Joseph Newman`s revolutionary energy machine looks like a 9,000-pound wash tub. It doesn`t seem to be something that could shake the world, but Newman promises that it can.
”I am going to change history,” said the inventor.
Despite the machine`s grand purpose–to provide an unlimited, clean source of energy–its components are surprisingly uncomplicated. Inside the tub is a bundle of six 4-foot-long magnetic rods wrapped in eight miles of copper wire and hooked up to 150 six-volt batteries.
To bring the machine to life, Newman must switch on the batteries and give the magnets a push with his shoulder. Gradually, the whirling rods will pick up speed until they reach 260 revolutions a minute.
Newman`s invention is, he says, an energy factory, producing 25 times the energy it consumes by electromagnetically converting mass to energy. He claims it could revolutionize society by making current energy sources, including nuclear power plants, obsolete.
The United States has rejected Newman`s application for a patent, saying his machine ”smacks of perpetual motion,” which is the scientific equivalent of a free lunch and an impossibility because of the first and second laws of thermodynamics.
The man who offers this rich possibility or absolute impossibility is a self-taught, backwoods inventor of plastic barbells, of a deflector that keeps the rain off windshields at drive-in movies, of a gadget that sucks the juice from oranges still hanging on the tree.
In his own words, Newman is just ”a country boy.” He lives in a small house at the end of a two-rut lane in Lucedale, Miss., and has taught himself physics, chemistry, electrical engineering and astronomy.
”They are just homefolks, born and reared just across the line,” said Lucedale Mayor Al Rouse of Newman, his wife, Ellen, and their 4-year-old son, Gyros.
To the U.S. Department of Commerce and its Patent and Trademark Office Newman is a perpetual pain in the neck. They think he is yet another crackpot on a quest for the scientific equivalent of the Fountain of Youth.
To his numerous supporters–scientists from across the country, 10 congressmen who have introduced private bills on his behalf and the thousands who have attended his public demonstrations such as the one at the Louisiana Superdome in New Orleans last spring–Newman is one of the most misunderstood and greatest intellectuals of our time.
Milton Everett, an engineer with the Mississippi State Department of Natural Resources and one of the inventor`s first supporters, described Newman as a ”humanist and an idealist,” and someone to whom ”Einstein`s going to have to take a second seat.”
The Washington patent attorney, C. Emmett Pugh, described Newman on WYES- TV in New Orleans as ”a very honest, sincere and hard-working individual.”
”He has not had a formal education in science and technology,” Pugh said, ”which is perhaps why he was able to make his invention. He was able to look at things fresh, unfettered by prior mindsets.”
So-called perpetual motion machines have created a perpetual commotion since antiquity. The fact that interest in perpetual motion continues is a tribute to man`s perpetual optimism, gullibility or even laziness, according to the skeptics.
The most common perpetual motion design has been the self-propelled wheel, usually driven by a series of magnets or weights. One of the earliest designs, described in a 1,500-year-old Sanskrit manuscript, was a wooden wheel powered by mercury sloshing in its rim.
The golden age of the perpetual motion machine occurred during the latter half of the 19th Century, after the Industrial Revolution, when hundreds of patents were granted in England and about a dozen in the United States.
Today, the inventions continue more than 100 years after formulation of the first and second laws of thermodynamics. They state that energy cannot be created or destroyed, that it only can be transferred or converted to heat. Once this has happened, the laws say, some energy always is dispersed as waste. In other words, you can`t get something for nothing.
For example, a New England woman suggested building a washing machine powered by the force of falling clothes. A Texas inventor, Arnold Burke, gathered $800,000 from investors for his machine which utilized ”self activating” pumps driven by the ”molecular attraction” in water. During a 1979 trial for security fraud, the energy machine was inspected and found to be connected to four batteries in a nearby bathroom.
Newman counters the Patent Office ruling by saying that his invention is not a perpetual motion machine. His energy machine will run for a long time, but not forever, he said, because he is not creating energy, but converting mass to energy.
Newman has worked on his theory for 21 years, first in Houston, then in Mobile, Ala., and then in the garage behind his conventional-looking house in Lucedale. More recently, $500,000 in financial backing from California investors allowed him to build a new pine structure behind his home especially for his research. A plaque hanging on the door of this building states its purpose emphatically, ”Research Center for the Energy Machine of Joseph Newman.”
Inside the nearly empty building hangs a 75-pound punching bag on which Newman takes out some of his frustrations with the Patent Office. And on the wall are two banners with quotations from two of Newman`s heroes:
mathematician James C. Maxwell, who said, ”The energy in electromagnetic phenomena is mechanical energy,” and a 19th-Century scientist, Michael Faraday, who said, ”How few understand the physical lines of force.”
In addition to housing the energy machine, the building also serves as a conference center where scientists have gathered, often in outright disbelief, to examine the energy machine. In his legal battle with the Patent Office, Newman has enlisted the support of more than 30 of those scientists, including a NASA aerospace engineer, a nuclear physicist and an electrical engineer who worked on the Saturn 5 project.
After witnessing the energy machine and running his own tests, Roger Hastings, a senior physicist at the Sperry Corp. in Minnesota, wrote: ”The future of the human race may be dramatically uplifted by the large scale commercial development of this invention.”
Newman`s theory, which he calls the ”unified field theory” works on the principle that all matter is concentrated energy which could be released if one had a mechanism for unlocking it. This principle is at the very heart of Einstein`s famous equation, E
MC 2.
The most dramatic example of unlocking that energy is, of course, a nuclear reaction, which Newman said is a ”horrible perversion” of Einstein`s discovery.
Newman`s energy machine converts mass to energy electromagnetically with a rate of efficiency he claims is nearly 100 percent. A nuclear reactor converts mass to energy at an efficiency rate of less than 1 percent.
The basis for Newman`s theory is the ”gyroscopic particle,” a subatomic unit of matter that spins like a gyroscope.
When Newman throws the switch on his washtub-shaped machine, this is what he says happens: an electric current passes through the copper wire, causing the gyroscopic particles to spin around the wire at the speed of light, creating a strong magnetic field. The machine`s battery-generated electric current operates in pulses, turning on and off, causing the magnetic field
(the gyroscopic particles) to expand and contract. As the magnetic field collapses in the off-phase of the pulse, the particles collide causing any loose particles to be break away. Those particles are released at the ends of the copper wire as electric energy.
Newman has spent seven years and more than $500,000 (he has financial backers) trying to prove to the Patent Office that his machine works. But the Patent Office has been fooled many times in its 184-year history into granting patents for the so-called perpetual motion machines; so often that the machines have have earned a permanent spot in the Patent Office handbook, which says ”alleged inventions of perpetual motion machines are refused patents.”
The Patent Office has three requirements for patentability of an invention, according to Franklin Burnett, special assistant to the assistant commissioner for patents: An invention must be ”new, useful and unobvious.” Because he could not comment specifically on Newman`s case, which is still in court, Burnett said that, in general, ”Utility is a key statutory requirement for a patent. In other words, it has to work. That is a big requirement as far as a perpetual motion machine is concerned, because to our knowledge, perpetual motion machines do not work.”
Newman has been in and out of the front door of the Patent Office countless times in the last seven years, with his applications and affidavits and finally with his energy machine and his lawyer.
His original application for a patent was in 1979. After the Patent Office rejected Newman`s patent in 1982, saying ”More output than input attained smacks of `perpetual motion,”` Newman requested a re-examination. The request was granted, but his patent was not. Newman says he was told that if he submitted a single affidavit from an expert who had witnessed the machine and had tested it, he could have his patent. He submitted 30 such affidavits. And still no patent. In January, 1983, Newman sued the Patent Office in U.S. District Court in Washington.
The case was assigned to Judge Thomas Jackson who, when faced with conflicting claims, appointed a special master to investigate Newman`s machine. That special master was William E. Schuyler Jr., a former head of the Patent Office. At the time Jackson called Schuyler`s credentials superb. One year later, in the fall of 1984, Judge Jackson refused to accept Schuyler`s results after the special master found that Newman ”is entitled to a patent based upon his experiments and results.”
Newman`s attorney, James Flannery, requested that a pioneering patent be granted on the basis of the master`s report. The Patent Office attorney, Jere Sears, asked the court to reject the special master`s report and to ”refrain from believing those who apparently believe in the tooth fairy.”
Judge Jackson did neither, saying: ”I am not prepared at this point to conclude that . . . Newman has produced a truly pioneering invention of the order of magnitude of the atomic and hydrogen bomb. Neverthless, I am also equally unprepared to say on this record that Mr. Newman is a crackpot as a matter of law and that his invention cannot possibly, as a matter of physical principles, operate under any circumstances.”
Newman was ordered to surrender his machine to the Patent Office for testing at the National Bureau of Standards. So, still without his patent, Newman was billed $11,602 for the special master`s report.
Newman refused to deliver his machine for further testing until January of this year. In June the National Bureau of Standards released a 35-page report which concluded: ”At all conditions tested, the input power exceed the output power. That is, the device did not deliver more energy than it used.” Newman and physicist Hastings disputed the National Bureau of Standards methodology for testing the machine. In the testing process, the Bureau grounded the energy machine, which dispersed much of its generated energy before it could be measured, Newman said. In his own tests of the machine, Hastings said that he never has had less than 100 percent results.
The Patent Office annually handles more than 100,000 requests for patents and grants 60 to 70 percent of those. Flannery, Newman`s attorney, contends the Patent Office has neither the time nor the skill to understand his client`s invention.
Newman says he will continue to pursue his patent in the courts in December.
He also will continue to pursue a congressional patent (a way of end-running the patent office). He recently testified before the Senate Subcommittee on Energy and is awaiting a report from Sen. Thad Cochran, chairman of the subcommittee.
Newman is pressing for a hearing in the House Judiciary Committee. Rep. Dan Burton (R., Ind.), the first to sponsor private legislation on Newman`s behalf, wrote to Rep. Robert Kastenmeier (D., Wis.), chairman of the Judiciary Committee, saying: ”Mr. Newman has invented a machine which could have a tremendous impact on the world. If Mr. Newman is correct, then his invention will be the greatest of the century. . . . The marketplace will be the final arbiter of the validity of the Newman device.”
Meanwhile, Newman will continue working on prototypes or applications of his energy machine.
Until recently Newman`s only application for his energy machine was a fan. But he is working on a prototype of an automobile. His new version of the automobile will be missing 80 percent of what the usual car carries under its hood. It won`t have an engine, a radiator, oil pumps or pollution controls.
Mayor Rouse is representative of Newman`s increasing popular support when he says, ”We are just rural people down here, they call us rednecks, but we can count money with the rest of them. It`s hard for us to understand how someone who works as hard as Mr. Newman keeps getting the door shut in his face.
”Seems to me that if it`s a dud, if it`s a mistake, an impossibility, what`s it going to hurt to give the man a green light? If it don`t work, he`s the only one who`s going to be made an ass.
”But imagine if he does have something to help all us working people? We wouldn`t have to depend on those OPEC countries anymore. It would revolutionize the world. Imagine one of those little machines out in the back yard to milk the cows, run the air conditioner, the deep freeze.”
Newman claims to have generated interest in his machine from scientists, businessmen and governments all over the world. Recently, representatives of the Swedish government visited Newman in Lucedale to witness the machine.
”Don`t you find it interesting that Sweden sends an official thousands of miles to the backwoods of Mississippi, yet my own government hasn`t sent anyone?” he asked. He will not, however, give up the battle and go to one of the other countries, such as Spain or South Africa that have already granted him patents, to develop his machine.
”It`s my bulldog instinct,” he said. ”I`m from this country, my foreparents fought hard to make this country what it is. . . . Rather than walk away, I`d rather stay and fight.”
Newman promises a new Industrial Revolution: ”My invention will change history as no invention has ever done.”
