The Search for Perpetual Motion
The Laws of Physics Say There Is No Such Thing as Free Energy
Mar 1, 2009
Most people learn, sometimes with embarrassment, that there’s no such thing as a free lunch. After hundreds of years of searching by thousands of people, it looks a lot like there is no such thing as free energy either.
That doesn’t discourage scores of enthusiasts from looking.
Perpetual Motion Machines
The Holy Grail of energy is the perpetual motion machine. Such a machine is supposed to run forever without the need of an energy input. One of the brightest minds ever to have existed on the planet made drawings of perpetual motion machines; unfortunately, Leonardo da Vinci’s inventions only run when energy is applied to them. Writing in the February 2008 issue of Leonardo (published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology) Prof. Alan A. Mills describes da Vinci's devices.
In the 16th century, there was a “self-blowing windmill." An article in the March 1941 University of Chicago journal Isis features Mark Antony Zimara's mill, which captured wind coming from the sails into a bellows. The wind would then be returned from the bellows to drive the sails. Zimara seems to have had doubts about the practicality of his design. Dennis Lee has no such qualms.
Free-Electricity Machine
Mr. Lee claims to have invented a free-electricity machine. Writing in Forbes (June 2005) Michael Maiello
says "there's a physics ignoramus born every minute, and so Lee has made quite a business out of developing this machine. People have parted with as much as $50,000 to buy dealerships to support him."
The folks in the California Justice Department weren't buying though. In 1988, they hit Mr. Lee with 47 criminal and civil charges. He pled guilty to eight and did two years in jail. Undaunted, Mr. Lee is still pushing his free-electricity machine and other inventions in personal appearances and on his website at pureenergysystems.com.
Johann Bessler and his Orffyrean Wheel
In 1712, Johann Bessler claimed he had unlocked the secret of free energy. His Orffyrean Wheel, he said, was self-moving. People stomped over each other in the rush to give him money to develop his machine. He built bigger and bigger wheels, the largest was 12 feet in diameter and 14 inches thick. It rolled out of the workshop in 1717.
Tests were done under a variety of conditions. In one of them, the wheel was placed in a room that was then locked and sealed. Almost two months later, the sealed room was opened and there was Bessler’s wheel happily turning at 26 revolutions a minute.
The innards of the thing were kept out of sight; the centre of the wheel was covered in canvas so no one could examine the mechanism. Herr Bessler was a cautious man and didn’t want anybody stealing his invention. When he suspected people were trying to pinch his discovery, Bessler smashed his beloved wheel.
Overbalanced Wheel Technology
A couple of years later he wrote a paper about his wheel. He led people to believe the secret of its never-ending motion was based on weights. This would mean that his gadget was just another variation on the overbalanced wheels that inventors had been trotting out for public investment for centuries.
Overbalanced wheels all work on the same flawed logic; moving weights are attached to a wheel so they fall to a position farther from the wheel’s centre for one half of the wheel’s rotation. The idea is that weights farther from the centre apply more torque and this causes the wheel to spin forever. Actually, it doesn’t.
Physics Professor Donald Simanek says “None have worked, but that doesn’t stop people from using the same idea again and again, altering mechanical details, often with incredibly complex designs. I call this ‘reinventing the square wheel.’ ”
