Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
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April 1961 | Volume 12, Issue 3
Untitled
Text Complexity Grade Level
9
- 1. Even if friction were no factor, this machine would waste energy. All the water must be lifted to the top, yet only part of it performs useful work on the way down.
- 2. If there is enough attraction to pull the magnet up the track, there will be enough to pull it to the magnet without a track. At point C the attraction is much greater than at the bottom of the track. The ball will simply fly up to the magnet, ignoring track, hole—and inventor.
- 3. As each bellows passes the top of the machine, it has a given amount of air which must somehow be passed down to the bellows just rounding the bottom pulley. Considerable pressure must be exerted to fill this bottom bellows under water. Eventually all bellows will have the same number of molecules of air at the same pressure, and the machine will stop.
- 4. The bellows must compress air into the bladders under water, which takes a significant amount of energy. The machine won’t perform enough work to feed that much energy into the bellows.
- 5. Count the balls on the right side, as against those on the left.
- 6. Mercury will be pushed out of bellows at left, but will tend to run into any bellows below the pivot point. Thus all the mercury will end up in the bottom group of bellows, all vacuum in the top group.
- 7. Magnetic attraction pulls ball up the incline; gravity pulls it straight down. (The principle would be clearer if the inventor had drawn the magnet farther up the perimeter of the wheel.) Ball will move slightly, but will reach a point where the combination of the two forces will cancel each other out. There the wheel will stay.
- 8. Only two weights at the right are performing any significant amount of work, while trying to overbalance five at the left.
- 9. In order to deposit balls on left so they will roll down the sloping rack, they must be lifted farther than they drop.
- 10. If this one would work, you could run a loop of rope over a top pulley and a side pulley, and it would turn forever. Only the ball at point A is doing its full work, while all other balls on the right side are being partially supported. Yet the machine must raise the full weight of all balls moving up through the center.
- 11. Wasted water again, in addition to friction.
- 12. This is a bit unfair. The machine was built—and actually works! However, if you take a second look you will see that it is not a true perpetual-motion device, which must be a closed system operating on gravity, buoyancy, or magnetism. This machine is powered by