-Caveat Lector-
Source : SCIENCE, 16 Nov. 1984, p. 817
Title : An Endless Siege of Implausible Inventions
Author : R. Jeffrey Smith
In the modern world of commerce, the U.S. patent and trademark office
is a street-corner cop with the power to arrest de development of any
product that promises the impossible. Its book of statutes contains
the basic laws of physics, the axioms of mathematics, the fundamental
principles of mechanical engineering. With paticular enthusiasm, its
employees serve as guardians of the public in a never-ending battle
against mechanical devices allegedly capeable of perpetual motion.
This, at least, is how they see themselves. Invetors such as Joseph
Newman are more apt to view them sa "a bunch of narrow-minded people
who have conducted themselves outside the federal law and the human
race." For more than 5 years, Newman, 48, has been frustrated in his
efforts to obtain a patent for an "Energy System Having Higher Output
Than Input." In 1982, the patant office told him that because such a
devive is simply infeasible, his application was denied after
something less than a comprehensive, time-consuming review (Science,
10 Ferbruary [1984], p. 571).
Recently, however, with the help of some unexpected scientific
endorsements, Newman persuaded th U.S. District Court in Washington,
D.C., to order that his application be granted a full review by an
examiner - in short, a second chance. Newman believes that the
decision is a slap in the face for the patant office and a partial
vindication of his claims. Actually, the dispute reveals how easy it
can be for inventors to jerk the patant office around. The ruling,
made by Judge Thomas Jackson on 31. October, places the office in the
difficult position of determining whether Newman's "energy generation
system" -- a powerful electric motor -- is adequately described in
his
application, and whether it is similar or identical to motors with
existing patants. Neither topic was given serious consideration on
the
first go-around, for reasons the patent office believes obvious.
The decision resulted from an unusual hearing in which a phalanx of
attorneys in Newman's employ repeatedly cited patent case law, while
Jere Sears, deputy solicitor in the patent office, repeatedly invoked
the second law of thermodynamics. In its essence, that law states
that
the energy produced by a mechanical device such as Newman's woill
always be less than the energy needed to opeate it. In addition to
basing the case on "all of recorded science", as Sears put it, he
relied heavily on an affidativ from Jacod Rainbow, a former chief
research engineer at the National Bureau of Standards and well-known
debunker of perpetual motion machines. Rainbow has several objections
to the patent application, but his primary claim is that the motor's
output of energy has been measured incorrectly. Although he has not
seen the device or tested himself, he is willing to bet "any money"
that it operates at well under 100 percent efiicency.
As strong as the gouverment's argument was, it was sharply undercut
by
two affidatives. One was written by Mort Zimmerman, the president of
Commercial Technology, Inc., in Dallas. Zimmerman said his 400-person
firm "has independently ... constructed, operated, and tested several
crud prototype devices based on th Newman invention, and has
confirmed for itself that these prototype devices which embody the
Newman invention operate and produce power as claimed by Newman" at
more than 111 percent efficiency. Zimmerman was enthusiastic enough
to
purchase an option for the right to manufacture and sell Newman's
motor in north Texas. (Recently, he told SCIENCE that the motor
"needs
further development for prctical utilization, and we're not
completely
convinced that we can get there.")
The second affidativ was prepared from Lawrence E. Wharton, a
physicist in the Laboratory For Atmospheric Sciences at the Goddart
Flight Space Center in Maryland. Initially, Wharton, who volunteered
his
services to the patent office as a sceptic of Newman's claims,
vigorously attacked Zimmerman's statement. Shortly before the court
hearing,
however, he recanted some of his arguments, and declared that the
motor's
efficiency "is in substantial excess of 100 percent" and perhaps as
high as 600 percent, if Newman's measurements are correct. The change
of
heart came, he said, after Newman argued with him in a long telephone
conversation.
Both of these statements apparently made a strong impression on
William Schuyler, an attorney and one-time commissioner of U.S.
patents who was appointed by the judge as a "special master" to help
resolve some of the technical disputes. In his report, Schuyler
agreed
that the operation of Newman's motor "seems clearly to conflict with
recognized scientific principles relating to thermodynamics and
conservation of energy." But he insisted ther was an "overwhelming"
evidence that the motor's output energy exceeded the external input
energy, adding that "there is no contradictory factual evidence." He
went so far as to state that Newman was entitled to a patent as long
as
it did not conflict with any existing patents.
All of this came as a great shock to Sears. It was he, not Newman,
who
nominated Schuyler. "We felt reasonably safe with aperson of his
background," he explains. In a final pleading to the judge, Sears
asked, "Why are we still paying power bills if Nwman has actually
achieved his claims? The Court should exercise some common sense and
refrain from joining those who apparently believe in the tooth
fairy... Manifestly, this court has no power to abrogate a natural
law."
In his ruling, Judge Jackson accepted the major points of Schuyler's
report, but said he was unwilling to conclude as yet that Newman has
produced a "truly pioneering invention." That decision awaits
aanother
hearing, now set for January. Sears denies that this decision has any
implications for the general patent review process. But one effect
may
be to bar the office from dealing summarily whith such unusual
claimsin the future -- a development that could sharply increase the
examination delays experienced by inventors with more plausible
claims.
To Newman, the dispute has become a crusade. Having spent thousands
of
dollars already in lawyer's fees, consulting fees, and court costs,
he
will soon pay to publish a book describing both his invention and the
patent fight. He says that "the world is fortunate that I'm not
afraid
of a ruckus, I intend to fight this untill hell freezes over."
--------------------------[ end of document ]-----------------------
-------------------------[ start of document ]----------------------
Copyright 1986 Information Access Company;
Copyright American Association for the Advancement of Science
Science
July 11, 1986
SECTION: Vol. 233 ; Pg. 154; ISSN: 0036-8075
HEADLINE: Newman's " energy output" machine put to the test; Joseph
Newman
BYLINE: Sun, Marjorie
BODY:
Newman's " Energy Output" Machine Put to the Test
What's a device with a battery pack, a magnet, and a coil wired
together?
For the past 6 years, Joseph Newman, an inventor from Mississippi, has
been
loudly proclaiming that it's a revolutionary machine which produces more
power
than it uses. The National Bureau of Standards recently issued its own
verdict
after analyzing Newman's machine: "In none of tests did the device's
approach
100%.... Our results are clear and unequivocal," the bureau said.
Newman has gone to great lengths to try to win a patent on his
energy
output machine. When the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office indicated in
1984
that the device did not work, Newman sued the agency. He hired a
publicist, andthe media often portrayed him as an underdog pitted
against the scientific
establishment. Then the court ordered Newman to submit the machine to
the
National Bureau of Standards for testing. Newman reluctantly complied.
A physicist and two electrical engineers from the bureau tested the
machine
in a variety of ways to measure its energy input and output and used
instrumentation that is common in research engineering laboratories.
The sole
power source of the device was 116 9-volt batteries. According to the
test
results, the device's efficiency ranged from 27 to 67%, depending on the
voltage, the power drawn from the device, and the condition of
insulating tape
on one of the parts. (The tape kept burning from sparks generated by
the
machine, which caused the efficiency to drop and had to be replaced
frequently.)
According to John Lyons, director of the bureau's National
Engineering
Laboratory, the device basically converted direct current to alternating
current. He noted that there are several machines already on the market
that dothe same thing, but they run at 90% efficiency or higher.
Newman had court permission to observe the bureau's tests, but never
appeared for any of the experiments, which were conducted between March
and
June. His spokesman Evan Soule said Newman will ask the court to order
the
testing of the test equipment. Newman said in an interview, "I have no
respect
for the National Bureau of Standards. This is a conspiracy against me."
The testing cost the bureau $ 75,000, which it hopes to recoup from
the
patent office. The patent office will submit the results to U.S.
District
Court for the District of Columbia, which will try the case in December.
----------------------------------------------------------
Source : SCIENCE, 10. Feb. 1984, pp. 571-572
Title : Newman's Impossible Motor
Subtitle: The patent office does not believe that Joseph Newman has
built a generator that is more than 100 percent efficient,
but New Orleans does.
Author : Eliot Marshall
At least one physicist in Louisiana swears that the CBS News
anchorman Dan Rather was smiling on 9 January when he reported
that an inventor near New Orleans has built a generator taht
defies the second law of thermodynamics. Others did not see
any smile. What they did see, to their surprise, was an
earnest but fantastic news story that has been running on New
Orleans' biggest television channel being repeated over the
network news.
The story is about an inventor, a self-educated Missisippian
named Joseph Wesley Newman. He was pleased with the CBS broadcast
because it make help him in a fight with the U.S. Patent and Trademark
Office, which has denied him a patent on the grounds of his latest
invention, "smacks of a perpetual motion machine", meaning by
definition it cannot do what it claimed. On 25 June, the U.S District
Court for the District of Columbia will hear a suit Newman has
brought against the patant office arguing that his device does not
aim at perpetual motion but converts mass to energy in a finite
but very efficient manner. He simply wants a patent.
Newman's invention is hard to describe, partly because its behavior
seems to be at odds with the laws of physics and partly because
the details are being kept secret while the ligation goes on.
Newman says his own theory of magnetism is "10,000 times more
important" than the invention itself, which be built to demonstrate
the concept. He claims to have discovered the mechanical principles
of a gyroscopic particle of matter that orbits in a magnetic field
much as an electron orbits in an atomic shell. Several readers of
his theory say it is incomprehensible and would not get attention
were it not for the illustrative devices. The patent Newman seeks
is for an "Energy Generation System Having Larger Output than Input".
Those who have seen it say it is a crude direct current motor
powered by a bank of lantern batteries with a heavy, rotating
magnet at its center.
Readings of the machine's performance, like those of Dan Rather's
expression, depend on the reader. As a result of the TV coverage,
the people of New Orleans may be convinced that Newman has invented
a simple device that produces more energy than it consumes and
could end the world's energy sqabbles if only an arrogan
scientific community would pay attention. That is Newman's
message. It has been taken up and broadcasted in a sort of
crusade by Garland Robinette, the evening news anchorman at
the CBS affiliate in New Orleans, WWL-TV.
Last autumn Robinette aired an eight-part series on Newman's
device, charging that jealous academics and frightened
executives tried to stifle information about it. Robinette
concedes that his intense coverage of Newman's began on a slow
news day when he was looking for a cute show-closer. He claims
he was skeptical at first and saw Newman's invention as
acuriosity. But the story. soon grew into a "monster that I
couldn't let go" when New Orleans viewers, facing a 200
percent increase in utility rates, demanded to know more.
Furthermore, a Missisippi state energy offical and a credible
scientist had recently vouched for Newman's claims. Robinette
sais that since he began reporting on the invention, no one
has come forward to rebut Newman. He cahllenges people to come
to "get this story off my back".
Newman has benefited from the television coverage and from
several weighty endorsements. For example, the television
engineers bached him. Last year, Robinette dragged two
reluctant engineers on WWL-TV staff to Newman's garage in
Lucedale, Missisippi., about 2 1/2 hours from New Orleans.
They werde sceptics at first, but, after looking at
oscilloscope readings and watching the machine recharge
batteries, they agreed with their anchorman that the claims
seemed valid.
Engineer Ralph Hartwell described the tests he ran. When he
arrived at Newman's House, he connected some weak penlight
batteries he had brought along to a small conventional motor
in Newman's back yard. It was allowed to run until the
batteries were drained of power, taking about 1 minute. He
then moved the dead batteries over to the smallest of Newman's
demonstration motors, connected them as a power source, and
started this motor spinning. It ran until it was time for the
camera crew to leave, for something between 1 ans 2 hours.
Finally, the batteries werdetaken fram Newman's machine back
to the conventional motor and reconnected. This time the motor
ran for about 3 minutes. Hartwell ran annother experiment on a
large device and concluded that it also appeared to generate
more power than it used. Other measurements were taken with
oscilloscopes and current meters, but these raedings have been
questioned. After signing a confidential pledge, Hartwell was
allowed to examine the machinee's inner wiring. He is certain
that there is no hidden sourche of energy. Although he feels
uncomfortable about it, he says he could not disprove Newman's
claim and would like to see a universtity run a controlled
test.
Newman's key endorsement comes from Roger Hastings, a
solid-state physicist for the Sperry Univac Company in
Minneapolis. A colleague who knew him as a postdoc fellow at
the University of Virginia says Hastings was regarded as an
adventurous and excellent theorist. Hasting's brother,
ascreener for new ideas for Tonka Toys, met NNewman when he
submitted an invention to Tonka. Although sceptical, Hastings
(the physician) was persuaded to make a trip to Lucedale. "I
used to teach physics at North Dakota University", says
Hastings, "and we would get three or four people a year who
had some kind of device that was going to save the world. I
assumed it was the same." Newman talked Hastings into fly down
for a visit anyway. He returned five times, testing and
retesting the motors, unti he was satisfied that he had made
no mistake. He eventually signed an affidatvit describing the
invention in detail and stating unequivocally that it runs at
greater than 100 percent efficency, producing more power than
it consumes. "I'm sticking my neck out," he says, "because
this is an important issue that should be resolved."
Endorsements such as this are essential for the credibility of
the pateht application. Although Newman has read the works of
the great electrical thinkers Michael Faraday and James Clerk
Maxwell, he is not proficent in math or physics.
Newman is collecting seval more endorsements. He claims to
have won the backing recently of, a Geman aerospace engineer
and a liaison officer between the National Aeronautics and
Space Administration (NASA) and the European space consortium.
Gerald Miller, a mechanical engineer, student of advanced
physics, and electical industiy consultant in California, das
inspected the devices and says, "I saw things that i cannot
explain in conventional terms." He found that the device
produced more energy than it used, adding, "I am absolutely
certain that there is no hidden energy source. Milton Everett,
a mechanical Engineer and director of the biomass program for
the Missisippi department of energy and transportation, says,
"I think Joe has discovered something that the world is going
to benefit from. It's nor a perpetual motion machine; it
converts mass to energy." Excluding inverstors, Newman claims
to have about 27 such endorsers.
But there have been and continue to be prominent doubters.
Oddly, TV anchorman Robinette has given little attention or
credence to the only thorough analysis ever performed on
Newman's device. It was aranged by Everett (before he became a
full convert to Newman's cause) and was paid for by the
Missisippi energy department. Two electrical engineers from
Missisippi State University (MSU), - Karl Carlson and Donald
Fitzgerald - tested one of the Newman's devices last March.
The conditions were unfavourable, because the motor kept
breaking down every "couple of minutes," says Carlson, as a
huge spark from the induction coil shorted out a switch on the
commutator. Thus, while it war fairly easy to measure the
power going in, it was not easy to tell what was coming out.
Newman has built a smaller, less quirky motor since then.
The pattern on the oscilloscope at the output end of a cycle
was difficult to read because as one observer says, the
discharge spark appeared as "a bright flash" or "a mess" on
the face of the screen. Newman sweeps this point aside as a
quibble, saying it merely indicates his machine's tremendous
power. The efficiency claimed for this device is anywhere from
the impossible (slightly over 100 percent) to the fantastic
(800 percent and up). A normal electric motor may be 80
percent efficient, Carlson says, and transformers are
generally in the 90's. Carlson and Fitzgerald found that
Newman's machine was between 55 and 76 percent efficient,
based on their reading of the most favourable oscillograms.
They wrote that they found "an output which is definitely less
than the input." However, they hedged by saying it was
impossible to measure the mechanical energy lost in the
machine, which could affect the rating. They declined to call
Newman's invention a breakthrough but reported that it was
remakably efficient given its "obvious crude configuration."
In a standard tag line, they wrote that "further investigation
is in order." Newman reads this qualified rejection as a
qualified endorsement, explaining when it comes to praising
new discoveries, academisc are mean. He speaks of Carlson and
Fitzgerald with harsher adjectives.
The physics faculties of Loyola and Tulane Universities, both
in New Orleans, have protested Robinette's reports. Daniel
Purrington, Tulane's physics chairman, says: "We all dispute
it. A number of us have told him [Robinette] we think what
he's doing is irresponsible. I talked to him for about 2 hours
about the principles involved." Carl Brans, a theorist at
Loyola, wpote Robinette a two-page letter of protest. "It's
just sensational journalism. In our opinion, it's not worth
the cost," to try to take the measurements that would end the
discussion.
David Keiffer, an experimental physicist at loyola,lon with
other faculty member, offered to check Newman's device if he
would bring it to the laboratory. (Newman's patent attorney is
a physics graduate of Loyola.) But in the preliminary talks,
Keiffer says, Newman insisted that he be present during the
entire procedure. Then he and Keiffer got into an argument.
Newman packed up and left, never to return. The Loyola
physicist also sought to advise WWL-TV's engineers on testing
the device, but this proved to be a touchy proposition,
because WWL is owned by Loyola and was originally founded by
Loyola's physics department. No one wanted the advice to be
interpreted as pressure.
"I have a fairly good reputation here," Robinette says of his
science reporting, "and this thing just has the potential to
make me look like an absolute ignoranmus. So I've tried
desperately to disprove this and all I've done so far is get
more and more people who are convinced."
What about the negative conclusion reached by the MSU
engineers? Robinette maintains (like Newman and Everett) that
while the engineers were testing the machine, they agreed that
it was producing more energy than it used. But "when they went
bacl, they wrote an ambigous response that didn't say it
didn't work and didn't say it did." Robinette mentions that
the MSU engineers are retired, as though to diminish their
reliability. He finds it "very surprising that they never
called to challenge his report, which gave the Newman-Everett
version of events.
Some who might otherwis voice scepticism seem to sypathize
with Newman because of the way the patent office rebuffed him.
In court filings, the patent office concedes that Newman is
correct that it rejected his claims without fully reading the
documents he submitted; that his application was handled by an
examiner - Donovan Duggan - who seems to specialize in
rejecting perpetual machines; that Duggan said he would not
allow a patent on Newman's device, no matter how much
supportive evidence was submited; that the office officials
never tested the Newman device for efficacy and refused to
observe oscilloscope readings of itsinput and output; and
finally; and, finally, that the office issued a patent 1979 to
a man named Howard Johnson for a perpetual motion machine that
Johnson since then agreed is inoperable.
If there were an association od militant patent rejectees,
Newman's battle with the patent office could be its rallying
cause. But there is no such association. However, Newman has
done reasonably well attracting attention by himself,
especially in New Orleans. In a few months, he will get his
day in court.
-----------------------[ end ]-----------------------------
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