The Most Incredible Attempts at Perpetual Motion Machines

It is said that the hardest part about building a perpetual motion machine is figuring out where to hide the battery.

While definitely not a perpetual motion machine, the Elektro Dumper (45 ton dump truck with a 600 kWh battery), is an interesting parallel technology. It is the world's largest EV and it recharges itself during operations. Its designers identified a use case that leveraged the EVs regenerative braking. The dump truck, at 45 tons empty, ascends a 13-percent grade and takes on 65 tons of ore. With more than double the weight going back down the hill, the regenerative braking system recaptures more than enough energy to refill the charge the eDumper used going up.

My favorite things about perpetual motion machine attempts is it just shows how much you can conserve energy or use what you have to create as much energy as possible and is really powerful in that way.

a super easy way to debunk a perpetual motion machine is: the more complex it is, the more energy it costs to run. more complex usually means more mechanical parts, heavier weights, bigger contraptions. which also means more air friction, friction friction, harder to move, etc etc. therefore making it less resistant to entropy and more prone to general failure.

I see perpetual motion machines as lessons in efficiency rather than sources of energy. The closer you get to 100% efficiency the more convincing your perpetual motion machine becomes.

I have been working on a perpetual motion machine since I was 11. The funny thing is I can't seem to stop.

I will say that the pursuit of perpetual motion, much as the pursuit of phlogiston, panacea, and the philosopher's stone, has been a good thing in the long run. While alchemy led to the development of chemistry, the pursuit of perpetual motion has led to discoveries in everything from machine milling techniques and lubrication to gear efficiency and photovoltaics. While the pursuit of perfection is a guaranteed failure, the pursuit itself is what holds the value.

I have an old physics textbook, the 1892 edition of Elementary Lessons in Electricity and Magnetism by Silvanus Thompson. In a chapter describing some of the batteries in use at the time it mentions that the Clarendon laboratory bell had been ringing for over forty years and it is powered by a Zamboni dry pile battery. This is on pages 149-150 of the book.

I love the fact that a potential huge discovery in battery technology is hindered by the simple fact that nobody wants to stop the record run.

I feel like attempting a perpetual motion machine is a rite of passage for any nerd. My friends and I did when we were 11, and it was based on siphoning water into a series of sealed containers and then trying to have the final container refill the first one. It was actually a really great lesson in the futility of the exercise for us. We worked so hard on it all weekend trying to solve all the issues we encountered, but each solution created a new problem of course. We gave up and played video games.

one of my favorite engineering works is the Jaeger LeCoutre table clock, which uses the difference in temperatures to wind up tension for the clock. just 1 degree difference is enough for it to run for a day. That means the difference of night and day temperatures is enough to make it run in perpetual... until years down the road it needs a service.

Simon himself is a prime example of something perpetual. The perpetual creation of channels😂

I think it's more impressive how this guy can perpetually keep hosting new channels.

I think the most fascinating thing about perpetual motion machines is that although impossible, anything that comes close eventually reveals itself to be running on some sort of external source. Meaning eventually someone will make one again and again until we discover what energy is being inputted. If we go far enough we'd probably create a machine that runs on the ever increasingly obscure forms of energy. A radiometer runs on infared radiation but it was still an amazing discovery from a seemingly perpetual machine, one by accident. Basically any perpetual machine ends up as a measuring device for energy.

You can buy the first type of clock in Switzerland. A compressible chamber holds a temperature sensitive gas resting against a large spring, winding the clock. 1c in temp difference makes them run for a day. An indoor solar and gravity powered clock. Genius, especially for 1850s.

As a New Zealander having watched a fair bit of your content, seeing a mention of us was quite thrilling, followed up immediately with a cackle at your pronunciation of "Otago"! Thanks Simon! (Oh tah go)

In high School, my friend had this calculator that worked for a few months without batterys. In early march, the batterys accidentaly fell out of the device, and we ended up throwing them out due to rust, surprisingly though, it kept running. It didn't have a solar power cell, like many calculators do, my guess is that it had a weird slow capacitor, but even then, it would be incredible, considering it was allways powered on up until late december.

It's always more beneficial when things are physically explained than the typical "it won't work because physics"

I one hundred percent thought you were vsauce

I still respect those that attempt such a machine. I know it's impossible, they (hopefully) know it's impossible, but the lengths they go to are crazy, and the efficiency of some of these machines is truly amazing. Maybe the real goal is just getting as close to 100% as possible while realizing we will never surpass it.