Scientists Claim To Tap The Free Energy Of Space
by Richard Walters ("For the People" magazine)
Bruce DePalma and his N-MACHINE and other experiments have been mentioned
by Richard Hoagland in the video "Hoagland's Mars Vol 2 : The U.N. Briefings"
Physicist Bruce DePalma has a 100 kilowatt generator, which he invented, sitting
in his garage. It could power his whole house, but if he turns it on, the government
may confiscate it.
Harvard educated DePalma, who taught physics at the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology for 15 years, claims that his electrical generator can provide
cheap, inexhaustible, self sustaining and non polluting source of energy, using
principles that flout conventional physics and are still not fully understood.
His N machine, as it is called, is said to release the "free energy"
latent in the space all around us. DePalma views his device as an innovation
that could help to end the worlds's dangerous dependence on finite supplies
of oil, gas, and other polluting fossil based fuels.
Deceptive Simplicity
The DePalma generator is essentially a simple magnetized flywheel, ie a magnetized
cylindrical conductor rotating at high speed with the help of a motor. His astonishing
claim is that the present versions of the N machine can generate up to five
times more power than it consumes. This, of course, defies the basic law of
the conservation of energy, which says that the output of energy cannot be more
than the input. Most physicists simply refuse to look at DePalma's findings
and dismiss his theories out of hand.
Yet "proof of principle" for his invention was apparently provided when a large
N machine, dubbed the Sunburst, was built in 1978 in Santa Barbara California.
The Sunburst machine was independently tested by Dr. Robert Kincheloe, professor
emeritus of electrical engineering at Stanford University. in his 1986 report
(presented to the Society for Scientific Exploration, San Francisco, 6/21/86),
Kincheloe noted that the drag of the rotating magnetized gyroscope is only 13
to 20 percent of a conventional generator operating at an ideal 100 percent
efficiency, the DePalma N machine could produce electricity at around 500 percent
efficiency.
In Kincheloe's cautious summary:
"DePalma may have been right in
that there is indeed a situation here whereby energy is being
obtained from a previously unknown and unexplained source. This is a
conclusion that most scientists and engineers would reject out of
hand as being a violation of accepted laws of physics and if true
has incredible implications".
"The jury is still out on the DePalma N machine," says physicist
Harold Puthoff, a senior fellow at the Institute for Advanced
Studies in Austin, Texas. "It isn't clear where the reported excess
energy is coming from--whether out of the electromagnetic field or as
the result of some anomaly associated with rotating bodies in terms
of inertia. The DePalma machine needs to be replicated on a broad
scale to see if it actually works. Though I'm rather skeptical, I
certainly would encourage independent laboratory experimentation.
While such a phenomenon would have seemed to absolutely go against
the law of energy conservation a number of years ago, we now
recognize that the potential for extracting energy out of so called
empty space is in fact a reality".
Not So Empty Space
Puthoff, a PhD. from Stanford University, believes that a new, non
polluting energy source may be achieved by tapping the force random
fluctuations jostling atomic particles within a vacuum. Scientists
now know that "empty" space seethes with waft are called vacuum
fluctuations: huge amounts of energy that suddenly burst forth,
jiggling particles to and fro. Puthoff has developed his own
theory, zero point energy, in an attempt to tap the abundant power
found in the vacuum of space. He and associates in a new company,
Jupiter Technologies, may soon try to manufacture zero-point energy
machines.
DePalma described his N machine and outlined a theory to explain its
workings in a paper, "On the Possibility of Extraction of Electrical
Energy Directly From Space", published in the British science
journal, Speculations in Science and Technology (Sept 1990, Vol 13
No 4). So far, the scientific establishment either has ignored
DePalma's controversial claims or remains unaware of them.
Patent *Not* Pending
No one has ever obtained a patent for an N machine in the U.S.,
although in the San Francisco area alone, there are some 200 patent
applications relating to such devices. The U.S. Patent office
automatically denies a patent to any gizmo which purports to produce
more energy than it consumes, on the grounds that its personnel are
not equipped to evaluate such claims. DePalma is quick to point out
that the N machine is not a perpetual motion machine, that mythical
contraption long sought by frustrated inventors. "The perpetual
motion machine is only supposed to run itself. It could never put
out five times more power than is put into it. Perpetual motion
schemes used conventional energy sources, whereas the N machine is a
new way of extracting energy from space".
Other scientists-inventors who attempted
to build and operate free
energy machines have been intimidated and harassed by the U.S.
government. At least one inventor had his device confiscated by the
Defense Department on the grounds that its free energy technology
endangered national security interests. This inventor was put under
a gag order, so that he could not even tell the press that his N
machine had been confiscated. This is ironic when one considers
that the idea for the N machine came directly from a famous
experiment performed by Michael Faraday in 1831.
U.S. Not Interested
The U.S. energy monopoly, which pushes for the development of oil,
gas, coal, and nuclear power--while defunding solar energy and other
non polluting alternatives--apparently does not want to see free
energy emerge as a viable option.
Meanwhile, other countries, notably India and Japan, are vigorously
pursuing what might prove to be a technological breakthrough. (is
this yet one more example of the Invented in USA/Made in Japan"
syndrome, the outcome of American shortsightedness and vested
interests?) In India, eminent engineer Paramahamsa Tewari is
currently testing his invention, called the Space Power Generator
(SPG), which essentially replicates DePalma's N machine. With 5
kilowatt total input, the SPG is reportedly yielding 30 kilowatt
electrical output (correspondence to B. DePalma 8/13/90).
Tewari, a senior engineer with India's Department of Atomic
Energy-Nuclear Power Corporation, also directs the Kaiga Project,
India's largest atomic power facility, in Karnataka. He freely
acknowledges his dept to DePalma, who has shared his experimental
results with Tewari for many years. According to Tewari, "The
electrical power generated by the Space Power Generator is indeed
commercially viable and should be brought to the notice of the
general public." He has urged India's Atomic Energy Commission to
create an independent research group to advance free energy
technology. Tewari also credits John Wheeler, the prominent
American physicist and discoverer of the black hole, for his steady
encouragement. Wheeler, who had been searching for a mathematical
theory that would predict free energy, applauded Tewari for his
effort to develop such a theory, and the two scientists corresponded
for several years.
Japanese Interest
The Japan Science Foundation, under Japanese government auspices,
awarded grants to two universities and one company to produce models
of the N machine and to investigate how it works. Kazama Giken
Corporation is commercially supplying small N machines for research
and educational purposes. Another Japanese company, Panasonic/National, is also
pursuing this technology. Shiuji Inomata, Ph D president of the
Japan Psychotronics Institute and senior scientist at the
Electrotechnical Laboratory in Ibaraki, has been instrumental in
sparking the interest of Japan's scientific community in the N
machine.
"One day man will connect his apparatus to the very wheel work of
the universe... and the very forces that motivate the planets in
their orbits and cause them to rotate will rotate his own machinery"
predicted Nikola Tesla, the Croatian born American electrical
genius whose discoveries and inventions rival those of Edison.
Proponents of the N machine believe that it taps directly into a
primordial energy source, meshing with the wheel work of the cosmos.
A Wrong Turn
"Electrical engineering took a wrong turn 160 years ago," according
to Tewari, referring to English scientist Michael Faraday's
pioneering work of the world's first dynamo. In 1831, Faraday
performed a series of experiments which led to the modern electric
induction generator, having two moving parts--a rotor and a stator.
Faraday moved a wire near the pole of a magnet, producing an
electrical potential across the ends of the wire. This induction
principle is used in all the electrical generators we use today.
And that's precisely what Tewari means by a "wrong turn."
In that same year, 1831, Faraday also performed a simple yet
ingenious experiment with a rotating magnetized conductor. The
resulting phenomenon (free energy?) has yet to be explained in terms
of conventional scientific theory.
By cementing a copper disc on top of a cylinder magnet, and rotating
the magnet and disc together, Faraday created an electrical
potential. After pondering this phenomenon for many years, he
concluded that when a magnet is rotated, its magnetic field remains
stationary. Thus, he reasoned, the metal of the magnet moves
through its own field, and the relative motion is translated into
electrical potential.
Faraday's experiments led him to the revolutionary conclusion that a
magnetic field is a property of space itself, not something attached
to the magnet, which merely serves to induce or evoke the field.
A Prototype
Known for over 150 years, the Faraday homopolor generator, as his
contraption is called, has been viewed by a handful of visionary
inventors as a basis for evoking the free energy latent in space.
They see is as the prototype for a generator capable of providing
its own motive power with additional energy to spare. When the
world embraced Faraday's two piece induction generator, whose
drawbacks include mechanical friction and electrical losses, the
enormous potential of the Faraday homo polar generator was abandoned,
in the opinion of free-energy proponents.
Following in Faraday's footsteps, DePalma in 1978 speculated that
free energy could be tapped from the matrix of space simply by
magnetizing a gyroscope. "I reasoned that the metal of the
magnetized gyroscope moving through its own magnetic field, when
rotated would produce an electrical potential between the axle and
the outer edge of the rotating magnetized flywheel," he explains.
This insight led to his N machine, essentially a one piece rotating
magnetized flywheel, "Instead of having a rotor and a stator, as do
conventional generators, the n machine only has a rotor.. Half of
the flywheel is the north pole, the other half is the south pole.
One electrical contact is put on the axle, another contact is placed
on the outer edge of the gyroscope, and presto, electricity is taken
directly out of the magnet itself."
Idea Put to the Test
For 150 years after Faraday's controversial experiment, no one
bothered to see whether or not a rotating magnet generator would
have to to the same amount of work as a conventional induction
generator in order to produce and identical power output. Then, in
1978, the aforementioned Sunburst homopolar generator was built.
Tests determined that is output power greatly exceeded the input
needed to run the machine, that it was much more efficient that an
induction generator. Opinions differ as to the exact mechanisms by
which the N machine generates energy. In 1977 Tewari created a
minor sensation when he put forth the theory that space is filled
with a dynamic medium whose swirling motion is the source of all
matter and energy. In his Space Vortex Theory, more fully developed
in his 1984 book, Beyond Matter, the Indian engineer inventor
postulated that a void lies at the heart of the electron-- a void
whose high speed rotation within a vacuum could produce energy from
space. Tewari's theory is based on the assumption that the electron
has a definite structure, and is not just a homogeneous "droplet" of
charge.
According to Tewari, the movement of "voids" in the spinning
magnetized cylinder of his Space Power Generator liberates free
energy out of the space between the machine's axis and the magnet.
He readily admits that this sounds incredible, by the yardstick of
known laws of physics. Tewari says he never would have developed
his theory had he been trained as a physicist rather than as an
engineer, since his ideas differ so radically from conventional
physics.
"Tewari's explanation is perfectly possible," comments DePalma. "He
is attempting to conceptualize what's happening between the atoms
and where the energy is liberated."
Concept of Magnetism
"My own approach," continues DePalma, "is that space is all around
us like the sea of water the fish swim in. The only way you know
it's there is to distort it in some way, and the simplest way to
distort space is with a magnet." DePalma maintains that his own
conception of magnetism as a distortion of a pre-existent homogeneous
field is "the first new thought on the fundamental nature of
magnetism since Oersted."
Having taught at MIT as a lecturer in physics for 15 years, DePalma
grew increasingly dissatisfied with mainstream physics' explanation
of the way things work. His current view of the universe would
strike many conventional scientists as heresy.
For example, modern science says that energy is a constant substance
in the universe, and that the conversion of energy from one form to
another will lead to the heat-death of the universe eon from now.
In contrast, says DeFalcate, "My cosmos is an open-ended universe, one
in which energy can be evoked from space itself. All energy come
from space," he maintains, "and there are various processes which
can release this energy, the simplest of which is lighting a match or
rubbing two sticks together."
Suppose you light a candle. The heat in the flame derives from the
release of latent heat stored in the wax, according to the
textbooks. Nonsense says DePalma. "The law of energy conservation
is pure assumption," he insists. In his theory, the heat of a lit
candle comes from space, and this substrate is slowly consumed by
the energy of space flowing through it.
When you drive a car, the heat latent in the gasoline is extracted
through burning, which propels the pistons. Right? Wrong says
DePalma. His understanding of the process is that the gasoline-air
mixture, catalyzed by an electric spark, acts as a "molecular
antenna" to release energy from space. Heat energy thus released
cooks or burns the substance which is evoking it in the first place,
producing exhaust.
Likewise, when a magnet is rotated in the N-machine, DePalma
theorizes, the electrical current comes from the space through which
the magnet is drawing its energy, not from the magnets mechanical
rotation.
DePalma's approaches to other basic phenomena are equally
unorthodox. In the mid-1970's he performed the "Spinning Ball
Experiment," which purportedly demonstrated that a rotating object
will fall faster or go higher than an identical non rotating object
with the same initial velocity. If true, these results fly in the
face of all knows physics. The experimental procedure is simple:
Take a steel ball bearing (the kind used in a pinball machine), set
it rotating, drop it, and measure how fast it falls. Compare its
time with that of an identical but non-rotating control ball.
DePalma explained his anomalous results in terms of free energy
added to the motion of the rotating object. Those and other
experiments led him to formulate radical new concepts of rotation,
gravity, inertia and motion in general building on the work of
pioneers in the field. He published his findings on the Spinning
Ball Experiment in the British Scientific Research Association
Journal in 1976. He also outlined the Spinning Ball Experiment to
Dr. Edward Purcell, a Harvard physics professor, one of the most
eminent experimental physicists at that time. According to DePalma,
Purcell, after contemplating the experiment for several minutes,
blurted, "This will change everything."
Applying New Technology
"Applied physics is not engraved in stone," says Don Kelly,
president of the Space Energy Association (SEA/US), a group of
engineers, scientists, and inventors dedicated to developing
free-energy technology. Today's free-energy scene encompasses a
bewildering array of devices, including N machine, Russian plasma
generators, a Swill hybrid converter (combining free-energy
components and solid state methods), permanent magnet motors (PMMs),
the multiple-coil Hubbard Generator, and various hydrogen power
systems.
A standout among the latter group is the "Enerex" H20 unit invented
by Yoshiro Nakmatsu, known as the "Edison of Japan." This prolific
inventor--father of the floppy disk--claims that his pollution free
Enerex unit runs on tap water alone and can generate three times as
much power as a standard gasoline engine. An H20 splitter, the
Enerex produces hydrogen as the working fuel.
Kelly notes that Germany, Switzerland, Japan, Korea and the
Netherlands all have active free-energy research associations, with
which SEA/US exchanges information. Nevertheless, he feels that the
nascent free energy technology faces opposition in the United States
from government agencies, academics, and vested industrial
interests. Kely envisions free energy eventually gaining acceptance
and application through a grassroots movement of do-it-yourselfers
around the country.
SEA/US publishes an interesting quarterly newsletter, available to
members. (Space Energy Association/U.S. P.O. Box 11422,
Clearwater, FL 34616; phone 813-441-3923; membership dues are $35
per year).
Economics of the N machine
DePalma Energy Corporation has not sold a single machine yet. To
build an N machine by hand, the company charges around $500,000.
Bruce DePalma claims that, if mass produced, the cost of hsi machine
would drop to a mere $400 to $500. He points out that a typical 100
kilowatt AC generator costs a little over $100,000, and add that an
N machine putting out the same amount of power could be manufactured
for one third to one half the cost in regular production. His goal
is to set up technology sharing agreements with clients who would
manufacture his machine.
Surveying the variety of electro-magnetic free energy units
available or on the drawing boards, Don Kelly concluded that most of
them are plagued by fuzzy applied physics, lack of technical and
financial support, and "a distinct cost effectiveness problem."
However, Kelly singled out the DePalma N machine as "the mainstay
for this F/E category" and "the best of the F/E units for its
potential today." He gave the N machine a high "KISS rating"
(KISS=Keep it simple and stupid) due to the machines simple,
one-piece rotor performs better than today's conventional two piece
generators.
Other Applications
The gyroscope with its anomalous properties, so crucial to the N
machine, is also finding applications in antigravity and space
propulsion. Eric Laithwaite, electrical engineering professor at
Royal Imperial Technical College, London England, employed the
gyroscope in an antigravity machine which he invented. Laithwaite
is best know as the discoverer of the linear electrical motor use to
propel high speed trains in Japan. After making contact with a
couple of English inventors who, in dreams, had seen how a gyroscope
could be used to generate a force against space, he devised his
antigravity device and, in 1974, demonstrated it in front of an
audience at the Royal Imperial Technical College.
The machine, which weighed approximately 20 pounds when not running,
reportedly DECREASED in weight to 15 pounds when running. This
effect was said to be due to antigravity. Laithwaite's experiment
created a sensation and was written up in papers around the world.
A more sophisticated version of the Laithwaite antigravity machine,
invented by Scottish engineer Sandy Kidd, is being tested at
Edinburgh University. British Aerospace and the European Commission
(the body which runs the Economic Community) are helping to fund the
test, which may prove whether it is possible to defy gravity and
Newtonian principles.
The test will investigate several other similar antigravity devices
as well. Testing is under the supervision of Stephen Salter, a
professor of engineering design, well known for his work in deriving
energy from ocean wave power using large floating objects crammed
full of gyroscopes.
The Kidd antigravity machine consists of a system of gyroscopes said
to produce inertial thrust without reciprocal reaction, thus turn on
its head Newton's Third Law of Motion. (The third law states that
when a force acts on a body--every action produces an equal and
opposite reaction).
Kidd claims that a spacecraft powered by his propulsion design could
travel millions of miles into space, carrying a minimal payload of
fuel to power the gyroscopes.
So far, the amount of thrust claimed to have been produced under laboratory conditions
has been measured in ounces. But his is a claim which can not be ignored, according
to Dr. Ron Evans, Principal Engineer for Future Concepts in British Aerospace's
military aircraft division. While Evans expressed skepticism about the underlying
cause of Kidd antigravity machines's anomalous effects, he said, "If the laws
we have been brought up to believe in are wrong, then we would be silly to ignore
this. It would be nice if it (the Kidd machine) worked and would open whole new
fields."