Steorn renews perpetual promise to show free energy machine

Welcome back my friends to the magnetic machine story that never ends, courtesy of Dublin-based perpetual motion mongers Steorn.

One of my two favourite miraculous organisations — in the company, however unfairly, of xG and its magic morphing wireless broadband — is making noises again and promising great things. In this case, it's "a public display of various Orbo systems" by the end of 2009, with a video stream so that all of us out here in Webland can watch, wonder and then buy a very reasonably priced licence to use the technology.

Ah yes, the technology. You won't be surprised to hear that there's been no further disclosure about what it is and how it works, except that it now includes a "passive magnetic bearing technology, ZeroF". In an interview in Free Energy Times, Steorn CEO Sean McCarthy said that this was necessary because ordinary bearings act as speed bumps due to the "very strong radial forces that change direction in very small angular displacements". I think that means powerful magnets wobbling around a bit, but we'll have to wait and see.

Apparently, every bit of the Orbo perpetual motion over-unity energy-from-nowhere device is explicable by standard physics "except the net result". So far, though, the 'net result' in terms of the failed demo in 2007 and the disbanding of the independent review panel this year — their conclusion: nothing doing — has been thoroughly explicable by standard physics.

Steon has also filed two patents this year, but don't get too excited. One is for measuring energy transfer from an electromagnet to a permanent magnet, and the other is for measuring the torque of a rotating device. In both cases, they're in the class of patent best described as "stark raving obvious" — the latter incredibly so, as Sean appears to have reinvented the optical encoder.

Which leaves yet another intriguing question: if that's their IP, what on earth would they license?