Canada and the World
Current Events with a Canadian Perspective
Last update
19 November 2010
The Search for Perpetual Motion
For centuries, inventors and swindlers have tried to build machines that don't require energy inputs; only the swindlers have been successful
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-
Zimara seems to have had doubts about the practicality of his design. Dennis Lee has no such qualms.
Free-
Mr. Lee claims to have invented a free-
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-
Johann Bessler and his Orffyreus Wheel
In 1712, Johann Bessler claimed he had unlocked the secret of free energy. His Orffyreus
Wheel, (below) he said, was self-
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-
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.’ ”
© Canada and the World, April 2010
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Leonardo da Vinci drew a water-
