A Brief History of Perpetual Motion
Alf B. Meier
Smashwords
Edition
ISBN:
978-1-4581-9684-2
Copyright 2011 by Alf B. Meier
www.alfbmeier.com
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From the Renaissance to the early Industrial Age
Most kids like Christmas, no doubt about that, and when they cease to be kids they still expect to get something for free. What other explanation is there, to the contrary of common sense and scientific discovery, why people still try to build a machine that never stops moving? More than that: Build a machine that never ceases moving and produces work... for nothing.
Look through "popular science" magazines for classified adverts for free energy, aimed at the gullible who seem to ignore (or not know) the first and second laws of thermodynamics. They are:
Energy can be transformed but cannot be created or destroyed.
and
Systems tend to an equilibrium in isolation, resulting in entropy.
In plain English:
From nothing nothing comes.
and
Everything will stop sooner or later due to the transformation losses in its system, unless external energy is added to it.
This did not dissuade generations of tinkerers and inventors to prove what is generally accepted and a proven reality can be overcome with a little ingenuity.
The reasoning is always the same:
Science is incomplete.
or
Impossible is an unscientific term.
or
Science has been proven wrong in many instances.
Earliest attempts
There is an
attribution to nearly every early scientist who tried to build a
perpetual mobile, but we will refrain from hearsay and leave all
those aside from whom we have no written evidence that is either
contemporaneous or by own records.
It should be no surprise that the first notation of the ever-turning wheel comes from India, after all it would reflect the Indian spiritual belief of life being an ever-turning wheel of reincarnation. The first reference we know of a machine that never stopped comes from the Indian mathematician Bhaskara Achārya (1114–1185) who describes a wheel with gravitational rods filled with mercury. Even though Bhaskara Achārya referenced them to an older work, no traces other than his description can be found.
From India, the legend of the machine, and the attempts to build one, moved on to Arabia. There are several machines similar to the one described by Bhaskara around 1200 and from there, together with the Arabic numeral notation, it came to Europe and was recorded for the first time in Leonardo de Pisa's Liber Abaci mostly known for the new way of notating math that it introduced.
The first European attempt was recorded in 1235 as being done by Villard de Honnecourt, yet few details are known. Other than his artistic portfolio, not much is left to tell us about his life, yet one of his drawings depicts a traditional moving rod model with extending hammers (instead of mercury rods).
With the discovery of more complex systems, such as magnetic forces and chemistry, the quality of attempts to obtain "free energy" changed. Already in 1269, Peter of Maricourt laid the foundation for a magnetic perpetually moving machine in his book Epistola de magnete, describing a device that has been copied and recopied until our days. A later work described his attempt to build a perpetual clock, but there is no proof of it getting past the planning stage.
From the Renaissance to the early
Industrial Age
Most references for this time are nothing but
descriptions of older machines attributed to the wrong persons.
Maricourt's machine, for example, was attributed to Raimond Llulius.
Notable is that the perpetual motion machine now merits a pseudo-scientific foundation even though many works were plagiarized from the Middle Ages; for example Opusculum perpetua memoria dignissimum, de natura magnetis et ejus effectibus, Item de motu continuo by Jean Taisner is but a disingenuous copy of Maricourt's work.
In a 1612 article, Thomas Tymme analyzed the perpetual motion machine as described by Cornelius Drebbel that tried gain energy from temperature and air pressure differences. In 1618 a book attributed to Jacopo Zabarella was published in Frankfurt, Germany called De rebus naturalibus libri XXX, that contained a chapter dedicated to the invention of perpetual motion engines, mostly referring to the gravity equilibrium machines such as the one described by Bhaskara.
In 1648 John Wilkins dedicated a chapter to the theory of the perpetual motion machine in his book Mathematical Magick, where he reflected upon the works of Zabarella and Tymme describing the different types of engines, those using gravity as a power source, those using magnetic forces and those that generate energy by taking advantage of temperature and air pressure difference. The latter hardly can be classified as perpetual motion engines as they are dependent on external energy to function (even though the atmospheric energy does not cost any money yet).
Both Robert Boyle and Blaise Pascal dedicated a few thoughts proposing various contraptions, but soon re-channeled their efforts to something more doable.
With the discovery of the steam engine and the fantastic revenues achieved by the use of mechanical energy in manufacturing, many returned to free energy schemes, to the point that the French Science Academy announced in 1775 they would no longer accept work or spend time on perpetual motion. Other science academies followed suit and at that point free energy moved toward the fringe of science and often into the mainstream of charlatanry.
The 19th and 20th
centuries
The machines got a little more sophisticated, sometimes
to the point of incomprehensible complications, but development
remained in the hands of eccentrics. Let me just highlight the works
of John Gamgee, Rube Goldberg and William Heath Robinson.
John Gamgee's proposal sounded logical when he devised the Zeromotor. Why not just exchange the water of a steam engine for ammonia? Ammonia boils at a sub-freezing temperature and creates a pressure of four atmospheres when it turns to gas. All needed to do is to collect the ammonia again after going through the piston of the engine and the cycle starts anew. With his first attempt he stumbled upon the reality of the second law of thermodynamics: Sooner or later the system stabilizes without external energy with as much gas forming as liquifying in the increased pressure and the engine stops. In the case of the Zeromotor, that happened within fractions of a second, too fast for the engine's crank to turn even a single round.
Rube Goldberg's and William Heath Robinson's machines were so complex that it was not evident at first glance that they failed to perform as promised - to the point that doing a Rube Goldberg is a term still used by engineers to signify an over-complex machine. It is not needed to mention that they eventually stopped as well... way faster than their inventors intended.
During this time at least twenty patents were filed, all promising perpetual motion and/or free energy. Most were issued because the patent clerks evidently had no idea of history, as they all contributed nothing new to the concept and are more or less the same as in the centuries before, with more modern drawings. All -- old and new-- shared one thing: They did not work as intended.
Additionally we should not forget all the schemes devised by "inventors" obviously designed to defraud potential investors. Zero energy seems to be for the guild of traveling quacks what gold making was in centuries past and in both cases it ended the same way: An investor who is considerably poorer with a bunch of useless junk and a fraudster who has to disappear in a hurry.
Does there need to be one? In summary what we learned is that the eternal moving machine that generates power by itself is most probably the result of a well intended but major error in translation. The wheel described by Bhaskara Achārya was most probably a mechanical allegory of the Hindu Wheel of Life.
Very few of the engines actually contained any real innovation, after Bhaskara we can only point to Maricourt, who tried to use magnets instead of gravity, and Drebbel, who tried to use the weather. The rest was just the same, maybe using water instead of a mechanical rod or mercury, but each trying to generate energy from imbalances in mechanical equilibrium the contraption generated itself.
The constructors hoped that this would continue forever without losses or having some energy to spare. An illusion as the mechanical friction loss, even in the most sophisticated modern engines, tends to be between one and thirty percent, depending on the complexity of the system and for those who want to beat the odds, even the best mechanical system to avoid friction losses, the ball bearing, has an initial loss of 0.001% getting greater with load and torsion. And we have not even yet mentioned other losses, such as friction the contraption causes against the air it turns in.
William Kenrick, after analyzing the theory, in his work A Lecture on the Perpetual Motion summarized it quite well, ' It is surprising that so fallacious a theorem should have been quoted and requoted by different writers, both at home and abroad, without any notice being taken till very lately of its fallacy.'
Let's face it: The only way to obtain free energy is to run a cable to your neighbor's electrical outlet or to siphon gas out someone's tank.
Barrow, John D., Impossibility: The Limits of Science and the Science of Limits. Oxford University Press, 1998
Dirks, H., Perpetual Motion. E & FN Spon, London, 1861
Kenrick,W., A Lecture on the Perpetual Motion. London, 1771
Orfyrreo, Das Triumpfirende Perpetuum Mobile. Kassel, 1779
Saldini,V., Perpetuum mobile. Frankfut/Main, 1625
Townsend White, L., Medieval Religion and Technology: Collected Essays. University of California Press, Los Angeles, 1978
Website of Perpetual Motion at the Open Directory Project
Website of The Museum of Unworkable Devices