BRIDGEPORT, Dec. 28.- A story is current here that a veteran machinist named Baker, an old resident of Bridgeport, has just returned from Philadelphia with a sensational story to tell. He is represented as having been for the past two years an employee at the workshops of the Keely Motor Company, in Philadelphia, as the representative of a New York capitalist, by whom he was to be paid for the discovery and exposure of Keely's much advertised secret. Now Baker returns to denounce Keely as a fraud and give the outlines of a Book which be promises to write for the edification of Wall street and other parts of this too confiding world. Baker claims to have been drawing $200 a month from the New Yorker while pursuing his investigations and to have had the full confidence of Keely. Keely, he says, was very careful in engaging him, keeping him at the most unimportant employment until he felt that the man was trustworthy. Baker said it required a year and a half to discover the secret. This is Baker's description of the motor to a reporter.

"The motor proper consisted of a heavy outside covering of metal shaped to deceive the spectator in every way he may look at it. The outside looks as if the machine consisted of a large massive iron cylinder with valves, wheels, and outside piper. These are supposed to assist in the act of generating the famous new force, when in fact the outside shape has little to do with the working parts. Those parts are on the inside. The force is, pure and simple, air, the least bit tainted with a chemical to deceive, as everything else is made to do. The air is pumped from 7 to 21 steel tubs on the inside of the shell. The tubs are of sufficient strength to withstand a pressure of from 10 to 30,000 pounds. There is mechanism inside the shell that permits the compressed air to pass from one chamber or cylinder at a time into a distinct and separate cylinder which contains the piston that operate the fly-wheel of the machine. By this method the machine can be kept running five minutes or perhaps longer, and yet show very little change on the pressure gauge. The plan is to allow only one-third of the air to escape from one cylinder, and then that one is disconnected, and so on until but one cylinder has been used to that extent, when the machine is stopped and a great show is made, as, of course, the indicated pressure is exactly the same as it was before the wheel went around. Nor a drop of water is used at any time. The water story is all bosh."

Such in substance is a long story as it is told by Baker, who alleges that Keely is far from being a practical mechanic and never talks to one, though when a stockholder comes around Keely deluges him with a mixed fantastic jargon, using a hundred terms or more that no mechanic or scientist ever heard before. Baker avers that the idea of a motor was given to him in Newark, N.J., as long ago as 1867, when Dr. George A. Prindham, then of Newark, now of Philadelphia, constructed a machine in many respects like the Keely motor at the fire engine works of Gould Brothers, in Railroad-avenue, Newark, Keely, he says, captured the idea by haunting the shops. Baker omits to make public the name of the New-York capitalist in whose interest he has been playing the detective on Mr. Keely. (The New York Times)

See Also

Keely Chronology
Keely Motor
Keely Motor Company
Was Keely a Fraud