lower end, as shown. A well-greased cotton rope C passes over the wheel
B and through the small opening of the tube with practically little or
no friction, and also without leakage. The tube is then filled with
water. The rope above the line WX balances over the pulley, and so does
that below the line YZ. The rope in the tube between these lines is
lifted by the water, while the rope on the other side of the pulley
between these lines is pulled downward by gravity.
[Illustration: Fig. 14.]
The inventor offers the above suggestion rather as a kind of puzzle than
as a sober attempt to solve the famous problem, and he concludes by
asking why it will not work?
In addition to the usual resistance or friction offered by the air to
all motion, there are four drawbacks:
1. The friction in its bearings of the axle of the wheel B.
2. The power required to bend and unbend the rope.
3. The friction of the rope in passing through the water from z to x and
its tendency to raise a portion of the water above the level of the
water at x.
4. The friction at the point y, this last being the most serious of all.
An "opening of the tube with practically little or no friction, and also
without leakage" is a mechanical impossibility. In order to have the
joint water-tight, the tube must hug the rope very tightly and this
would make friction enough to prevent any motion. And the longer the
column of water xz, the greater will be the tendency to leak, and
consequently the tighter must be the joint and the greater the friction
thereby created.
A favorite idea with perpetual-motion seekers is the utilization of the
force of magnetism. Some time prior to the year 1579, Joannes Taisnierus
wrote a book which is now in the British Museum and in which
considerable space is devoted to "Continual Motions" and to the solving
of this problem by magnetism. Bishop Wilkins in his "Mathematical
Magick" describes one of the many devices which have been invented with
this end in view. He says: "But amongst all these kinds of invention,
that is most likely, wherein a loadstone is so disposed that it shall
draw unto it on a reclined plane a bullet of steel, which steel as it
ascends near to the loadstone, may be contrived to fall down through
some hole in the plane, and so to return unto the place from whence at
first it began to move; and, being there, the loadstone will again
attract it upwards till coming to this hole, it will fall down again;
and so the motion shall be perpetual, as may be more easily conceivable
by this figure (Fig. 15):
"Suppose the loadstone to be represented at AB, which, though it have
not strength enough to attract the bullet C directly from the ground,
yet may do it by the help of the plane EF. Now, when the bullet is come
to the top of this plane, its own gravity (which is supposed to exceed
the strength of the loadstone) will make it fall into that hole at E;
and the force it receives in this fall will carry it with such a
violence unto the other end of this arch, that it will open the passage
which is there made for it, and by its return will again shut it: so
that the bullet (as at the first) is in the same place whence it was
attracted, and, consequently must move perpetually."
[Illustration: Fig. 15.]
Notwithstanding the positiveness of the "must" at the close of his
description, it is very obvious to any practical mechanic that the
machine will not move at all, far less move perpetually, and the bishop
himself, after carefully and conscientiously discussing the objections,
comes to the same conclusion. He ends by saying: "So that none of all
these magnetical experiments, which have been as yet discovered, are
sufficient for the effecting of a perpetual motion, though these kind of
qualities seem most conducible unto it, and perhaps hereafter it may be
contrived from them."
It has occurred to several would-be inventors of perpetual motion that
if some substance could be found which would prevent the passage of the
magnetic force, then by interposing a plate of this material at the
proper moment, between the magnet and the piece of iron to be
attracted, a perpetual motion might be obtained. Several inventors have
claimed that they had discovered such a non-conducting substance, but it
is needless to say that their claims had no foundation in fact, and if
they had discovered anything of the kind, it would have required just as
much force to interpose it as would have been gained by the
interposition. It has been fully proved that in every case where a
machine was made to work apparently by the interposition of such a
material, a fraud was perpetrated and the machine was really made to
move by means of some concealed springs or weights.
A correspondent of the "Mechanic's Magazine" (Vol. xii, London, 1829),
gives the following curious design for a "Self-moving Railway Carriage."
He describes it as a machine which, were it possible to make its parts
hold together unimpaired by rotation or the ravages of time, and to give
it a path encircling the earth, would assuredly continue to roll along
in one undeviating course until time shall be no more.
A series of inclined planes are to be erected in such a manner that a
cone will ascend one (its sides forming an acute angle), and being
raised to the summit, descend on the next (having parallel sides), at
the foot of which it must rise on a third and fall on a fourth, and so
continue to do alternately throughout.
The diagram, Fig. 16, is the section of a carriage A, with broad conical
wheels _a_, _a_, resting on the inclined plane _b_. The entrance to the
carriage is from above, and there are ample accommodations for goods and
passengers. "The most singular property of this contrivance is, that its
speed increases the more it is laden; and when checked on any part of
the road, it will, when the cause of stoppage is removed, proceed on its
journey by mere power of gravity. Its path may be a circular road formed
of the inclined planes. But to avoid a circuitous route, a double road
ought to be made. The carriage not having a retrograde motion on the
inclined planes, a road to set out upon, and another to return by, are
indispensable."
[Illustration: Fig. 16.]
How any one could ever imagine that such a contrivance would ever
continue in motion for even a short time, except, perhaps, on the famous
_descensus averni_, must be a puzzle to every sane mechanic. I therefore
give it as a climax to the absurdities which have been proposed in sober
earnest. As a fitting close, however, to this chapter of human folly, I
give the following joke from the "Penny Magazine," published by the
Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge.
"'Father, I have invented a perpetual motion!' said a little fellow
of eight years old. 'It is thus: I would make a great wheel, and fix
it up like a water-wheel; at the top I would hang a great weight,
and at the bottom I would hang a number of little weights; then the
great weight would turn the wheel half round and sink to the
bottom, because it is so heavy: and when the little weights reach
the top they would sink down, because they are so many; and thus the
wheel would turn round for ever.'"
The child's fallacy is a type of all the blunders which are made on this
subject. Follow a projector in his description, and if it be not
perfectly unintelligible, which it often is, it always proves that he
expects to find certain of his movements alternately strong and
weak--not according to the laws of nature--but according to the wants of
his mechanism.
2. FALLACIES
Fallacies are distinguished from absurdities on the one hand and from
frauds on the other, by the fact that without any intentionally
fraudulent contrivances on the part of the inventor, they seem to
produce results which have a tendency to afford to certain enthusiasts a
basis of hope in the direction of perpetual motion, although usually not
under that name, for that is always explicitly disclaimed by the
promoters.
The most notable instance of this class in recent times was the
application of liquid air as a source of power, the claim having been
actually made by some of the advocates of this fallacy that a steamship
starting from New York with 1000 gallons of liquid air, could not only
cross the Atlantic at full speed but could reach the other side with
more than 1000 gallons of liquid air on board--the power required to
drive the vessel and to liquefy the surplus air being all obtained
during the passage by utilizing the original quantity of liquid air that
had been furnished in the first place.
That this was equivalent to perpetual motion, pure and simple, was
obvious even to those who were least familiar with such subjects, though
the idea of calling it perpetual motion was sternly repudiated by all
concerned--the term "perpetual motion" having become thoroughly
offensive to the ears of common-sense people, and consequently tending
to cast doubt over any enterprise to which it might be applied.
That liquid air is a real and wonderful discovery, and that for a
certain small range of purposes it will prove highly useful, cannot be
doubted by those who have seen and handled it and are familiar with its
properties, but that it will ever be successfully used as an economical
source of mechanical power is, to say the least, very improbable. That a
small quantity of the liquid is capable of doing an enormous amount of
work, and that under some conditions there is _apparently_ more power
developed than was originally required to liquefy the air, is
undoubtedly true, but when a careful quantitative examination is made of
the outgo and the income of energy, it will be found in this, as in
every similar case, that instead of a gain there is a very decided and
serious loss. The correct explanation of the fallacy was published in
the "Scientific American," by the late Dr. Henry Morton, president of
the Stevens Institute, and the same explanation and exposure were made
by the writer, nearly fifty years ago, in the case of a very similar
enterprise. The form of the fallacy in both cases is so similar and so
interesting that I shall make no apology for giving the details.
About the year 1853 or 1854, two ingenious mechanics of Rochester, N.
Y., conceived the idea that by using some liquid more volatile than
water, a great saving might be effected in the cost of running an
engine. At that time gasolene and benzine were unknown in commerce, and
the same was true in regard to bisulphide of carbon, but as the process
of manufacturing the latter was simple and the sources of supply were
cheap and apparently unlimited, they adopted that liquid. The name of
one of these inventors was Hughes and that of the other was Hill, and it
would seem that each had made the invention independently of the other.
They had a fierce conflict over the patent, but this does not concern us
except to this extent, that the records of the case may therefore be
found in the archives of the Patent Office at Washington, D.C. Hughes
was backed by the wealth of a well-known lawyer of Rochester, whose son
subsequently occupied a high office in the state of New York, and he
constructed a beautiful little steam-engine and boiler, made of the very
finest materials and with such skill and accuracy that it gave out a
very considerable amount of power in proportion to its size. The source
of heat was a series of lamps, fed, I think, with lard oil (this was
before the days of kerosene), and the exhibition test consisted in first
filling the boiler with water, and noting the time that it took to get
up a certain steam pressure as shown by the gage. After this test,
bisulphide of carbon was added to the water, and the time and pressure
were noted. The difference was of course remarkable, and altogether in
favor of the new liquid. The exhaust was carried into a vessel of cold
water and as bisulphide of carbon is very easily condensed and very
heavy, almost the entire quantity used was recovered and used over and
over again.
But to the uninstructed onlooker, the most remarkable part of the
exhibition was when the steam pressure was so far lowered that the
engine revolved very slowly, and then, on a little bisulphide being
injected into the boiler, the pressure would at once rise, and the
engine would work with great rapidity. This seemed almost like magic.
The same experiment was tried on an engine of twelve horse-power, and
with a like result. When the steam pressure had fallen so far that the
engine began to move quite slowly, a quantity of the bisulphide would be
injected into the boiler and the pressure would at once rise, the engine
would move with renewed vigor, and the fly-wheel would revolve with
startling velocity. All this was seen over and over again by myself and
others. At that time the writer, then quite a young man, had just
recovered from a very severe illness and was making a living by teaching
mechanical drawing and making drawings for inventors and others, and in
the course of business he was brought into contact with some parties who
thought of investing in the new and apparently wonderful invention. They
employed him to examine it and give an opinion as to its value. After
careful consideration and as thorough a calculation as the data then at
command would allow, he showed his clients that the tests which had been
exhibited to them proved nothing, and that if a clear proof of the value
of the invention was to be given, it must be after a run of many hours
and not of a few minutes, and against a properly adjusted load, the
amount of which had been carefully ascertained. This test was never
made, or if made the results were not communicated to the prospective
purchasers; the negotiations fell through, and the invention which was
to have revolutionized our mechanical industries fell into "innocuous
desuetude."
That the inventors were honest I have no doubt. They were themselves
deceived when they saw the engine start off with tremendous velocity as
soon as a little bisulphide of carbon was injected into the boiler, and
they failed to see that this spurt, if I may use the expression, was
simply due to a draft upon capital previously stored up. The capacity of
bisulphide of carbon for heat is quite low, when compared with that of
water; its vaporizing point is also much lower and consequently, an
ordinary boiler full of hot water contains enough heat to vaporize a
considerable quantity of bisulphide of carbon at a pretty high pressure.
In even a still greater measure the same is true of liquid air, and this
was the underlying fallacy in the case of the tests made with liquid-air
motors.
3. FRAUDS
But while the inventors of these schemes may have been honest, there is
another class who deliberately set out to perpetrate a fraud. Their
machines work, and work well, but there is always some concealed source
of power, which causes them to move. As a general rule, such inventors
form a company or corporation of unlimited "lie-ability," as De Morgan
phrases it, and then they proceed by means of flaring prospectuses and
liberal advertising, to gather in the dupes who are attracted by their
seductive promises of enormous returns for a very small outlay. Perhaps
the most widely known of these fraudulent schemes of recent years was
the notorious Keeley motor, the originator of which managed to hoodwink
a respectable old lady, and to draw from her enormous supplies of cash.
At his death, however, the absolutely fraudulent nature of his
contrivances was fully disclosed, and nothing more has been heard of
his alleged discovery. But, while he lived and was able to put forward
claims based upon some apparent results, he found plenty of fools who
accepted the idea that there is nothing impossible to science.
It is true that the Keeley motor was examined by several committees and
some very respectable gentlemen acted in such a way as to give a seeming
endorsement of the scheme, but it must not be supposed for an instant
that any well-educated engineers and scientific men were deceived by Mr.
Keeley's nonsense. The very fact that he refused to allow a complete
examination of his machine by intelligent practical men, ought to have
been enough to condemn his scheme, for if he had really made the
discovery which he claimed there would have been no difficulty in
proving it practically and thoroughly, and then he might have formed
company after company that would have rewarded him with "wealth beyond
the dreams of avarice."
The Keeley motor was not put forward as a perpetual motion; in these
days none of these schemes is admitted to be a perpetual motion, for
that term has now become exceedingly offensive and would condemn any
invention; but the result is the same in the end, and the whole history
of perpetual motion is permeated with frauds of this kind, some of them
having been so simple that they were obvious to even the most unskilled
observer, while others were exceedingly complicated and most ingeniously
concealed. Many years ago a number of these fraudulent perpetual-motion
machines were manufactured in America and sent over to Great Britain for
exhibition, and quite a lucrative business was done by showing them in
various towns. But the fraud was soon detected and the British police
then made it too warm for these swindlers.
Mr. Dircks, in his "Perpetuum Mobile," has given accounts of quite a
number of these impostures. The following are some of the most notable:
M. Poppe of Tuebingen tells of a clock made by M. Geiser, which was an
admirable piece of mechanism and seemed to have solved this great
problem in an ingenious and simple manner, but it deceived only for a
time. When thoroughly examined inwardly and outwardly, some time after
his death, it was found that the center props supporting its cylinders
contained cleverly constructed, hidden clock-work, wound up by inserting
a key in a small hole under the second-hand.
Another case was that of a man named Adams who exhibited, for eight or
nine days, his pretended perpetual motion in a town in England and took
in the natives for fifty or sixty pounds. Accident, however, led to a
discovery of the imposture. A gentleman, viewing the machine took hold
of the wheel or trundle and lifted it up a little, which probably
disengaged the wheels that connected the hidden machinery in the plinth,
and immediately he heard a sound similar to that of a watch when the
spring is running down. The owner was in great anger and directly put
the wheel into its proper position, and the machine again went around as
before. The circumstance was mentioned to an intelligent person who
determined to find out and expose the imposture. He took with him a
friend to view the machine and they seated themselves one on each side
of the table upon which the machine was placed. They then took hold of
the wheel and trundle and lifted them up, there being some play in the
pivots. Immediately the hidden spring began to run down and they
continued to hold the machine in spite of the endeavors of the owner to
prevent them. When the spring had run down, they placed the machine
again on the table and offered the owner fifty pounds if it could then
set itself going, but notwithstanding his fingering and pushing, it
remained motionless. A constable was sent for, the impostor went before
a magistrate and there signed a paper confessing his perpetual motion to
be a cheat.
In the "Mechanic's Magazine," Vol. 46, is an account of a perpetual
motion, constructed by one Redhoeffer of Pennsylvania, which obtained
sufficient notoriety to induce the Legislature to appoint a committee to
enquire into its merits. The attention of Mr. Lukens was turned to the
subject, and although the actual moving cause was not discovered, yet
the deception was so ingeniously imitated in a machine of similar
appearance made by him and moved by a spring so well concealed, that the
deceiver himself was deceived and Redhoeffer was induced to believe that
Mr. Lukens had been successful in obtaining a moving power in some way
in which he himself had failed, when he had produced a machine so
plausible in appearance as to deceive the public.
Instances of a similar kind might be multiplied indefinitely.
The experienced mechanic who reads the descriptions here given of the
various devices which have been proposed for the construction of a
perpetual-motion machine must be struck with the childish simplicity of
the plans which have been offered; and those who will search the pages
of the mechanical journals of the last century or who will examine the
two closely printed volumes in which Mr. Dircks has collected almost
everything of the kind, will be astonished at the sameness which
prevails amongst the offerings of these would-be inventors. Amongst the
hundreds, or, perhaps, thousands, of contrivances which have been
described, there is probably not more than a dozen kinds which differ
radically from each other; the same arrangement having been invented and
re-invented over and over again. And one of the strange features of the
case is that successive inventors seem to take no note of the failure of
those predecessors who have brought forward precisely the same
combination of parts under a very slightly different form.
It is true that we occasionally find a very elaborate and apparently
complicated machine, but in such cases it will be found, on close
examination, to owe its apparent complexity to a mere multiplication of
parts; no real inventive ingenuity is exhibited in any case.
Another singular characteristic of almost all those who have devoted
themselves to the search for a perpetual motion is their absolute
confidence in the success of the plans which they have brought forth. So
confident are they in the soundness of their views and so sure of the
success of their schemes that they do not even take the trouble to test
their plans but announce them as accomplished facts, and publish their
sketches and descriptions as if the machine was already working without
a hitch. Indeed, so far was one inventor carried away with this feeling
of confidence in the success of his machine that he no longer allowed
himself to be troubled with any doubts as to the machine's _going_ but
was greatly puzzled as to what means he should take to _stop_ it after
it had been set in motion!
These facts, which are well known to all who have been brought into
contact with this class of minds, explain many otherwise puzzling
circumstances and enable us to place a proper value on assertions
which, if not made so positively and by such apparently good authority,
would be at once condemned as deliberate falsehoods. That falsehood,
pure and simple, has formed the basis of a good many claims of this
kind, there can be no doubt, but at the same time, it is probable that
some of the claimants really deceived themselves and attributed to
causes other than radical errors of theory, the fact that their machines
would not continue to move.
While many have claimed the actual invention of a perpetual motion it is
very certain that not one has ever succeeded. How, then, are we to
explain the statements which have been made in regard to Orffyreus and
the claims of the Marquis of Worcester? For both of these men it is
claimed that they constructed wheels which were capable of moving
perpetually and apparently strong testimony is offered in support of
these assertions.
In the famous "Century of Inventions," published by the Marquis in 1663,
four years before his death, the celebrated 56th article reads as
follows (_verbatim et literatim_):
"To provide and make that all the Weights of the descending side of
a Wheel shall be perpetually further from the Centre, then those of
the mounting side, and yet equal in number and heft to the one side
as the other. A most incredible thing, if not seen, but tried before
the late king (of blessed memory) in the _Tower_, by my directions,
two Extraordinary Embassadors accompanying His Majesty, and the Duke
of _Richmond_ and Duke _Hamilton_, with most of the Court, attending
Him. The Wheel was 14. Foot over, and 40. Weights of 50. pounds
apiece. Sir _William Balfore_, then Lieutenant of the _Tower_, can
justifie it, with several others. They all saw, that no sooner these
great Weights passed the Diameter-line of the lower side, but they
hung a foot further from the Centre, nor no sooner passed the
Diameter-line of the upper side, but they hung a foot nearer. Be
pleased to judge the consequence."