A brief history of Perpetual Motion machines

Part 3 of a series on the Second Law of Thermodynamics

The Second Law was formulated in the 19th century and proven within the context of classical physics. Quantum physics of the 20th century includes an enormous energy density lurking in the vacuum, and whether the vacuum energy can be tapped for useful work remains a controversial question. There is no shortage of claims, most of which are clearly bogus. One of the best reasons to believe that extracting energy from the vacuum is possible is the vigor with which pursuit of this technology is being suppressed.  (Links to Part I & Part 2)

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In 1905, the US Patent Office changed its rules for patenting a device that claims to draw useful energy from the ambient environment. For all other inventions, it suffices to submit to the office a detailed description of the device or process; for perpetual motion machines, a working model must be submitted. In practice, people who claim to have submitted a working device report frustration that the Patent Office demands that the device be vetted by independent experts, and if the expert says, “yes, it works”, they will go on seeking experts until they find one who says “it’s a fraud.”

We might wonder, what is the harm in giving patent protection to a device that doesn’t work? Certainly many other faulty technologies have been granted patents. People routinely patent devices in the early stage of development, before knowing whether they work or not, in order to stake a claim to IP protection before somebody else does. In the (pathological) case of pharmaceutical products, there are many that don’t do what they claim to do, but they are protected by patent in any event. Software that doesn’t work is also routinely patented without contest.

Joseph Newman ran afoul of the Patent Office rules when he submitted the required working model of a device he developed from a home workshop in Lucedale, Mississippi. He claimed that his motor produced kilowatts of mechanical power from a small, dime store battery. According to Wikipedia,

In 1979, Newman submitted an application for his device to the United States Patent and Trademark Office.^[7] The application was eventually rejected in 1983,^[8] which set off a lengthy court battle. The United States District Court requested a master of the court to make the final decision. William E. Schuyler, Jr, former Commissioner of U.S. Patent Office, Washington, DC was chosen by the court to make the final decision to award the patent or not award the patent to Newman. Schuyler concluded that evidence to support Newman's claim was overwhelming and found no contradictory factual evidence.^[9]

However, the judge ordered Newman's machine to be tested by the National Bureau of Standards (NBS). The National Bureau of Standards (NBS), now known as the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), by request of the patent office, tested the device for several months and got negative results. In every case presented in the NBS report, the output power was less than power input from the battery pack, and therefore the efficiency was less than 100%. The court therefore upheld the rejection of the patent application.^[3][4]

Lacking patent protection, Newman had difficulty attracting investors for a manufacturing company. He did eventually build a factory, but the Alabama SEC came after him for fraud. He fought a bitter court battle over 30 years, and eventually took his trade secrets to the grave (2015).

Newman had scant technical education and personality quirks that make it easy to dismiss him on personal grounds. But the question remains, why the Patent Office enforces such strict standards in this case, while they routinely grant patents to dubious “inventions” in other areas. Why do Federal agencies devote so much resource to suppression of free energy technology?

Lawyers who have no background in science take the proscriptions of the Second Law as dispositive, when (it is obvious to me that) this is just the present state of science, and the Second Law is at least as likely as any other Law of Nature to be overthrown by future findings. I savor the irony that lawyers are well aware that today’s black letter law could be overturned by a court decision tomorrow, but they hear about a “law” of thermodynamics and believe it is forever.

It is always prudent to examine unexpected experimental results with care and with skepticism. But it is always wrong to throw out experimental results simply because we know from theory that they cannot be correct. 

Suppression

My personal suspicion was aroused when I learned of the suppression of cold fusion technology. Cold fusion does not defy any laws of physics, and I can attest to the reality of the effect from personal experience. I wrote about the subject last February. I do not have personal experiences to convince me that “free energy” technology is real, but what I know of suppressed cold fusion technology helps open my mind to the possibility. 

There are many rumors about Nicola Tesla’s forays into free energy, and there was a prototype tower (1901) that purportedly was intended to broadcast electrical energy without a grid of copper wires. Tesla was of the opinion that the Giza pyramids were an ancient energy transmission device. The story goes that Tesla was funded by J.P. Morgan, who refused to back research on a power source that could not be metered and billed to the consumer.

Tesla had a date with FDR the day he died. His notebooks were seized by the FBI and made unavailable to the scientific community that might have continued his work. The person assigned to read the notebooks and censor them for selective release was, bizarrely, Donald Trump’s uncle.

Here is a trick video that seems to show a simple mechanical device that goes back and forth forever. The video is blocked by Youtube! Why? In my adopted field of anti-aging science, there have been credible scientists making the faulty argument that rejuvenation of aging animals cannot work because of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. A cautionary tale is Lord Kelvin, a founding father of thermodynamic science, who “proved” in 1895 that no heavier-than-air machine could fly. [NYTimes, 1903]

Other inventors who were harassed or killed

Adam Trombly (1951 - ) inherited papers from his father, who had worked with heavily classified research in cooperation with Nazi scientists, brought to America through Operation Paperclip. Paperclip scientists studied non-standard models of physics and the psycho-pharmacology of mind control. Trombly believes that the CIA killed his father with injection that gave him cancer; also that some of the classified technology was reverse-engineered from extraterrestrial spacecraft.

Trombly began working on zero-point energy in 1979. “I was warned by Buckminster Fuller that if we were successful there'd be hell to pay.” He turned his father’s sketches into a “closed path homopolar generator” that produced more electrical output than it consumed.

Trombly got out of the field because he feared for his life. His lab was raided several times, and he discovered microwave antennas beamed at his house. When he developed cancer at age 38, he suspected that it was induced by the same people who killed his father. Today, Trombly works at Project Earth on more mainstream environmental science.

Here is a (sensationalized) video about Trombly and other free energy researchers, emphasizing sabotage of their work and mysterious deaths.

“The American public has been lied to for so long, they wouldn't be able
to recognize the truth if Jesus told them personally.” — Adam Trombly

Thomas Henry Moray (1892-1974), an American engineer from Salt Lake City, worked with a crystal of lithium aluminum silicate that he claimed drew power from the environment and converted it to electrical energy. He demonstrated a device based on his crystal, but the US Patent Office refused to register his claim, so he kept it secret. “Today Moray's work is continued, and closely guarded, by his son John.” [Guardian article]

Bruce DePalma learned basic electricity and magnetism as an undergrad at MIT and grad student at Harvard. He claimed to derive useful electrical energy from simply rotating a magnet and connecting the outer edge with the inner axle, contacted with electrical brushes. This same configuration had been studied more than a century earlier by Michael Faraday, who claimed to see a small anomalous voltage. DePalma modified the configuration and used modern materials to obtain a much larger, useful power from his “N-machine”. He died in 1997 just before the device was to be demonstrated for a venture capitalist backer. Paramahansa Tewari continued his work for 20 years, but could not get the device to produce the claimed excess energy.

Two years ago, Foster and Kimberley Gamble produced a film that portrayed free energy inventors from around the world. Their work is a valuable survey, though they lacked the expertise to evaluate the claims rigorously. 

Dennis Lee is apparently an imposter, a carnival barker. In the 1990s, he drummed up enthusiasm and investment for “free energy devices” that were demonstrated with stage magic. But Wade Frazier tells a different story about Dennis, with whom he worked for several years before parting ways. (Wade is a friend of a friend, and enjoys my confidence for that reason.) He tells of a long-term, multi-headed effort to suppress free energy technology by any means necessary, beginning with buying the rights and burying the technology, but ending with threats, arrests, and murder as a last resort. Wade claims that Dennis was swindled out of several companies he started, and was offered $1 billion to silence him at one point, which doesn’t square with my understanding of any technology that Dennis demonstrated. (He describes a hydraulic system based on simple mechanical advantage, a small piston moving through a large distance can build up a large pressure, which in turn can move a large piston through a small distance.) 

Edwin Gray (1925-1989) received second-hand drawings from a Tesla invention, and worked on them through the duration of his career. In the 1970s, he promoted a motor that ran on a small, 12 volt battery, yet produced hundreds of horsepower output, and never ran the battery down. Descriptions of the technology were vague, and referred to a capacitor used to create a short, high-voltage discharge. Gray patented his device in 1973. In 1974, his lab was raided by the LA PD and his device was confiscated. He was arrested, and charges of fraud and embezzlement were ultimately dropped. He pled guilty to minor SEC filing irregularities and was released. But though his work produced two more patents over 15 years, no commercial product came from it. “Edwin V. Gray died at his shop in Sparks, Nevada, in April 1989, under mysterious circumstances. He was 64 and in good health.” [ref]

Two most plausible free energy machines IMO

Floyd Sweet was an electrical engineer specializing in transformers. In retirement, he found that there are certain alloys of iron and barium that he could magnetize, then induce a state of permanent oscillation, where the magnetic field would oscillate without external input. An oscillating magnetic field generates an oscillating electric field in an adjacent conducting wire, so that it is easily turned into a source of electric power. (Indeed, this is how a transformer works.) Reportedly, the self-oscillating magnet would become cold when the electric power was tapped, suggesting that energy conservation was obeyed, but the Second Law was violated. Floyd Sweet received death threats that finally led him to hide out in the Mojave Desert of southern California. He died a few weeks later, and took the secret of self-oscillation to his grave.

I find the mechanism plausible, though of course I would want to see replication as well as theoretical exploration. Ferromagnetism is a well-known phenomenon, in which quantum correlations tend to make adjacent atoms line up their electron magnets in the same direction (whereas, classically, we would expect the lowest energy state to be one in which adjacent magnets line up S to N and N to S). Quantum oscillators always have a lowest-amplitude state in which some vibration remains. Could atomic oscillators align and be held in place by a quantum phenomenon analogous to ferromagnetism? Such a system would have an inherent persistence akin to current in a superconductor which, once started, is not easily disrupted. Perhaps such a system could be built into a transformer with a resistive load on the secondary coil, and the result would be a refrigerator that generates electricity — a direct violation of the Second Law. The verified concept of a quantum refrigerator (which does not, however, violate the Second Law) adds plausibility to Floyd Sweet’s research. 

The most plausible free energy device that I have come across is currently under development at University of Colorado by Garret Moddel. His device is purely electrical, solid state, based on the Casimir effect. I wrote about it a year ago. Briefly, a Casimir cavity is a very thin region in which there is less vacuum energy than in the surrounding space. Moddel’s device is based on electrons that are attracted to enter the Casimir space via quantum tunneling, then are bled into an electric circuit where they can perform work. Moddel’s work checks all the boxes — a credible researcher with a plausible idea, openly described in detail and demonstrated in public. The device is microscopic, and generates microscopic power. Moddel says that scaling it up is within the range of present solid state fabrication technology, and he is looking for investors who will fund this next step.

State of the art

The most intriguing part of these stories is the intrigue. If free energy machines are impossible, why is it that there are dark forces going to great lengths to suppress them? Why, for that matter, has the US Patent Office made rules for free energy devices that are different from every other class of inventions. The great majority of devices to which they grant patents never work as advertised, and no harm is done in granting a patent for an idea that turns out not to be viable. These days, most software patents go nowhere. Why bother to make a special case for perpetual motion machines? 

Perhaps it is because the field is rife with fraud. Well, yes. So is the field of medicine. My adopted field of life extension is attracting a lot of venture capital, generating a lot of patents, producing few results so far. 

The Second Law was formulated and proofs offered in the 19th century. It is not obvious that quantum devices are limited by the Second Law, and it is agreed among experts that what we call empty space is actually bubbling with vast amounts of energy which, under normal circumstances, has no palpable effect. 

Moddel’s Casimir device and Sweet’s permanently oscillating magnet are both based on quantum effects. Maybe they can be made to work. Certainly, the question is worth the comparatively modest investment of a few million dollars to find out.