Long story short, he brought this little fan-driven motor to my lab bench and asked me to test the batteries connected to it with a voltmeter. Then, he started it turning (he input mechanical energy) and let it go on for a long time. The fan was kept running by the batteries connected to the motor. The key is, one of the batteries was running the motor against the resistance, while the other battery was supposed to be charged at a rate greater than the first battery's depletion!
Afterwards, I tested the batteries and found that the voltage reported was actually higher than before he started. What I should've realized at the time was the energy he input was far greater than the resistance the fan encountered. Voltage is not energy. But at the time, I told him I was a bit confused. I adamantly declared his idea of a FED was nonsense, but I told him I'd have to go home and think over how his device generated more voltage in the battery. Also, I should've made him stay there for more than 4 minutes.
The difference in the energy put in (when he started the motor by spinning the fan) versus put out would've become quite clear as the fan eventually slowed and stopped. The initial turn of the fan's rotor put in exactly as much charge into the batteries as they lacked, as this was the load on the motor.
Basically, the guy ran Bedini's "School Girl Experiment":
First, when you click the link of the schematic above, you see that this guy is spouting off complete and utter nonsense:
On this slide, we show a theoretical scheme which several researchers have discovered and used to build simple free energy motors. In this scheme, we drive an ordinary d.c. series motor by a two wire system from an ordinary battery. The motor produces shaft horsepower, at -- say -- some 30 or 40 percent efficiency, compared to the power drained from the battery. This much of the circuit is perfectly ordinary.WTF? Anyway, the technical take-down of all FEDs based on this sort of scheme can be found here by Eric Krieg. Krieg is like the James Randi of "over unity device" skepticism.
The trick here is to get the battery to recharge itself, without furnishing normal power to it, or expending work from the external circuit in the process.
To do this, recall that a charged particle in a "hooking" del-phi river moves itself. This is true for an ion, as well as for an electron. We need only make the del-phi in correct fashion and synchronize it; specifically, we must not release the hose nozzles we utilize to produce our del-phi river or waves.
The inventors who have discovered this have used various variations, but here we show a common one. First, we add an "energizer" (often referred to by various other names) to the circuit. This device makes the del-phi waves we will utilize, but does NOT make currents of electron masses. In other words, it makes pure Ø-dot. It takes a little work to do this, for the energizer circuit must pump a few charges now and then. So the energizer draws a little bit of power from the motor, but not very much.
Now, if this sounds familiar to my long-time readers, they may recall that I mentioned a company called Steorn using similar technology/concepts as the aforementioned device. I said at the time not to hold your breath waiting on a demonstration, and...whattya know? I was right!
The fellow at UF with the earthshatteringly-important FED is named Rick Friedrich. Rick runs truthinheart.com, specializing in publication of various obscure titles in theology...and overunity electronic technology developed by John Bedini and Tom Bearden. His page describing John Bedini's new book (that he has published) alludes to the details of the devices that supposedly defy the 1st and 2nd laws of thermodynamics (LoT). John had these details up on a web page, now archived here, that includes scans of the patents he received and shows the schematic diagrams for these devices.
Although his credentials appear to have come under some scrutiny, Bearden's work got published (somehow) in an obscure journal. You can read his scans of the article here at his site. Probably the funniest thing from the article is the circular references -- he says that his results have been independently verified by "Naudin", and supports this with an endnote [2]. Go to reference 2, and you find the words, "Communicated in Ref. 1". Hilariously, reference 1 is quite difficult to even understand, but claims a paper by Bearden himself, in Adv. in Chem. Phys. 114. This is a print-on-demand book selling for $245. Not exactly an easy reference to check, but the table of contents doesn't mention Bearden or any of his co-authors.
Basically, if something sounds too good to be true, it is.
See here for a skeptical investigation into a similar bunch of nonsense perpetrated by Dennis Lee.
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