, Sgt. Challenged. The stockholders themselves were kept out of the room. Their counsel came to the closed doors, knocked, and, I'm reading Sergeant Verbatum in the Anderson Intelligencer, was answered by Mr. Keeley, who would not admit him. Sergeant proposed a bargain. Show me not thousands of pounds of pressure per square inch, he said, but only a hundred, instantaneously, and I will believe you have a new invention. Keeley, per the Times account, showed him at once a pressure of a thousand pounds. Sargent did not know what to think. He suspected a sidelitz powder concealed somewhere. He suspected gun cotton. He suspected nitroglycerin. He examined the apparatus looking, in his own charming phrase, for some little pea somewhere that would explain the wonder to him. He found none. He went home. He consulted a scientist whose name, he tells the Times, would be recognized all over the country if he could bring himself to say it, which he does not. The unnamed friend suggested carboline vapor. Sergeant obtained a jet of carboline and let it play across his hand. It stung with cold. Keeley's vapor, Sergeant countered, was pleasant to the touch, and Keeley's had no smell. Carbolene had a smell. He returned to Philadelphia and drank it again, Keeley's vapor, condensed to water in Sergeant's phrase, by simple expansion. He drank it and it was water, and it was fine. The skeptic friend, still unconvinced, wrote back that Keeley must have substituted plain water in a surreptitious manner. So Sgt. Unds he himself controlled. At the end of this process, published in July of 1875 in the leading newspapers of the Eastern Seaboard, Mr. Sgt. of Sergeant Cuttingworth pronounced himself convinced. He had, he wrote, the phrase set out in small capitals by the Anderson Intelligencer's compositor, found no room for any further doubt. He proceeds, in the same interview, to describe the engineering. The Keeley motor, he says, will produce 250 times the pressure that steam will. Again, small caps. It is, he says, far superior to gunpowder. He has fired a rifle with it. The pressure of the Keeley vapor is sustained the full length of the barrel, so that the ball leaves the muzzle at velocities gunpowder cannot match. Naval gunboats of the future, he tells the Times, will be driven by the same force that fires their guns. And so on. Engines of Austrian gunmetal are in preparation. A new gauge is being fabricated, capable of measuring pressures up to 50,000 pounds. A whole scientific vocabulary is being coined for phenomena hitherto unknown. It is, he insists, entirely real. I want you to hold that testimony in mind, because it is the single best example I have ever read of a man who was not lying and was not a fool, and was, nonetheless, catastrophically wrong. Sargent was an engineer. He knew what pressure was, he knew what a boiler was, and he sat in a Philadelphia workshop and drank vapor from a Keeley apparatus and pronounced it nourishing, and put his firm's name to the pronouncement in the New York Times. The Keeley Motor Company shares, meanwhile, did what shares do. The Freeland Tribune traces the arc. In moments of announcement, a new refinement, a new demonstration, a new endorsement, the stock climbed. The paper says the shares fluctuated from 10 cents to a thousand cents on the dollar. Fortunes were made on them, and other fortunes were lost. When enthusiasm ran hot, men fought for the chance to buy in at 200% above par. When it ran cold, they fought for the chance to sell out at 90% below. Twenty-two years passed like this. Keeley worked. Investors invested. Some sued. Keeley was jailed briefly in 1888 for refusing to disclose his methods to a court-appointed commission, a commission convened by his own stockholders, who by then included men wealthier than he was, and who had begun to want their money back. He was released on a finding that even the presiding judges seem to have regarded as slightly embarrassing, that a man cannot be compelled, in furtherance of the discovery of his fraud, to describe an invention he claims is patentable, which is precisely the objection a fraudster would raise, and precisely the objection a genuine inventor would raise, and the law of eighteen eighty-eight had no way to tell the two apart. New machines appeared. Old machines were dismantled to build them. The motor always was on the cusp. And then, in January of 1896, on page three of the Freeland Tribune, the paper is only four pages long, appears the last great burst of Keeley publicity. The recent announcement, the paper writes, that John Jacob Astor has been negotiating for the purchase of an interest in the work and inventions of John W. Keeley of Philadelphia has centered public interest once more in the Keeley Motor. John Jacob Astor, the Astor, the Waldorf Astoria Astor, a man whose family, in 1896, controlled a fortune the papers estimated at over a hundred million dollars, was negotiating to buy in. The Tribune's explanation of the underlying physics is a small masterpiece of newspaper hedging. What Keeley says he has found, the paper writes, is an etheric vapor, the phrase printed in quotation marks because the paper is being scrupulous, a substance present everywhere, penetrating the atmosphere and solid bodies as well, just as electricity is everywhere present. By causing the molecules of air to vibrate rapidly, Keeley, the paper says, frees this vapor and collects it into a reservoir. The paper puts the word generator in quotation marks. It puts the word vibrator in quotation marks. It puts the phrase etheric vapor again in quotation marks. It is doing everything a decent country weekly can do to fence off the terminology from its own editorial voice. And it is doing that, I would guess, because the editor had seen this rodeo before. Then the paper does something else, which I find quietly moving. It offers three verdicts side by side. A few men, the Freeland Tribune writes, call Keeley a great scientist. More call him a fool. Most people call him a clever imposter. That is a sentence a country weekly has no business writing so precisely. It is not editorializing, it is triangulating. It is the paper telling its readers, in effect, here is where the country has landed, and roughly how many of the country have landed where. Take your pick. Then the Tribune repeats, in the same voice it used twenty years earlier, the same catechism of promised marvels, the dumbbell that will float, the cold engine that will start on its own, the cannonball that will pierce three inches of steel at the sound of a trumpet from ten feet away. And the paper signs off, in 1896, 22 years into the demonstration, with the sentence If the motor be ever completed and performs the work claimed for it, the whole civilized world will be bettered. If that is the last full throat gasp of the Keeley motor in the sources I have in front of me. Aster's negotiations, whatever exactly they were, did not close in a purchase. Historians of the family suggest Astor's interest was closer to entertainment than to acquisition. He liked the demonstrations, and, being an Astor, could afford to sit through them. Keeley died on November 18, 1898, at the age of 71. Heart failure. And the moment he died, everything that had been theatrical about his life became all at once concrete. Because Keeley, in his life, had never permitted anyone into the walls or the floor of his laboratory. Investors had walked around it, watched machines on tables, been served tea and lectures. But the room itself had been sacred. The moment the executors took possession, that changed. The Keeley Motor Company hired an investigative team, and the Omaha Daily Bee of December 18, 1898, a page I have in front of me, sandwiched between advertisements for celluloid collar boxes, iron toys, and sterling silver shoehorns marked down from a dollar to 40 cents, carries the headline Power of Keeley's Motor, How It Fascinated Men of Wealth. The article beneath the fold summarizes what by then, one month after the funeral, was already public. The floor came up. Under the floor, the investigators found a three-ton iron sphere. Around it, a network of pipes in brass and pewter, so slender they had passed for structural bracing, running under the floorboards up through hollowed table legs into the very machines Keeley had demonstrated for 25 years. The sphere was pressurized, the pipes carried compressed air. Every one of the marvels, the flywheel, the floating dumbbell, the pressure gauges, the trumpet trick with the cannonball, traced back through those brass conduits to the iron ball buried in the basement. Three tons, compressed by hand over years in the small hours of the morning, by Keeley himself, with a foot pedal and a pump. The engineers sent by Scientific American wrote up the discovery, and it was in every major paper by Christmas of 1898. The report was careful. It did not gloat. It described what was seen and what was inferred. What was inferred was that Keeley had spent, at minimum, the last twenty years of his life running a mechanical illusion whose complexity was, in its own perverse way, more impressive than a genuine etheric vapor motor would have been. The plumbing alone, hidden, silent, undetected for decades by men who had every incentive to detect it, represented a lifetime of engineering. The theatrical patter about vibratory sympathy and polar currents was the front. The pipes were the back. Compressed air, mind you, was not a novel motive force in 1898. It was well understood in 1875. Pneumatic tubes were carrying letters under London and Paris. The rock drills of the American mining industry ran on it. What Keeley had done, without anyone realizing it, was to build under his own workshop a static reserve of compressed air so large and to route pipes from it so cleverly that he could deliver bursts of pressure at any point in the room, at any moment, and account for their arrival with any narrative he pleased. The physics was Watt and Bolton, the showmanship was Barnum. If you go back to Sergeant's testimony in the Anderson Intelligencer of july eighteen seventy five, and you read it looking for the seam, you can nearly find it. Sergeant complains, verbatim, that Keeley would not for a long time admit him to see what he was doing. When Keeley at last did admit him, Beckle was in the room. When Sergeant asked about substitution of the drinkable water, Keeley did the demonstration again, but always in Keeley's room, always with Keeley's apparatus, always in a space Keeley had prepared. Sergeant thought he had ruled out chemistry. He had not thought to look at plumbing. That is the trick, essentially. Sgt, the New York engineer, expected the deception to happen at the scale of chemistry, some concealed reagent, some hidden pee. Keeley was operating at the scale of civil works. He had built, under his own building, a piece of infrastructure. And people looking for a P do not think to lift the floor. This is why I keep coming back to Keeley. Not because he was clever, though he was, not because his investors were rich, though they were, because the shape of the con, the specific mismatch between where the mark is looking and where the machine actually lives, is a shape that repeats. Sargent's letter is not, when you strip it down, a letter about vapor. It is a letter about a class of educated men whose confidence in their own expertise blinded them to the possibility that the trick was happening at a different level of the apparatus. Than the one their expertise covered. He drank the water. He drank it again. He drank it a third time on his own terms. He wrote in the leading newspaper of the Eastern Seaboard that a man could live on the Keeley vapor. And the water was, of course, water, not fabricated water, not chemically generated water. Water Keeley had put into a jar and connected to a valve. There is a temptation, when one recounts a story like this, to make the marks look foolish. I would rather not. Sargent went in a skeptic. He asked for demonstrations he thought impossible. He got them. He asked for a rebuttal to his own suspicion of chemical trickery. He got that too. He was, at every step, doing what a rational man is supposed to do. The problem is that no amount of testing against the wrong hypothesis rules out the right one. He was testing whether the vapor was a chemical. He was not testing whether the floor had a pipe in it. And nobody told him he was permitted to bring a stethoscope to the floorboards. By the time the sphere was found, the Keeley Motor Company had raised something on the order of five million dollars in stock across its 24-year existence. In 1898 dollars, roughly 200 million today, though estimates vary, and the company's books were, by all reports, unhelpful. Most of that money was gone. Some had funded lab equipment, some had funded Keeley's household. A great deal had simply evaporated, in the fluctuations the Freeland Tribune described. The largest single investor at the end was a Philadelphia widow named Clara Bloomfield Moore, who had put in, over years, a sum estimated by the executors at more than a hundred thousand dollars. She had, in the last decade of Keeley's life, taken to writing pamphlets and books explaining his physics to the general public. When the sphere was found, she was in Europe, ill. Her family wrote afterward that she refused to believe the report. She died the following year. That is the shape of it, more or less. A Philadelphia workshop, a Chester County music teacher, a generator, in scare quotes, a generation of investors, a three-ton sphere, a widow in Europe who could not bring herself to admit that the last decade of her intellectual life had been a plumbing project. I want to close with a passage I have read many times, and every time I read it, it seems to me to mean something slightly different. It is from the Freeland Tribune, January 20th, 1896, the same article that celebrates Astor's negotiation, the same article that describes the cannonball and the trumpet. The writer, unnamed, is trying to explain to a small town Pennsylvania readership what Keeley says he has found. And he pauses, mid-explanation, to offer that three-part verdict I read earlier. A few men call Keeley a great scientist. More call him a fool. Most people call him a clever imposter. Read it twice. That sentence in eighteen ninety six is not editorial. It is demographic. The paper is telling us that the country has already reached a verdict on Keeley, and that the verdict is imposter by plurality, fool by minority, genius by a small, pious remnant. Keeley is still alive when this sentence is set in type. He is still receiving stockholders. He is still receiving Astor's people. He is still receiving Clara Bloomfield Moore's money. He is, in 1896, two years from his death, already a known fraud in the country's opinion. And he has, for those two remaining years, no shortage of clients. Because, and this is what I keep coming back to, the country's verdict does not close the case for the individual mark. Sergeant, twenty years earlier, was a skeptic when he arrived. He was a believer when he left. Bloomfield Moore knew, or could have known, what the majority of her countrymen thought. She wrote her books anyway. Aster's people ran their negotiations anyway. The public verdict at every stage of Keeley's career was substantially correct. It changed no one's individual behavior who wanted the machine to be real. The etheric vapor, the Freeland Tribune wrote in 1896, would revolutionize the world. It would make most of the difficulties that confront us today, the paper said, vanquished. Every one of those difficulties, the labor of steam, the price of coal, the danger of gunpowder, the tedium of the workshop, would fall to Keeley's generator when it was completed. The specific promises were not, in fact, absurd. Steam did fall, though not to Keeley. Coal did fall, though not to Keeley. Gunpowder was overtaken, though not by Keeley. Everything Keeley promised the 19th century, the twentieth century did, in the end, deliver, by different mechanisms, in different workshops, staffed by different men. Keeley's motor was fake. The dream Keeley was selling, that human ingenuity would find a limitless, clean source of motive power, that hard labor would end, that darkness would be lit and distances erased, was not fake. It was the actual dream of the 19th century. It came true. It simply was not Keeley who delivered it. That, I think, is why the story has legs. Keeley was not selling nothing. He was selling the wrong version of the right thing. And his investors were not stupid. They were people who correctly perceived that the future would be built on some substrate they did not yet understand, and who backed the wrong horse in the right race. One last thing before I sign off. In the OCR of the Omaha Daily B of December 18, 1898, the Keeley article sits on the same page as two other columns. On one side, a report on two farmer boys from Franklin County, Nebraska, Charles Hofer and Fritz Gauger, indicted for passing counterfeit $10 silver certificates given to them by a man named Roselle, who, the paper notes, had since been killed by revenue officers in an Arkansas mountain still. On the other side of the fold, a Sunday advertisement for a sterling silver shoehorn, worth a dollar, marked down to 40 cents. I don't think the layout is accidental. A country editor laying out his pages by hand on a December afternoon understood what he had. On one side of the fold, the biggest scientific hoax of the century exposed. On the other, a boy in a farmhouse in Nebraska holding a counterfeit $10 bill somebody handed him at a fair, wondering how to explain to a federal magistrate that he had not known it was fake. Between them, a silver shoehorn on discount. For people who wanted, briefly, to imagine that they lived in the kind of house where such a thing would be needed. That is the whole small business of nineteenth century belief, laid out in three columns. Something you want to be true, something somebody else wanted to be true. And something you are willing to pay a slightly reduced price for, so long as it looks like the thing you want.