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Joseph Newman’s Energy Machine

As I noted in My Days with Baton Rouge Skeptics, in the late 1980s, when I was in law school, I joined a local skeptics’ group in Baton Rouge, which was somehow affiliated with the national CSICOP, the Committe for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal. I eventually left, in part because of their reticence to criticize religion (as if religion should be exempt from the same type of skeptical criticism we aimed at people who said they had ESP) and, more importantly, because of their refusal to recognize socialism and statism as types of irrationality.

During those days, I was a BSEE then MSEE student at LSU. One of my (and my wife’s) professors was a very smart, patient, soft-spoken man named Ali S. Mirbod. I think he was from Egypt. He died a few years later of a brain tumor. I remember after he would present some difficult issue he would stop and say, “is it clear?” and it sounded like “EEZ EET CLEE-ARR”? Anyway there was at the time this Mississippi guy named Joseph Newman who claimed he had invented a way to harness subatomic “gyroscopic particles” to get free energy. He had all kinds of contraptions wiht battery stacks connected to his machine which powered a light bulb, and he claimed it was some kind of net energy producer.

This is obvious nonsense. So a patent application for it was rejected by the US Patent Office, on the grounds that the invention lacked utility—that it did not work. Since perpetual motion machines are impossible. This led to Louisiana Rep. Bob Livingston getting involved on Newman’s behalf, tests of the machine’s efficacy by my professor Mirbod and by the NIS, and to me corresponding with Livingston about it and writing my own mini-report for the Baton Rouge Skeptics group. The documents are here.

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{ 16 comments… add one }
  • Ronald Treadaway October 12, 2012, 9:02 pm

    Many years ago I remember Joseph Newmans energy maching. I understand that Ham Radio Operators use this techniqe to receive distant radio signals.

  • Joe February 18, 2014, 9:00 am

    Page 4 is missing from the document link, which includes the supposed testimony of the special-master investigator. Are you censoring the available information?

    • Stephan Kinsella February 18, 2014, 9:13 am

      ummmm no?

      • Ritchie July 22, 2014, 2:10 pm

        Is page 4 missing? If, so can the online document be updated to show it?

        • Deeds May 26, 2017, 10:44 am

          It’s a shame there was so much corruption over the whole thing. I mean he paid (I’ve seen the invoice and the payment slip) just under 12k for some top guy appointed by the judge to test his invention and then accept that the judge won’t give you a patent because HE doesn’t believe his OWN top guy (morons) – then the rapist charged Newman 11.5k for the pleasure. Everything about the story stinks and you bloody know it!! Go back to chasing ghosts. you omitted so much of the story – including page fucking 4. this article is trash, written by a wannabe collecting on Newmans fame from the internet – just like all the others. I don’t give a shit if the machine worked on not I DO care about how they treated him. In our faces on TV – watch the documentary no wonder the poor lost it in the end, fed the fuck up with this world. Sad – we killed him basically. or was that God punishing him for stealing when he was a kid – you should know all about that ghost chaser.

          The only obvious nonsense is your ability to know what the fuck you’re talking about – show us some credibility in rubbishing the claim like you did. The patent office would not give him a patent becuase they have to suck the balls of Einstein. And you bloody well know that also. His fake fucking particles and black holes… geezUS.

          • wsfentress December 18, 2019, 11:02 am

            Nice rant. Yeah, you gotta feel for Mr. Newman. Had something similar happen to me!! Trying not to be bitter about it.

  • Deeds May 26, 2017, 10:44 am

    moderate that last message – go on I dare you.

  • Vince July 14, 2017, 3:38 pm

    You are obviously another crooked crony in the pockets of pathetic disgusting bureaucrats. You are the type of people in this world who destroy rather then move forward the humanity on this planet. How dare you speak about science you know absolutely nothing about. This man’s life was destroyed attempting to do something good for the world. Yet the crooked cronies and crooked politicians and crooked government would not allow this machine to exist as they would loose everything related to the energy field. You Stephan are just scum as they are. I would love to meet you one day; you coward, phony pathetic scum of the Earth.

  • Vinyasi January 27, 2018, 5:21 pm

    I contest Newman’s claim that his device was overunity on the grounds of an oversight: his device received extra input from the spinning magnetic field of the permanent magnet. This creates an AC input which blends with the DC input in his coil. The DC input is dominated by a high voltage and low amperage due to the resistance of his massive coil impeding current flow. The AC input is dominated by high amperage and low voltage due to the very low inductance of his spinning bar magnet/s relative to the excessively high inductance of his massive coil and the spinning field’s low impedance. This creates an isolation transformer between the coil and his spinning magnetic field. This transformer effect is a step down transformer from the perspective of the battery pack heading toward the spinning magnetic field. This step down transformation, plus the isolation of his circuit into two separate subcircuits, creates and sustains a dipole of a high voltage square wave (chopped by his commutator) versus a high amperage sine wave of his spinning bar magnet. These sine waves are well known to be spatially helical in shape despite oscilloscope tracings depicting them as flattened sine waves. Doing the math, his device is merely a few parts per million in its coefficience of performance. Not overunity at all. Despite this dour analysis, permanent magnets do not readily lose their magnetic charge if kept at room temperature. But their charge was installed during their manufacture at an energy cost. And the Newman motor requires an outside source to initiate spin not unlike a hand crank on an early model Ford Model T or the electric starter motors of modern gasoline engines in automobiles of today. But due to positive feedback amassing voltage on the coil, the rotation of the motor accelerates beyond that of its initiating thrust coming from outside itself until it reaches its ideal idling speed without load. As an electric generator, the Newman motor sucks. As an EV motor requiring a rapidly varying speed of rotation, the Newman motor is a disappointment. But as a mechanical producer of torque spinning at a constant rate, the Newman motor excels. This, I’ve garnered from attempting to simulate the Newman motor using the simplified model of a transformer for his coil and spinning bar magnet/s. I have had to account for all energy sources in order to get a negative flow of current to manifest at the battery pack and still keep impedances relatively low throughout the circuit. This is when I made my discovery of the inherent inefficiency of the Newman motor when I had to provide an electromagnetic model to the spinning magnetic field of his permanent magnet/s. Still, as motors go, it is very unique and worth the Patent Office revisiting their short-sighted counter claims to Newman’s lack of accurate analysis by awarding a patent, posthumously, in honor of their – and Newman’s – mistake.

  • C. E. S. April 11, 2018, 8:58 am

    Just came across this. It’s 2018. Armrest couch potato scientist discussing Joseph Newman’s Machine who disregard the over 30 Scientists and techs with credentials up the backside who put their reputations on the line after thoroughly testing Mr. Newman’s machine need to get a life. The patent office has become a gate keeper for GE and companies like that looking for stuff to steal and modify for their own gain.
    Anyone who has been at their doors knows this for a fact. Newman’s machine works, plain and simple and anyone with a third grade proper education could build it properly and it would do exactly as Mr. Newman said it would.
    Sadly, our government run propaganda centers known as public schools keep this knowledge from the masses by teaching 150 year old physics as the gospel of innovation instead of cutting edge real scientific endeavor.
    Remember, the Carnegies (who own the centers that make the school books) said in a speech in 1990, 1995, 2000, 2005, 2012 that they need worker/managers, not free thinkers for their enterprises.
    Whoever wrote this article is a prime example of a braindead drone regurgitating what his corporate masters have fed him.

    • Truth June 30, 2019, 9:28 pm

      Very well said C.E.S.
      The patent office fought Newman tooth and nail to stop him, and the crooked judge helped to bankrupt Newman. They would not have fought him so viciously if his invention didn’t work…… Period.

  • MikeA July 21, 2019, 9:21 am

    Wow. Are you sure you’re a EE? Your letter comes across as written by a dopey kid that tries to sound smarter than he is. You simply site third party references from those opposed to Newman. You never tested the device, nor have you tried to reproduce the results with unbiased observation. This is called junk science my friend. It’s amazing how the internet provides a platform for every kook like you to have a voice while trying to silence the voice of others by inferring they are the kooks.

    Regarding NIST: It is well documented that they did not test the motor as specified by the manufacturer (something you conveniently neglected to mention or of which you were ignorant because you didnt do you due diligence). The motor was to be run with a floating ground, but NIST grounded the motor in opposition to the schematics provided. Its quite possible the excess energy was sunk to ground.

    Regarding the patent office: It is their job to issue patents to protect unique intellectual property, not to determine workability. One glaring example from this very decade is that Elizabeth Holmes recieved 200 patents for devices that didnt work and of which she supplied the patent office few details. Why weren’t you writing nonsense papers about that?

    • Stephan Kinsella July 23, 2019, 10:49 am

      The PTO is supposed to issue patents only for devices that have utility–i.e., that work, and it’s long-standing practice to treat something that appears to be a perpetual motion machine as having no utility. So in those cases, the PTO can request more proof of utility than the inventor’s mere claims. Newman was never able to provide this proof. The fact that the PTO sometimes grants patents for things that doesn’t work, doesn’t mean Newman’s machine works.

  • Don Turco December 27, 2019, 3:59 pm

    The Patent Office requires a working verified model for only one thing. Yep you guessed it, anything that looks and smells like a perpetual motion machine. Newman could have taken his plans to any number of people, had a new one built, had it tested and then, if in fact it worked, THe PO would have issued him his patent. He didn’t do that. I wonder why.

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