Will Steorn’s perpetual motion machine remain perpetually off?

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Friday, 06 July 2007 20:55

Opinion and Analysis

Steorn, the company behind the vaunted Orbo ‘free energy machine’, has had to postpone their technical demo ‘until further notice’ as it’s simply not working.

Following a public announcement and challenge to scientists in a full page ad in ‘The Economist’ magazine last year, the world has wondered whether Steorn’s Orbo ‘free energy’ technology really works or not.

Some 5000 people responded, with 500 being qualified scientists and 22 eventually chosen, with definitive results on whether the technology works or not due at the end of 2007.

Excitement had been building at the prospect of Steorn’s first public demonstration of the Orbo technology, due to start on July 6, 2007 at the Kinectica Museum in London.

But according to a new announcement from Steorn , following up from their announcement on the 5th of July that the demonstration would be temporarily postponed due to “excessive heat from the lighting” which had mysteriously caused the Orbo to stop working, Steorn have now decided to “postpone the demonstration until further notice”. 

The strong lights were designed to light up the demo for the world to see both live and through the Internet. Unfortunately the concept of some form of cooling seems to have eluded the Steorn team, with traditional air conditioning being a prime candidate to help out in this situation.

According to Steorn’s new announcement, their CEO Sean McCarthy said that “technical problems arose during the installation of the demonstration unit in the display case on Wednesday evening. These problems were primarily due to excessive heat from the lighting in the main display area. Attempts to replace those parts affected by the heat led to further failures and as a result we have to postpone the public demonstration until a future date.”

McCarthy continued that “we apologise for the inconvenience caused to all the people who had made arrangements to visit the demonstration or were planning on viewing the demonstration online.”

Steorn’s announcement concludes by stating that “Over the next few weeks the company will explore alternative dates for the public demonstration”.

Unfortunately this won’t help their cause with the skeptics who claim that their device is a violation of the principle of conservation of energy which states that energy can neither be created or destroyed, it can only change form.

Naturally the allure of a device that creates free energy without climatic or environmental consequences is overwhelming – who wouldn’t want access to free energy, other than today’s energy companies that make a lot of money providing us with electricity, gas, oil and other energy sources?

Despite Steorn’s obvious setbacks, we’ll just have to wait and see what happens next, although if nature’s laws as we understand them have anything to do with it, we might well be waiting a very long time.