Perpetual Motion Firm Steorn Finally Goes Under

Last month, Irish tech startup Steorn permanently shut its doors. Steorn operated as an unsuccessful e-commerce developer from 2000 until 2006, when it announced the development of Orbo, a magnetic battery technology that provided “free, clean, and constant energy,” and rebranded itself as a tech development firm.

Its history since that time is nothing short of bizarre publicity stunts. Steorn never publicly disclosed Orbo’s tech, if it ever existed, and its founder Shaun McCarthy scheduled and canceled a public demonstration in London, claiming the venue’s lights were too hot. McCarthy defended Orbo by frequently referring to the first law of thermodynamics—which his product apparently violated— as mere “scientific dogma” and went as far as recruiting a group of scientists to prove him right (they didn’t). As recently as 2015 they were accepting email orders for a €1,200 Orbo product that did nothing but demonstrate the technology. For reasons P.T. Barnum knows well, Steorn was able to raise €23 million in private funding since 2006 using almost nothing but unfounded claims and hype.

Perpetual motion devices have captured the fancy of many an inventor despite modern science’s belief that they’re impossible to construct. Notable attempts at constructing a machine include the 12^th-century Bhaskara’s mercury-filled wheel, Bessler’s wheel, and Robert Fludd’s water screw, none of which quite worked. On the stranger side, more recent “inventor” David Hamel claimed extraterrestrials sent him plans to build a free energy machine, and that he successfully constructed it but it unexpectedly flew away. Most attempts were disproven at best, while at worst their builders were convicted of fraud due to behind-the-scenes manipulation.

At some point in Steorn’s history McCarthy realized that his product—if it ever worked— went against many scientific theories, but he resolved to try and license his product anyway. That’d be near-impossible in the US, as perpetual motion machines are the only patent applications needing a working physical model along with the design. They usually fall under the so-called utility rejection: if your design doesn’t do what you say it does, you won’t get a patent. Perpetual motion machines were also included on the office’s sensitive application warning system (SAWS) list until the patent office discontinued it last year. Applications entered SAWS—basically a method to flag weird or controversial inventions—when they proposed things like room-temperature superconductors, cures for “incurable” diseases, age extension formulas and suicide machines.

Science periodically revises itself, and there’ve been a few notable patent cases when “impossible” inventions suddenly became possible. Hair regrowth formulas, for example, were once roundly dismissed as impossible; after that point the burden of proof for any invention shifts to the inventor to demonstrate that it is possible. Eventually inventors were able to provide sufficient proof that their concoctions caused a little hair regrowth, so the patent office overturned the rejections and reconsidered the patents. A visit to YouTube finds a healthy smattering of videos claiming to demonstrate perpetual motion, and an equal smattering of commenters believing them to be true on the grounds of “science isn’t infallible.” And they’re right about that, even if the videos they’re choosing to believe are almost certainly hoaxes.

Hair regrowth patents are one thing, but as far as patenting perpetual motion, we’re just not there (yet).