#Perpetual motion definition series#

People suggested perpetual motion machines based on static electricity, surface tension, magnetism, hydrostatic forces, and so on. But then, after that, as each new physical phenomenon was discovered, people invented new ways of using it to produce power without consuming energy. You wonder, did they ever try to make one? Well, yes they did, but it always seemed that they'd failed to get the proportions just quite right.ġ7th and 18th-century science eventually made it clear that the overcentered wheel wouldn't work. For the next 500 years many writers recommended the use of this ingenious - if impossible - little device.

The Moslems picked the idea up around AD 1200, and it showed up again in France by 1235. This wheel was supposed to stay forever out of balance and to turn forever. It was simple enough - a wheel with weights mounted around its rim in such a way that they swung radially outward on one side and inward on the other. In any event, the Hindu mathematician Bhaskara suggested a machine that would produce continuous power in AD 1150. And maybe we're the losers today for failing to see more magic than we do in such a process. The medieval engineer saw more magic than physics in the way windmills induced breezes to grind grain for him. Besides, the science of your day doesn't discriminate very clearly between physics and magic. Your eyes tell you that perpetual motion obviously is possible. You watch a wind mill turn, and stop for a while, and then turn some more. You watch a water wheel turn, and turn, and turn. You've harnessed a lot of power, and you're hungry to harness still more. For years you've harnessed the motions of wind and water. For 140 years we've all agreed on thermodynamic laws that tell us that that sort of machine can't exist.īut think for a moment like a medieval engineer. When we talk about a perpetual motion machine, we usually mean a machine that produces power without being fed an even greater amount of power in a different form - say an engine that produces electrical energy without eating up even more energy in the form of coal.

#Perpetual motion definition series#

The University of Houston's College of Engineering presents this series about the machines that make our civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity created them.