| Rita's ~
VINTAGE READING®
~ Notebook
Since 1947, "Mrs. B" has found and verified countless people, events . . .
and--at times--even figments of imagination. We offer an example.
APRIL - MAY 2007 :: © 2007 Buday Books / Vintage Reading®
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"Enough Energy in a Quart of Water..."
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 "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 tough 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 and 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.
~ ~ ~
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!
But 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.
-----
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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