For twenty-six years he sold Philadelphia investors a motor that ran on vibration and willpower. When he died, they pulled up his floorboards.

John Keely spent 1872 to 1898 charging Philadelphia's rich to watch his 'vibratory liberator' hum along on nothing but water and good intentions. Clara Bloomfield-Moore, the paper-magnate widow bankrolling him, poured roughly $100,000 into the dream before he conveniently died. Then Scientific American's men pried up the workshop planks and found a three-ton iron sphere of compressed air in the cellar, quietly piped up through the legs of every prop he'd ever demonstrated. How does one man keep an entire city of engineers fooled for a quarter century? The Philadelphia dailies that November had opinions.

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The Footnote runs on cold coffee, old newspapers, and an unreasonable amount of time spent in archives nobody else visits. None of which pays. If the show is worth a few dollars a month to you, this is where you say so — and you’ll be personally funding a man’s refusal to get a normal hobby. Either way, thank you for listening. — Wendell

Some stories don’t fit the main show. A fraud too small for a full episode. A second swindle by the same con artist. A tangent about a forger I couldn’t stop reading about at two in the morning. That’s what the subscription is — bonus episodes, footnotes to the footnotes, and the occasional longer dig into a story that deserved more room than I gave it. Five dollars a month. It pays for the archive subscriptions that make the whole thing possible. You’re not buying content. You’re keeping a small, strange operation running. — Wendell

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