According to these guys, at least.
I’d meant today’s post to be on FlowingData’s 16 excellent graphics explaining the financial crisis in über-simple terms for us regular folk, but their site seems to have imploded under the sheer weight of its own awesomeness and, I suspect, a lot of enthusiastic Diggers. So, here’s one that’s undeservedly been on the backburner for a while now.
Back in February, a company called Steorn — like many before it — announced that it had finally built a working perpetual motion machine. That is, the machine supposedly creates more energy than it consumes, making it a permanent, inexhaustible source of power. (FYI, it has nothing to do with the Rube Goldberg-esque image of another supposed perpetual motion machine up top, though that would be awesome.)
From Steorn’s site:
Orbo is a technology that creates energy from magnetic interactions. Orbo provides free, clean and constant energy at the point of use.
Orbo is a platform technology that can be engineered to power anything from a phone, to a fridge to a car.
Orbo is controversial - science tells us that energy can not be created - yet Orbo does this. Orbo is an over unity technology - it provides more energy out than is put in.
This isn’t Steorn’s first attempt at a perpetual motion machine — the first one crashed and burned rather disappointingly at its big unveiling back in 2007. There’s more than a little suspicion about this latest version too — first off because our entire body of science says energy can neither be created nor destroyed, and second because I can’t for the life of me find any online video of the Orbo in action, and most of my Google image hits led me to 404s.
Still, Steorn is apparently granting 300 engineering firms permission to play around with the device and see what applications they can come up with, and there’s nothing like forking over your creation to a few hundred curious engineers to build — or destroy — your product’s credibility. If they actually deliver, that is.
For you engineers out there, the site briefly explains the technology behind the Orbo, and you can even apply to be one of the 300 lucky tinkerers. I’m kind of hoping one of you does, because I’d love to hear about this thing from someone other than the company that makes it.
Story via Boing Boing.
Image via the L.A. Newspaper Group.
1 response so far ↓
1 David // Apr 2, 2009 at 5:46 pm
There are several perpetual devices that do the same thing. The Minato wheel is the most believable example. It is a perpetual magnet motor developed by a Japanese ex-musician that operates at about 250% efficiency. This means that more electricity is output of the device than input. Currently, about 20,000 are under production to be installed as ventilation fans in Japanese convenience stores. They are also developing a computer cooling fan.
These devices to do not break the law of conservation of energy even though more energy is output than input. To understand how this can be, one must realize that AC electricity is a flow of energy, and not energy itself. This flow can be used as an energy source. With this principle, one can output more energy one puts in to a system.
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