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- Taken from KeelyNet BBS (214) 324-3501
- Sponsored by Vangard Sciences
- PO BOX 1031
- Mesquite, TX 75150
- PMOTION1.ASC
-
- This is a story from a book called FOIBLES AND FALLACIES OF
- SCIENCE, written by Mr.Daniel Hering in 1924.
-
- History relates several types of perpetual motion machines. The
- inventor's motives range from the ideal of pure invention to an
- attempt to defraud the public. Perpetual motion machines have been
- traced back for several hundred years.
-
- As of this date there has been no known account of a working
- perpetual motion machine which can be built and demonstrated by
- anyone other than the inventor. Although, we have heard many
- claims, we have yet to see a working model. This does not rule
- out the possibility that one could actually be made and
- practically demonstrated.
-
- The U.S.Patent Office receives about one hundred applications a
- year on perpetual motion machines but they are usually rejected by
- the office, without research into their workability.
-
- The keywords which bring about the rejection are perpetual motion.
-
- contributed by Ron Barker
-
- -----------------------------------------------------------------
-
- PERPETUAL MOTION
-
- -----------------------------------------------------------------
-
- Visit a workshop - it matters little what shop, or where -
- talk with the mechanic skilled or unskilled, his name is Legion,
- and you will find that he has present in his mind or discarded in
- his garret a device for perpetual motion. You would be likely to
- make the same discovery if you consulted a clerk in a counting
- house, a minister in his study, or the president of a bank.
-
- Turn to the man of all men in the whole country who is most
- familiarly associated with the wizardry of invention - perhaps you
- know his name - and see if he has not at some time been inoculated
- with this same virus. When it began to work cannot be known but
- historically this "folly" is not so old as some of the others.
-
- While the baffling mathematical problems and the search for
- their solution date back several thousands of years, authentic
- records of The Perpetual Motion Machine are probably not more than
- five hundred or six hundred years old, but of the many mechanical
- vagaries unquestionably this has been the most absorbing. If, by a
- machine that would produce perpetual motion, we mean simply a
- contrivance that will go on indefinitely without human or animal
- assistance, the problem is not only solvable but is in the
- constant act of being solved.
-
- With the ordinary forces of nature any machine may be kept
- continually in operation. The incessant flow of water over a
- waterfall is perpetual motion, and needs only a wheel placed under
- the falling water to communicate power to other machinery. The
- turbines under Niagara are examples.
-
- Alternations of temperature which cause a body to expand and
- contract will accomplish the same result. "Perpetual Motion" as a
- mere fact is a commonplace of science if it is not understood to
- imply a perpetual supply of power from nowhere.
-
- The ceaseless flow of rivers, the incessant tides, the
- movements of the earth and other heavenly bodies are perpetual
- notion, sufficient for all human purposes. But these do not
- express the purpose of the inventors of perpetual motion. Their
- idea was and is to produce a device which, when set going, would
- of itself develop power enough to keep it in operation without
- drawing upon extraneous sources. The effect of gravity, whether
- helpful or harmful, was always within their purview, but no other
- physical agency.
-
- The inventions have been of multifarious design, employing
- about every known principle of mechanics and some that are not
- known, but they all fall into a few classes. One type, comprising
- many of the inventions, is some sort of pump to keep enough water
- flowing to a waterfall to keep it going.
-
- Another type is a wheel with jointed arms or spokes that hang
- down from the side of the hub that is rising, but when passing the
- top, an arm swings out into a horizontal position and having a
- weight at the end, it propels the wheel. There are always one or
- more extended weighted arms on one side of the wheel, to raise the
- slack pendent arms on the other side.
-
- Instead of jointed arms the wheel may have radial tubes
- containing balls that roll out from the hub to the rim on the side
- that is descending, and roll in from the rim to the hub on the
- other side, thus serving the same purpose as the arms with weights
- at the end. The wheel is overbalanced.
-
- A favorite variation is a clock that shall be self-winding.
- Where the winding up has been accomplished by utilizing cleverly
- some of the work of the descending weights, this has been as
- fallacious as the scheme of pumps.
-
- This type of automatic renewal, like many others that began
- honestly, has been exploited fraudulently to victimize the
- credulous, by the introduction of some auxiliary contrivance which
- is skilfully concealed, and for a while escapes detection. But
- genuine self-winding clocks have been constructed, and
- consequently perpetual motion, in a qualified sense, has been
- secured, by using other natural agencies.
-
- Expansion and contraction of a piece of metal in the clock,
- properly geared to the winding machinery has served the purpose
- and so, too, has the varying pressure of the atmosphere. But
- these, though genuine, are not instances of perpetual motion as
- originally understood and sought after.
-
- The Mechanics' Magazine (London, 1823 - 1872) at first opened
- its columns freely to the consideration of perpetual motion. No
- amount of ridicule or criticism could quench the ardor of the
- perpetual motion enthusiasts rather, opposition seemed to
- stimulate it.
-
- Disappointments were recounted by the editor and
- correspondents, and frauds and tricks of all sorts were exposed ;
- never were propagandists more steadily admonished or more vainly.
- And yet, only the frauds were supported by actual working models ;
- in the sincere attempts, the inventors relied wholly upon drawings
- and descriptions to establish their contention, with an insistence
- that the machine would work, and a challenge to the editor and
- everybody else to prove that it would not work, and to show why it
- would not.
-
- For a long time an impression was general in England that
- there was an outstanding offer from the Government of a large
- reward for the successful invention of such a machine, and in
- spite of the efforts of publishers to correct this error, one
- inventor after another asks for information how to proceed to get
- the reward, in case his invention is accepted.
-
- In response to such an inquiry, the editor of The Mechanic's
- Magazine for January 29, 1848 says :
-
- "No reward has been offered by government;it has done many
- foolish things but none so foolish as this. Before our
- correspondent wastes any more time on his schemes, let him
- first seat himself on a three legged stool, and try to lift
- himself by the legs of his stool. If he succeeds in that, he
- may go on - the want of government reward notwithstanding."
-
- The mental attitude of present-day seekers after perpetual
- motion is severely censured by Mr. Dircks, but his strictures are
- founded altogether on the record. He says:
-
- "A more self-willed, self-satisfied, or self-deluded class of
- the community, making at the same time pretension to
- superior knowledge, it would be impossible to imagine. They
- hope against hope, scorning all opposition with ridiculous
- vehemence, although centuries have not advanced them one
- step in the way of progress."
-
- He enumerates the classes of the people high, low, ignorant,
- educated that have essayed to produce the perpetual motion, and
- says:
-
- "There is something lamentable, degrading, and almost insane
- in pursuing the visionary schemes of past ages ... not a
- solitary discovery is on record, not one absolutely
- ingenious scheme projected, or one simple self-motive model
- accomplished...." - *
-
- * from Perpetuum Mobile: A History of the Search for Self
- Motive Power from the 13th to the 19th Century.
-
- But when one has made an illusion part of his very existence
- can he welcome its destruction? Is there a more pitiful being in
- the world than a man with shattered illusion?
-
- Perpetual Motion inventors are still numerous, and in most
- cases are plainly cranky; they are obsessed with the infallibility
- of their scheme which, at the worst, lacks only some trifling
- change or addition to make it a success and their persistence
- makes them actual nuisances. They are always `open to conviction'
- but never can or never will see what is wrong about their device,
- no matter how plainly it is shown to them. Often their idea is so
- crude, so crass, that no intelligent mechanic would fail to see
- its absurdity, but in other instances the invention is
- diabolically clever, and even if the scientist does appreciate its
- fault, he has difficulty in pointing it out or explaining it.
-
- It might be expected that applications for patenting
- perpetual motion machines would become embarrassing to the
- government unless the Patent Office adopted some definite policy
- regarding them. As the impression has prevailed at some times and
- places that the U.S. Patent Office had decided to reject outright
- all such applications, the author addressed an inquiry to the
- Commissioner of Patents as to the attitude of the Office on this
- subject. The reply was as follows. (January 25, 1917) :
-
- Department of the Interior
- United States Patent Office
-
- Washington
-
- Perpetual Motion :
-
- Replying to your recent letter, you are advised that the
- Patent Office understands the term `perpetual motion' to mean a
- mechanical motion creating energy, that is, a machine doing work
- and operating without the aid of any power other than that which
- is generated by the machine itself, and which when once started
- will operate for an indefinite time.
-
- The views of the Office are in accord with those of the
- scientists who have investigated the subject, and are to the
- effect that mechanical perpetual motion is a physical
- impossibility. These views can be rebutted only by the exhibition
- of a working model. Many persons have filed applications for
- patent on perpetual motion, but such applications have been
- rejected as inoperative and opposed to well known physical laws,
- and in no instance has the requirement of the Patent Office for a
- working model ever been complied with.
-
- In view of these facts the Office will not now permit such an
- application to be filed without a model and this practice has been
- adopted in order to save applicants the loss of the fees paid with
- their applications. After an application for patent has been
- considered by the Examiner the filing fee of $15.00 cannot be
- returned.
-
- W.F. Woolard,
- Chief Clerk
-
- (of course fees have changed radically since 1917...Vangard...)
-
- The failure to submit a working model is doubtless due to the
- lack of that `trifling' addition, which cannot affect the validity
- of the idea on which the invention rests, but the applicant cannot
- risk the danger of being anticipated by some one else, and
- therefore cannot afford to wait for the completion of a successful
- model.
-
- F. Charlesworth, Assistant Examiner in the British Patent
- Office, says that the earliest British patent for a perpetual
- Motion machine was granted on March 9, 1635, the method of action
- being not described ; the next was in 1662, for an overbalanced
- wheel with weights at the ends of jointed arms. Between 1617 and
- 1903 over six hundred applications had been made to that Office
- for Perpetual Motion, all except twenty-five being since 1854.
- They were of course greatly varied in character but mainly
- mechanical, their operation depending on various agencies -
- chiefly gravity, loss of equilibrium, specific gravity of floats
- and weights in water or other liquids, receptacles inflated with
- air or other gas under water, compression and subsequent expansion
- of gases, and surface tension.
-
- So confident were some of the applicants, that they
- considered it necessary to include a brake in their machine, that
- it might be stopped or restrained from reaching a too high speed.
-
- It was not until the latter part of the eighteenth century
- that physical science reached a state of development that seemed
- to preclude the possibility of the perpetual motion, and not until
- the middle of the nineteenth was its inherent impossibility
- believed to have been assured.
-
- This came with the establishment of the doctrine of the
- conservation of energy, and the degradation of energy, and yet, as
- just stated, nearly six hundred applications were made to the
- British Patent Office in the forty-eight years from 1855 to 1903.
- Not every mechanic is acquainted with the conservation of energy
- as a principle of science, and of those who are, not all can
- escape the lurking thought that sources of forms of energy may be
- in operation that are not yet recognized either as to their extent
- or their mode of action. Again among those who do recognize and
- accept this doctrine are some who question the correctness of one
- or another supposed law of nature.
-
- They therefore hope that by dodging such a law, or by the
- help of some free energy somewhere, they can secure perpetual
- motion of a so-called `second kind.'
-
- It will be remembered that the astonishing revelations of
- radium and other radioactive substances seemed, at first, to upset
- the conservation of energy, and Lord Rayleigh invented a device
- which acted continually under such radiation, while apparently the
- energy of the source of radiation, while apparently the energy of
- the source of radiation was undiminished. He was not so hasty as
- some others, however, who were ready to believe that the doctrine
- had broken down, and now such perpetual motion is to be regarded
- as only one of the second kind, which employs natural agencies not
- differing from solar radiation of light or heat, or even from
- tidal power in their relation to the problem.
-
- So generally is the impossibility of `The Perpetual Motion'
- now recognized among scientific men that when a hypothesis leads
- to perpetual motion as its certain result, that fact is regarded
- as a proof of error in the hypothesis, like a reductio ad absurdum
- in logic or mathematics.
-
- In an early work (1648) entitled "Mathematicall Magick," by
- Bishop John Wilkins of Chester, England, its author says :
-
- "The discovery of a `perpetual motion' hath been attempted by
- Chymistry. Paracelsus" (d. 1541) "and his followers have
- bragged that by their separations and extractions they can
- make a little world which shall have he same perpetual
- motions with this Microcosme with the representation of all
- Meteors, Thunder, Snow, Rain, the courses of the sea, in its
- ebbs and flows; and the like. But these miraculous promises
- would require as great a faith to believe them as a power to
- perform them.
-
- `At nusquam totos inter qui talia curant
- Apparet ullus, qui re miracula tanta
- Comprobet....'
-
- And though they often talk of such great matters, yet we can
- never see them confirmed by a real experiment. * And then,
- besides, every particular author in that art hath such a
- distinct language of his own (all of them being so full of
- allegories and affected obscurities), that "tis very hard
- for any one (unless he be thoroughly versed among them) to
- find out what they mean, much more to try it."
-
- The procedure by which one can obtain a perpetual motion in a
- chemical way, for example, is this :
-
- "Mix five ounces of (Mercury=Mercury) with a equal weight of
- (Tin=Jupiter); * grind them together with ten ounces of
- sublimate; dissolve them in a Cellar upon some marble for
- the space of four days till they become like oyl-olive;
- distil this with fire of chaff or driving fire, and it will
- sublime into a dry substance and so, by repeating of these
- dissolvings and distillings, there will be at length divers
- small atomes which, being put into a glass that is well
- luted and kept dry, will have a perpetual motion."
-
- (Fr. Dirck's Perpetuum Mobile, p.3.)
-
- * The aforementioned letter from the U.S. Patent Office would
- indicate that Bishop John Wilkins's ground of complaint against
- perpetual motion inventors had not been removed during the
- centuries between his time, 1650 and the present.
-
- * The use of planetary symbols for metals was common in early
- chemistry and, its is said, began with the Chaldean philosophers
- and was continued by their successors in astronomy and astrology.
- They associated the heavenly bodies not only with metals, but also
- with the organs of the human body. The latter they divided into
- twelve parts corresponding to the twelve signs of the zodiac. They
- considered the metals to be seven in number, corresponding to the
- sun, moon, and five planets, with their symbols as follows :
-
- Gold = Sun
- Silver = Moon
- Mercury = Mercury
- Copper = Venus
- Iron = Mars
- Tin = Jupiter
- Lead = Saturn
-
- It is not quite clear how the Chaldeans could associate the
- planet Mercury with the metal mercury, when that metal was not
- discovered until more than two hundred years after the Chaldean
- empire ceased to exist; but this particular connection may be of
- later date than the others. Chaucer writes of this association in
- the Canterbury Tales about 1390. In the Canon's Yeoman's Tale, the
- Yeoman reels off a long string of scientific nomenclature with
- which he was made acquainted in his service of the Cannon, and
- enumerates the four spirits and the seven bodies thus:
-
- "The foure spirites and the bodies sevene,
- By ordre, as ofte I herde my lord hem nevene.
- The firste spirit quyk-silver called is,
- The seconde orpyment, the thridde, y-wis,
- Sal-armonyak, and the ferthe brymstoon,
- The bodyes sevene eek, lo, hem heere anoon!
- Sol gold is, and Luna silver we threpe,
- Mars iren, mercurie quyk-silver we clepe,
- Saturnus leed, and Juppiter is tyn,
- And Venus coper, by my fader kyn."
-
- He classes the perpetual motion machines as ;
-
- "1. Those depending upon chymical extractions;
- 2. By magnetical virtue;
- 3. By the natural affection of gravity."
-
- According to Bishop Wilkins, hydraulic machines, kept going
- by the descent of the liquid which they had raised, were used
- earlier than the overbalanced wheel, the earliest and apparently
- most attractive form being that in which water was raised from a
- cistern by the familiar Screw of Archimedes. The figure
- illustrates one variant of the type.
-
- When discharge at the top of the screw the water fell upon
- the vanes of a wheel mounted upon the screw shaft, being caught in
- a vessel at a lower level and again discharged upon the vanes of
- another wheel; and as this operation could be again and again
- repeated, the descending water would more than suffice to keep the
- machine in operation. This appeared in 1642, but it is difficult
- to fix the deserts of these inventions chronologically. In a work
- by Robert Fludd, which appeared in 1618, is described a common
- water wheel which sets in motion a chain pump by means of a system
- of toothed wheels, and the pump is supposed to raise the water
- necessary to keep the wheel going.
-
- The accompanying figure is a sketch accredited to Vilard de
- Honnecourt, a Gothic architect of the 13th century, who gave a
- description of it, and this seems to be the earliest authentic
- record of a perpetual motion machine. It represents a wheel with
- an odd number of mallet-like weights attached to the rim by a
- hinge at the end of the handle. It is supposed that when set
- going, the fall of a mallet upon the rim of the wheel gives an
- impulse to the latter, and as that action in general places more
- of the mallets on the descending side of the wheel than on the
- ascending, the motion is continuous!
-
- A number of Honnecourt's free hand sketches, including
- this among other, are in the Paris Ecole des Chartes.
- (F. Ichak, Das Perpetuum mobile, pp. 8, 9.)
-
- There are, however, allusions indicating that the idea was
- not absent from the minds of some of the philosophers, even of
- pre-Christian times. Although the seeds were sown so early, they
- seemed to germinate and fructify much more rapidly in the Middle
- Ages, that period of darkness and superstition, from which so much
- of knowledge did actually emerge in a renaissance, but the growth
- of this particular vagary has been most vigorous in modern times.
-
- Perpetual motion cannot exist with the principle of
- conservation of energy in any machine that has prejudicial
- resistances such as friction or the inertia of the surrounding
- air, and the establishing of that principle did much toward
- quieting the restless spirit, but any apparent contradiction of
- this principle reawakens the sleeper. Leonardo da Vince (1452 -
- 1519) dallied with the problem.
-
- Of the overbalanced wheel, there are many variations.
- A famous example of this type was produced by the Marquis of
- Worcester, about 1648. No picture of the wheel itself is
- available, though a somewhat circumstantial account of a
- demonstration with it at the Tower of London is on record, but its
- character is that shown in the diagram. Many devices of producing
- perpetual motion have been submitted to the author for comment. In
- almost every instance they have been more or less ingenuous
- variants of earlier inventions.
-
- One suggested by Mr. J. S. Hamilton of New York may be taken
- as an innovation inasmuch as it purports to utilize a modern idea,
- namely, that of the injector reversed, so as to act as an ejector.
- Since an injector, by means of a steam jet, will cause a stream of
- water to enter a boiler against a pressure equal to or greater
- than that of the steam jet, then, according to this inventor, if a
- stream of water flowing out of a cistern at a high level have its
- velocity sufficiently increased, it will re-enter the cistern at a
- lower point and also do work in its passage external to the
- cistern.
-
- "Starting the turbine from exterior source, (motor or
- engine), establishes the vacuum" (below it), says the inventor,
- "after which the turbine will run alone. The initial pressure will
- seek the vacuum and perform work en route. The water will return
- by reason of its increased velocity secured by the nozzling effect
- of the passage ways inside the turbine. The entrance gates of a
- water turbine nozzle the water, and since the turbines are radial
- inward flow, the passage ways in the `runner' are more narrow near
- the is increased it will enter, just as the injector has proven
- times without number."
-
- A discussion of this with its author would inevitably involve
- a discussion of the injector, to say nothing of what is to keep
- the turbine in motion if the water, on leaving it, is to have a
- greater velocity and therefore more energy, than on entering it;
- but it would not be difficult to show that its successful
- performance would contradict the conservation of energy. It is
- needless to say that this machine never reached the stage of a
- `working model'.
-
- With the well-known Principle of Archimedes staring them in
- the face, inventors could not be expected long to neglect so
- helpful an idea in their attempts to solve the problem of
- perpetual motion.
-
- According to this principle, a body immersed in a liquid is
- said to "lose weight," or weigh less than in air. A force that
- will lift a stone weighing one hundred pounds in air will lift one
- of a hundred and fifty pounds in water, and a block of wood will
- not only weigh nothing in water but will rise with a lifting
- effort of its own.
-
- As a simple application of this principle, an endless chain
- passing around an upper wheel in air and a lower one in water has
- ledges or buckets attached to it carrying balls, and as they
- descend they enter the water at the foot of the machine and are
- carried around the lower wheel, and then, either by the apparatus
- itself or by their own buoyancy, the balls are brought up in a
- column of water that reaches to the upper wheel, where they are
- discharged upon the descending side of the chain.
-
- The preponderance of weight on this side is the driving
- force. It is extremely simple (and the believer in it is scarcely
- less so).
-
- The astonishing thing is the employment of auxiliary pieces
- like the balls just mentioned, which are light in the water on one
- side of the chain, and heavy on the other, i.e., the descending
- side. If the idea were workable at all, the endless belt, a cord,
- or chain alone would be sufficient to demonstrate the action
- without the help of balls or weights, for the portion in the
- column of liquid would be buoyed up and so be lighter than the
- other portion of the chain, and the movement would go merrily on.
- It was left to a recent inventor to suggest the machine thus
- simplified, though he appears to be unaware that the general idea
- had occurred to others before him.
-
- A description and discussion of this attempt at the problem
- is given by John Phin in his `The Seven Follies of Science.' There
- is no difficulty in representing it by a drawing, but the hopeful
- aspirant for a patent is met by that discouraging demand for a
- "working model," and it seems impossible in practice to get a
- column of liquid to stand higher in one vessel than in another
- with which it communicates! Various changes have been rung upon
- the design, including the buoyant effort of liquids upon vessels
- that are inflated in the liquid and deflated outside.
-
- Thus statics, dynamics, hydraulics, pneumatics, all as
- branches of mechanics, have been called upon in connection with
- gravity; and by less direct action, heat, light, magnetism and
- electricity have been invoked in this fruitless endeavor to
- inveigle Nature into repudiating her own laws.
-
- Submitted by: Ronald Barker,
- Vangard Sciences
-
-
- Taken from KeelyNet BBS (214) 324-3501
- Sponsored by Vangard Sciences
- PO BOX 1031
- Mesquite, TX 75150
- PMOTION2.ASC
-
- This is a story from a book called FOIBLES AND FALLACIES OF
- SCIENCE, written by Mr.Daniel Hering in 1924.
-
- History relates several types of perpetual motion machines. The
- inventor's motives range from the ideal of pure invention to an
- attempt to defraud the public. Perpetual motion machines have been
- traced back for several hundred years.
-
- As of this date there has been no known account of a working
- perpetual motion machine which can be built and demonstrated by
- anyone other than the inventor. Although, we have heard many
- claims, we have yet to see a working model. This does not rule
- out the possibility that one could actually be made and
- practically demonstrated.
-
- The U.S.Patent Office receives about one hundred applications a
- year on perpetual motion machines but they are usually rejected by
- the office, without research into their workability.
-
- The keywords which bring about the rejection are perpetual motion.
-
- contributed by Ron Barker
-
- -----------------------------------------------------------------
-
- THE REDHEFFER FIASCO
-
- -----------------------------------------------------------------
-
- One American invention played a conspicuous if not very
- creditable part among perpetual motion machines. This was the
- invention of Charles Redheffer who exhibited it in Philadelphia in
- 1812 and 1813. Although it continued in operation apparently as
- long as its maker desired, it was perhaps not inherently more or
- less plausible than some others but it became une cause celebre.
-
- There were two circumstances connected with it that gave it
- celebrity, and entitle it to special notice: It created so much of
- a furore that the legislature of Pennsylvania thought it worth
- while to appoint a commission. This was a dignity to which such
- machines rarely attained. The other circumstance was the
- exceedingly clever way in which the fraudulent character of the
- machine was twice detected; once, by the eye, trained to observe
- the niceties of mechanical action; and once, by the ear, skilled
- to detect any peculiarity in the sound of moving machinery. At an
- appointed time the commission visited the house in which the
- machine was exhibited, on the Schuykill near Philadelphia, but
- arrived there only to find the house locked and the key missing.
-
- They did not get the opportunity to examine the machine and
- could only inspect it through a barred window. They saw a vertical
- shaft carrying a horizontal disc on which two inclined planes bore
- weighted cars that descended and rose at certain points in the
- rotation of the disc. This action of the planes and cars drove the
- shaft and disc which, in its turn, propelled further mechanism.
- The horizontal disc was a spur wheel and the teeth in its edge
- engaged with those of a smaller wheel and so, ostensibly, drove
- the rest of the machinery.
-
- One of the visiting commissioners, Mr. Nathan Sellers, took
- with him his young son, Coleman Sellers, who was a mechanical
- genius, and was keenly interested in the whole affair. Young
- Sellers saw something that escaped the others; his attention was
- caught by the appearance of the cogs in these two wheels. They
- were not much worn, only smoothed a little, but what little effect
- of rubbing together they did show was on the wrong side of the
- cogs!
-
- The faces of the cogs that will show wear depends upon which
- wheel is driving the other and, in this instance, the small wheel
- proved to be driving the larger. If the fact is the reverse of
- this, as it was represented to be, then to the mechanic whose eye
- detects this discrepancy, such a machine would appear to be
- running backwards. Although the source of propulsion was not
- discovered the deception was unmistakable. After returning home
- the young man told his father what he had discovered; the latter
- then employed a skilful mechanic to make a small model just like
- the Redheffer machine, but propelled by a clockwork mechanism
- concealed in an ornamental post of the framework. This mode
- exactly duplicated the behavior of the larger machine, to the
- astonishment and mystification of Redheffer himself to whom
- Sellers showed it.
-
- Conscious of his own trickery he was scared by the idea that
- another had actually achieved what he pretended to do, and
- proposed to buy out young Sellers, offering him a handsome share
- in the profits to be derived from the machine.
-
- (See Article on the Redheffer Perpetual Motion Machine, by
- Henry Morton, in the Journal of the Franklin Institute,
- Vol. 139, 1895, p.246.)
-
- An exposure like this which did not actually reveal the
- secret of the machine was not sufficient to check the interest of
- those who wanted to believe in it, and the exhibitions were
- continued. In 1813, soon after the fiasco in Philadelphia, this
- same machine or a duplicate of it was placed on exhibition in New
- York, where it was to meet its second reverse, The sequel is well
- told by Mr. C. D. Colden in his Life of Robert Fulton.
-
- " One of these perpetual motions," says Mr. Colden, speaking
- of the Redheffer machine, "commenced its career in this
- city" (New York), "in eighteen hundred and thirteen. Mr.
- Fulton was a perfect unbeliever in Redheffer's discovery,
- and although hundreds were daily paying their dollar to see
- the wonder, Mr. Fulton could not be prevailed upon for
- some time to follow the crowd. After a few days, however,
- he was induced by some of his friends to visit the machine.
- It was in an isolated house in the suburbs of the city.
-
- " In a very short time after Mr. Fulton had entered the room
- in which it was exhibited, he exclaimed, `why, this is a
- crank motion.' His ear enabled him to distinguish that the
- machine was moved by a crank, which always gives an unequal
- power, and therefore an unequal velocity in the course of
- each revolution; and a nice and practised ear may perceive
- that the sound is not uniform. If the machine had been kept
- in motion by what was its ostensible moving power, it must
- have had an equable rotary motion, and the sound would have
- been always the same.
-
- " After some little conversation with the showman, Mr.
- Fulton did not hesitate to declare, that the machine was an
- imposition, and to tell the gentleman that he was an
- impostor.
-
- " Notwithstanding the anger and bluster which these charges
- excited, he assured the company that the thing was a cheat,
- and that if they would support him in the attempt, he would
- detect it at the risk of paying any penalty if he failed.
-
- " Having obtained the assent of all who were present, he
- began by knocking away some very thin little pieces of
- lath, which appeared to be no part of the machinery, but to
- go from the frame of the machine to the wall of the room,
- merely to keep the corner posts of the machine steady.
-
- " It was found that a catgut string was led through one of
- these laths and the frame of he machine, to the head of the
- upright shaft of a principal wheel: that the catgut was
- conducted through the wall, and along the floors of the
- second story to a back cockloft, at a distance of a number
- of yards from the room which contained the machine, and
- there was found the moving power. This was a poor old
- wretch, with an immense beard and all the appearance of
- having suffered a long imprisonment; who when they broke in
- upon him, was unconscious of what had happened below, and
- who, while he was seated on a stool, gnawing a crust, was
- with one hand turning a crank.
-
- " The proprietor of the perpetual motion soon disappeared.
- The mob demolished his machine, the destruction of which
- immediately put a stop to that which had been, for so long
- a time, and to so much profit, exhibited in Philadelphia!"
-
- Besides the numberless variations in the methods of applying
- the principles of mechanics to secure a return of more power than
- is expended to secure a return of more power than is expended on
- the machine, consciously or unconsciously the principles of
- thermodynamics were invoked by inventors for the same purpose. The
- fallacy was the same. Only two generalizations are needed to
- comprise all known principles of heat in connection with work, and
- these are called the two laws of thermodynamics. They are to the
- effect that (1) a definite amount of heat has an exact equivalent
- in a definite amount of mechanical work, and either of these can
- be transformed into the other; (2) if by any means we cause heat
- to be transferred from some outside source; no self-acting machine
- will do it of itself.
-
- While the first of these laws is universally and unreservedly
- accepted, the second has always been a subject of dispute and
- still is so. The desire to get something for nothing and the
- belief in the possibility of dong so are too strong to yield to a
- dictum the demolition of which would seem to assure this
- possibility. To disprove a law by a process of reasoning is one
- thing, to violate it by a process of action is another. In theory
- the law has been controverted repeatedly, and disproved, at least
- in the opinion of the controverts, and if it could only be
- violated in practice the perpetual motion could be obtained ; the
- " working model " demanded by the Patent Office might be
- forthcoming.
-
-
- Submitted by: Ronald Barker,
- Vangard Sciences
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- --
- -* Don Allen *- InterNet: dona@bilver.UUCP // Amiga..for the rest of us.
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