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The ‘Baron’ of Arizona and Other Historic Hucksters

Khalid Elhassan October 31, 2019 27 min

6. Getting Rich Off of Gibberish

A spherical tank beneath Keely’s lab, held the compressed air that had been powering his engine all along. Wikimedia

John Keely used the kinds of words that sounded impressive to nonscientists, but that in reality were simply pseudo-scientific gibberish. However, it was effective pseudo-scientific gibberish: within a short time, Keely had convinced investors to give him the equivalent of about $25 million in current dollars as startup capital. He used that as seed money to found the Keely Motor Company. In subsequent years, investors coughed up the equivalent of more than $100 million in today’s dollars for a stake in Keely’s enterprise.

For more than two decades, Keely closely guarded the secret of his invention, refusing to share its details with anybody. But he kept promising investors that the perfection of a commercial version of his machine was just right around the corner. And throughout that time, gullible investors kept giving him more and more money, notwithstanding the consensus of physicists that Keely was a charlatan and a quack, and that perpetual motion such as he promised was physically impossible. Finally, when Keely died in 1898, the secret of his engine was revealed to the world. It had not been powered by water, but by a compressed air, machine hidden two floors below, and connected to the Keely engine by cleverly concealed pipes and hoses.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.