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Charles Redheffer was an American inventor who claimed to have invented a perpetual motion machine. First appearing in Philadelphia, Redheffer exhibited his machine to the public, charging high prices for viewing. When he applied to the government for more money, a group of inspectors were sent to examine the machine.
[1] [2] Devices allegedly suppressed include perpetual motion machines, cold fusion generators, torus-based generators, reverse-engineered extraterrestrial technology, anti-gravity propulsion systems, and other generally unproven or physically impossible, low-cost energy sources. [2] [3] [4] [5]
In 1979, Newman attempted to patent the device, but it was rejected by the United States Patent Office as being a perpetual motion machine. [1] When the rejection was later appealed, the United States district court requested that Newman's machine be tested by the National Bureau of Standards (NBS).
Perpetual motion is the motion of bodies that continues forever in an unperturbed system. A perpetual motion machine is a hypothetical machine that can do work indefinitely without an external energy source. This kind of machine is impossible, since its existence would violate the first and/or second laws of thermodynamics. [2] [3] [4] [5]
Free energy – a class of perpetual motion that purports to create energy (violating the first law of thermodynamics) or extract useful work from equilibrium systems (violating the second law of thermodynamics). [34] [35] Water-fueled cars – an instance of perpetual motion machines. Such devices are claimed to use water as fuel or produce ...
The water fuel cell is a non-functional design for a "perpetual motion machine" created by Stanley Allen Meyer (August 24, 1940 – March 20, 1998). Meyer claimed that a car retrofitted with the device could use water as fuel instead of gasoline. Meyer's claims about his "Water Fuel Cell" and the car that it powered were found to be fraudulent ...
An engraving of Robert Fludd's 1618 "water screw" perpetual motion machine. The history of perpetual motion machines dates at least back to the Middle Ages. For millennia, it was not clear whether perpetual motion devices were possible or not, but modern theories of thermodynamics have shown that they are impossible. Despite this, many attempts ...
Schematic figure of a Brownian ratchet. In the philosophy of thermal and statistical physics, the Brownian ratchet or Feynman–Smoluchowski ratchet is an apparent perpetual motion machine of the second kind (converting thermal energy into mechanical work), first analysed in 1912 as a thought experiment by Polish physicist Marian Smoluchowski. [1]