History of perpetual motion machines
[2] A drawing of a perpetual motion machine appeared in the sketchbook of Villard de Honnecourt, a 13th-century French master mason and architect.
Following the example of Villard, Peter of Maricourt designed a magnetic globe which, if it were mounted without friction parallel to the celestial axis, would rotate once a day.
In 1607 Cornelius Drebbel in "Wonder-vondt van de eeuwighe bewegingh" dedicated a Perpetuum motion machine to James I of England.
In 1686, Georg Andreas Böckler, designed a "self operating" self-powered water mill and several perpetual motion machines using balls using variants of Archimedes' screws.
[11] Cox claimed that the timepiece was a true perpetual motion machine, but as the device is powered by changes in atmospheric pressure via a mercury barometer, this is not the case.
[15][16][17] In 1827, Sir William Congreve, 2nd Baronet devised a machine running on capillary action[8] that would disobey the principle that water seeks its own level, so to produce a continuous ascent and overflow.
[18] In 1868, an Austrian, Alois Drasch, received a US patent for a machine that possessed a "thrust key-type gearing" of a rotary engine.
A story of the overcomplicated device with a hidden source of energy appears in the Scientific American article "The Greatest Discovery Ever Yet Made".
In 1900, Nikola Tesla claimed to have discovered an abstract principle on which to base a perpetual motion machine of the second kind.
He wrote:[22]A departure from known methods – possibility of a "self-acting" engine or machine, inanimate, yet capable, like a living being, of deriving energy from the medium – the ideal way of obtaining motive power.David Unaipon, Australian inventor, had a lifelong fascination with perpetual motion.
One of his studies on Newtonian mechanics led him to create a shearing machine in 1910 that converted curvilineal motion into straight line movement.
[23] In the 1910s and 1920s, Harry Perrigo of Kansas City, Missouri, a graduate of MIT, claimed development of a free energy device.
Papp blamed the accident on interference by physicist Richard Feynman, who later shared his observations in an article in Laser, the journal of the Southern Californian Skeptics.
Paul Baumann, a German engineer, developed a machine referred to as the "Testatika"[31] and known as the "Swiss M-L converter"[32] or "Thesta-Distatica".
Johnson claimed that his device generates motion, either rotary or linear, from nothing but permanent magnets in rotor as well as stator, acting against each other.
[44][45] Clean Energy Technologies, Inc. (CETI) claimed development of a device called the Patterson power cell that outputs small yet anomalous amounts of heat, perhaps due to cold fusion.
[46] Dave Jones created a device in 1981 using a seemingly constantly rotating bicycle wheel sealed in a plexiglass container.
He created it as a scientific joke, always stating that it was a fake and not a true perpetual motion machine, but to date no one has yet discovered how the device works.
Before he died of cancer in 2017, his brother Peter persuaded him to write down the secret behind the wheel, which he sent in a letter to Martyn Poliakoff, a chemist at the University of Nottingham.
[47][48][49] Adam Savage examined the wheel in 2023, which was housed at the Royal Society, producing a video of the event, in which he suspected that an electrical mechanism of some kind drove the device.
[51][52][53][54][55] Science writer Martin Gardner said that Bearden's physics theories, compiled in the self-published book Energy from the Vacuum, are considered "howlers" by physicists, and that his doctorate title was obtained from a diploma mill.
No independent confirmation was ever made of their claims, and in 2006, company founder Patrick Kelly was sentenced to five years in prison for stealing funds from investors.
