The never ending dream of perpetual motion

When a moment’s idleness leads Russ Swan back to his childhood dream of perpetual motion he is surprised to learn that optimism is still used to do battle with Nature

I've dabbled in a little inventing, in my time, as I imagine have many other readers of Laboratory News. Sadly my initial success proved to be short-lived and I turned to less unreliable ways of making a living.

But that early start was exhilarating, because in a flash of insight (others may call it genius, but modesty forbids) I had cracked a longstanding engineering problem. Having learned of the existence of a device called a dynamo, which produces electricity simply by being turned, I applied my existing knowledge of electric motors to create something amazing.

Its simplicity belied its world-changing function. By using a small electric motor to turn the dynamo, and feeding the power generated back in order to keep the motor turning, I'd discovered a free source of energy. The world may have been lurching into another fossil fuel crisis, but that would soon be irrelevant. Aged 11, thanks to a birthday bicycle and its lighting kit, I had saved the planet. I looked forward to a lifetime of Nobel Prizes and all the other trappings of a grateful population.

This distant episode was brought back sharply this month, with the receipt of a message from a fellow inventor imploring me to check his website and use my media contacts to help him promote his device. Random unsolicited emails like this tend to get binned unopened, but in a fit of work displacement I found myself assessing the potential of Mr Anatoly Nikolayenko's gravity-powered generator.

I inwardly hugged myself with the knowledge that, in 2015, people are still inventing perpetual motion machines. What's more, this particular device was slickly presented on a website in four languages – English, French, Russian, and Chinese – underlining the seriousness with which it should be taken. There was also the modest declaration that, within five years, the inventor expects nuclear, coal and natural gas power stations to be replaced with Gravity Powered Generators "making natural gas and coal obsolete commodities". Not one to overstate his claims, Anatoly adds that, "regarding petroleum...I would refrain from any speculations" – presumably because installation of his device in a moving vehicle might upset the delicate balance of the weight/counterweight arrangement.

Gravity is a favourite power source of the perpetual motion brigade, and provides the impulse behind some of the most compelling and delightful machines. They've been attempted for centuries, and even great names like Leonardo dabbled with them. The classic overbalanced wheel, in which weights roll outwards on a downward path and inwards on an upward, thereby imparting more moment to one side and keeping the whole thing spinning, is a delightful and legible mechanism that on first inspection even looks like it could work.

But, like Robert Boyle's self-flowing flask – a sort of looped siphon – and the auto-propelled train of 1829 which uses cone-shaped weights on a diverging track, of course it doesn’t. Couldn't. Never will.

Yet it seems the simple and well-understood principles of physics don’t stop the overoptimistic inventor from seeking to get something for nothing. Those who discard gravity as a motive source will often look to magnets or electromagnetic force for their holy grail, and may even claim to have discovered not just perpetual motion, but perpetual acceleration. An example is the Perepiteia machine by Thane Heins, an eccentric who claims to get up to 70 times as much power out of a toroidal transformer as he puts in. Just think about 7000% efficiency for a moment, and get ready to duck when he switches it on. I've seen Star Trek; I know what a phaser on overload can do.

Facts, and the laws of thermodynamics which the rest of us have to obey, don’t diminish the fervour with which inventors promote their devices. It has to be noted, though, that the majority of these seem to exist merely as sketches rather than working models.

I may have stumbled into the alternative universe of perpetuum mobile through a moment of work displacement, but I strongly advise any readers with an approaching deadline not to do the same. Certainly do not search for video evidence on YouTube, or you will be drawn into the new hobby of deducing how the many elegant hoax machines there are actually powered. You will become a metaphorical Boyle Bottle, endlessly looping but never filling or emptying. And under no circumstances should you read the comments, if you wish to retain any faith in the future of humanity.

The failure of my own motor/dynamo prototype to actually work was, I admit, a setback. I'm pretty sure all I needed was a larger dynamo, to get more electricity out, but Swan's MkII Perpetual Motion Machine never got built. I still think this is a pity, as I could have used it to prime my cold fusion device.