Device catalog
The Machines
Keely built and renamed apparatus across decades. The safe way to read the machines is to separate what each device was said to do from what independent evidence can support.
A catalog with two columns of truth
Keely's machines have to be cataloged in two columns. One column records the historical claim: a new force liberated through vibration, water, air, ether, and sympathetic relations. The other records the evidentiary status: no disclosed working principle, no commercial engine, and after 1898 a laboratory filled with hidden mechanical infrastructure.
The names are unstable because the project was unstable. MacDougalls history notes that Keely's small spinning globes and motors accumulated names such as Globe Motor, Dynasphere, Hydraulic Motor, Hydro-Vacuo Engine, and Hydro-Pneumatic Pulsating Vacuo-Engine as the story grew. That instability is itself evidence: the archive should preserve the vocabulary without pretending each name cleanly identifies a separate, documented engineering design.
| Device name | What it claimed | Evidence status |
|---|---|---|
| Generator / Multiplicator | An early water-and-air apparatus said to evolve a powerful vapor or etheric force. | Contemporary accounts describe pressure, valves, reservoirs, and secrecy, but not an independently repeatable mechanism. |
| Liberator / Disintegrator | An intermediate apparatus associated with releasing or transmitting the claimed force. | Often described with tuning forks, globes, wires, and tubes; later inspection made thin tubes central to the skeptical case. |
| Hydro-Pneumatic Pulsating Vacuo-Engine | A spectacular engine name attached to Keely's evolving motor language. | MacDougall treats the name changes as part of a long public career of increasingly elaborate machines and explanations. |
| Vibratory Microscope | A supporter-described instrument connected to Keely's sympathetic-vibration research. | Moore and later sympathetic-vibratory sources mention it, but this archive treats it as a claimed apparatus rather than a confirmed working microscope. |
| Etheric Force Machine | A surviving museum object related to Keely's claimed etheric force demonstrations. | The American Precision Museum record and NEH article document survival, not validation of Keely's physical claims. |
Generator and Multiplicator
The generator or multiplicator belongs to the earliest public phase of the motor. Reports from the 1870s describe a compact metal vessel, water poured into the apparatus, pressure readings, and Keely's refusal to reveal the process until he had secured patent protection. The claim was not that the device burned fuel; it was that mechanical action on water and air released a new expansive force.
That description made the generator legible to a steam-age audience. It had reservoirs, pipes, stopcocks, gauges, and a promise of pressure. But it also avoided the key requirement of engineering proof: an inspectable mechanism that another skilled mechanic could build, test, and operate apart from Keely's workshop.
Liberator and Disintegrator
The liberator is the part of the story where Keely's machine language becomes most theatrical. Supporter and critical accounts describe brass, globes, tubes, tuning forks, wires, and sensitive adjustments. The claimed role was to free, graduate, or transmit the force generated by vibration.
The same physical vocabulary later became incriminating. Thin tubes that Keely represented as solid or merely vibratory conductors were exactly the sort of objects critics associated with compressed air. The 1899 expose did not need to disprove every metaphysical claim; it needed to show that ordinary hidden power could explain the public wonders.
Hydro-Pneumatic Pulsating Vacuo-Engine
This name is one of the clearest signs that the Keely Motor was both a machine and a performance of machinehood. The phrase sounds technical because it borrows the grammar of nineteenth-century engineering: water, air, pulse, vacuum, and engine. But the public record does not give a stable, verified engineering design corresponding to the name.
MacDougall connects the terminology to Keely's unsuccessful patent language and to the cultural problem he posed. A working motor would have needed to obey ordinary energy accounting or demonstrate a new, reproducible physical process. Instead, Keely remained on the threshold of completion for roughly a generation.
Vibratory Microscope
The sitemap calls for the vibratory microscope because it appears in the sympathetic-vibratory tradition and in Moore-related supporter material. This archive includes it, but with a bright boundary: the vibratory microscope is a claimed or supporter-described instrument, not a public-domain equivalent of a surviving laboratory microscope with independent performance tests.
Moore presents the instrument as one of several delicate devices Keely destroyed or rebuilt under pressure. That account is valuable because it shows how supporters explained secrecy and non-disclosure: instruments were said to be harmonized, sensitized, and vulnerable to careless handling. The same explanation also made independent verification nearly impossible.
Surviving objects and public-domain images
The American Precision Museum object record and the NEH article are useful because they keep the discussion grounded in material culture. A surviving Keely-related Etheric Force Machine is historically important even if it does not validate etheric force. It shows how much craft, polish, and visual authority the project carried.
The 1899 newspaper diagrams are similarly important. They are not neutral lab notebooks; they are press artifacts from an expose. But they show what the public was being asked to believe after Keely's death: that floors, walls, ceilings, shafts, tubes, and hidden motors mattered more than any invisible ether.
Sources used on this page
Robert MacDougall, Sympathetic Physics (Technology and Culture, 2019)
Modern history-of-technology analysis of the motor, stock promotion, thermodynamics debate, and Clara Moore.
Clara Bloomfield Moore, Keely and His Discoveries (1893)
Public-domain supporter account and primary witness to the late sympathetic-vibratory framing around Keely.
Gale Encyclopedia entry on John Ernst Worrell Keely
Concise reference for incorporation, devices, supporters, death, and posthumous fraud findings.
American Precision Museum, Etheric Force Machine object record
Museum object record for Keely-related surviving apparatus dated to 1878.
Wikimedia Commons / New York Journal, Keely motor diagram
Public-domain 1899 newspaper diagram of the Keely motor apparatus.
National Endowment for the Humanities, The Etheric Force Machine
Short institutional overview of the American Precision Museum object and the hidden compressed-air explanation.