Perpetual commotion

Huckster or genius? An Irish firm is the latest to trumpet a `perpetual-motion machine’

“Built to last.”

“Lasts an extra, extra long time.”

“It keeps going, and going, and going, and going …”

Sure, that’s what they all say. But be it batteries or bubblegum, everything stops sometime. The only thing that goes on forever is the propensity to make this stuff up.


Perhaps this is what observers of Irish company Steorn are thinking these days. Nearly a year has elapsed since the firm put an ad in The Economist announcing that it had accomplished the impossible: developed a machine that would never stop running, producing unlimited clean power forever.

In other words, it declared it had solved the world’s energy crisis in one stroke. Steorn had entered a province traditionally populated by hoodwinking fraudsters and talentless tinkers alike: the perpetual-motion machine.

Like the fountain of youth, perpetual motion is a collective dream, an inventor’s fable that has drawn ardent believers through the centuries.

Toronto Star