Joseph Newman (inventor)

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Joseph Westley Newman is an inventor. He is known as the creator of a "free energy" machine, which, he claims, produces more energy than it consumes. While perpetual motion machines cannot exist according to the laws of physics (especially the second law of thermodynamics, which states that some form of energy has to be irreversibly consumed in order to produce work), Newman has claimed that his machine violates no physical laws because it converts part of its mass to energy.

1 Machine description
2 Claims about free energy
3 References
4 External links

[edit] Machine description

Newman's device consists of a battery pack (one or more of the batteries may be specially conditioned and the "conditioning" may travel from battery to battery), a commutator which was mechanically connected to a rotating permanent magnet, and a coil of wire.

The battery pack consists of 116 nine-volt batteries arranged in five sets of twenty batteries and one set of sixteen batteries. The batteries in each set are connected in series and external wiring is used to connect these various sets in series.

The commutator reverses the polarity of the battery connection twice during each rotation of the magnet. In addition, the commutator interrupts the connection to the coil twenty-four times during each rotation.

[edit] Claims about free energy

Newman claims that, after starting his machine using the power of the batteries, it is possible to measure a power output that is larger than the input. The copper in the coils is supposedly "electromagnetically converted" into electricity at an almost 100% mass-energy conversion efficiency, but it would take years to measure any mass difference.

In the 1980s Newman performed several public demonstrations, on television and in the Superdome, that garnered much media attention. Newman even received a patent after a long battle with the United States Patent and Trademark Office.^[1] Physicists and engineers were invited to test Newman's machines (with mixed results), and Newman also shipped a machine to the National Bureau of Standards (NBS) for testing. The NBS concluded that the machine was an efficient motor but did not produce over-unity energy. Newman countered that he was barred from observing the test and that the NBS failed to unfasten a key component that had been grounded to the frame for shipping — implying that the test would have worked had he been allowed to participate.

According to the well-known skeptic and debunker James Randi, who visited Newman to investigate his claims, the inventor made up excuses and did not want to concede the possibility of connecting the power output back to the input, which would produce a positive feedback loop and avoid further need for batteries as an external energy source. Newman alleged that the machine produces significant RF energy rather than electrical current and therefore connecting output to input is not straightforward.

Newman also pointed out that the principles underlying the machine had to do with magnetic particles and vortices, an idea conceived (and then rejected) by the 19th century physicist James Clerk Maxwell, and that those vortices were also responsible for such things as earthquakes and ESP. Randi concluded that Newman was a crackpot.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] References

^ Marshall, Eliot (10 Feb 1984). "Newman's impossible motor; the patent office does not believe that Joseph Newman has built a generator that is more than 100 percent efficient, but New Orleans does", Science v223 p571(2).