He proposed a steam train powered by perpetual motion that would replace water with ammonia, which has a lower boiling point and would evaporate without the need to boil water. And while many of them can operate for long periods of time, none of them work indefinitely.Īnother type of perpetual motion machine was proposed by British veterinarian and inventor John Gamgee in the 1880s. There are other variations of the overbalanced wheel, some of which incorporate weights or rolling balls. Supposedly, the downward force created by this imbalance would be enough to keep the wheel spinning forever. As the wheel spins, the mercury flows to the bottom of each reservoir, making one side of the wheel heavier than the other. Here’s how it works: A vertical wheel contains curved reservoirs of mercury, a heavy liquid metal. The idea behind this machine and others of a similar design is to preserve energy by incorporating falling or turning components. The overbalanced wheel, or Bhaskara’s wheel, is one of the oldest perpetual motion machines proposed. Still, it hasn’t stopped engineers from attempting to circumvent or outright ignore the laws of physics. Energy can be neither created nor destroyed, only changed into other forms of energy. To work, a perpetual motion machine would have to produce more energy than it takes to operate, rendering the idea impossible. The first law of thermodynamics, also known as the law of conservation of energy, asserts that the energy within a system remains constant. Too bad the laws of thermodynamics prevent it. The world has an ongoing love affair with fossil fuels formed from a dwindling supply of prehistoric plants and animals, so you can imagine the appeal of a limitless, free source of energy. This is the idea behind perpetual motion, a concept that has fascinated and confounded mechanical engineers for hundreds of years. Imagine a device so efficient that, once activated, it would work until the eventual heat death of the universe.
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