Adam Savage vs The "Perpetual Motion" Machine!

hey everybody Adam Savage from tested and I am in the Royal Society in London England and I'm with Virginia hello hello and uh you guys have pulled this out this is this is a perpetual motion machine which we all know is impossible Virginia can you tell me what's going on I can't tell you exactly how it works because it's a secret which we keep in a sealed envelope we've been told not to open so there's only two people who know the mechanism behind how this works and they work at the University of Nottingham and they are friends of the creator of the perpetual motion machine so he's a lot no David Jones who designed the machine and passed away in 2017 and he bequeathed his machine and his collections to a fellow of the Royal Society called Martin poliakov who does his own kind of YouTube videos about the periodic table so people might be familiar with him and he donated this to the Royal Society it's moving now is it always moving it's moving it's always moving I I don't turn it on or off I mean it will eventually spinning away in our storerooms downstairs it will start to slow down so yeah then so every so often we have to send it back to the University of Nottingham where they know the secrets of how to service it and keep it moving that tells me I think what I needed to know okay I've inadvertently giving away the secret well so what you said is that it runs it clearly runs for an extended period of time but at least two years we've seen it running without intervention yeah that still tracks with what I'm thinking about having looked at this and then you send it to someone who gives it a bit of a servicing yeah exactly okay um my my first impression perpetual motion is is impossible but if it's at all possible it is a it's a war of attrition it is a battle of tiny tiny tiny values um I noticed that the primary event that the primary bearings that this sits on are encased in acrylic or glass uh and I was wondering why until I asked myself if these three uh boxes at 120 degrees opposition to each other are not a pile a battery uh and so if they are some a chemical battery and this thing is insulated then I move on to these two items of which given my very very limited unschooled knowledge of electricity I might imagine that one is an anode and one is a cathode and that there is a way in which uh oh there's a way in which that this could simply be a a Charged device moving past a magnet uh creating a little bit of impetus um from the other side perhaps some type of electrical influence that is allowing these cups to both dispense with and then receive a charge but then there is this other thing which is this copper pipe which runs uh from one side of the wheel down and across the bottom and up to the other and it is open on both sides except for a heat shrunk I'm sorry uh what do you call it a Heat sinked box with a pair of coaxial cable inputs and this extra there's a valve there's this piece over here is a valve and so that leads me to wonder if there isn't some pressurization or some chemical reaction that allows that allows a little bit of extra impetus to be imparted through the through the copper pipe that it's not just one thing that it's a pair of things happening in concert oh right okay no no these these these two things are magnets these have to be magnets that's a popular interpretation yeah and so when you move uh wound you move iron past a magnet you get a charge but so then what do you do with that charge hold on oh there's another aspect too which is this box the dreadco box that I wrote off as the label first yeah has um what looks like a light meter input on both sides so this makes me also wonder if there isn't some um solar some some light based charge going into this because this doesn't well we don't know that this doesn't go anywhere I mean I should say when we keep it in storage it's down in our basement dorms which you've seen and when there's no one in there the lights are all up the lights are so it's not I've got a lot of exposure to Natural Light unless we bring it out to show people like you but it might not need much no maybe it needs five minutes it's all being opened every now and then um but um yeah so dreadco which it says here is is the name of the company which was kind of fake company created by David Jones this is David Jones and he was the writer of a popular science column and he used the pen name didalus and then he wrote about these kind of Fantastical Creations like perpetual motion machines um which kind of pushed beyond the boundaries of what was really possible in science so and then he he challenged people to figure out how he got it to work basically so if there are elements here that you're not sure they fit into your theory it's not impossible that those are decoys that he might have been using to distract people well that's where this box come in there's almost too much going on with it that makes me curious there's also no way in which these three boxes are in any way electrically con connected to each other because they're all mounted to the same piece of metal okay so I don't think that they're a pile but we are moving the coil past potentially a coil past a magnet so I suspect I suspect that these are magnets and that they are connected into these two pieces right here and that these boxes moving through the magnets is allowing a charge to both is allowing an anode and a cathode to work that it is effectively a super rudimentary motor deconstructed and split apart well I can't tell you if you're right it's the frustrating thing um but you know there are the people who are in the know tell me that when they eventually found out the secret they were a bit disappointed they preferred it when it remained an exciting mystery so then I submit that it's a motor I submit that it's a motor because that is absolutely how I would feel if someone said it was a motor I'd be like yeah disappointed we have actually got just over here the the envelope yes yeah so here we go it's it's a repurposed uh tax envelope UK tax office so this is so Martin poliakov who is the fellow who donated it to the society he persuaded his friend David Jones to write down the secret before he passed away and uh and David gave him this envelope with the secret in unbelievable um yeah and I mean he made other designs of perpetual motion machine as well so this one was made for uh in the 1980s for the British Association kind of exhibition which is Big Popular Science exhibition and that's when they ran this competition to see if anyone could figure out how it worked Apparently one person guessed the answer correctly and he wrote a letter back to them uh David Jones wrote a letter back to them saying he would neither confirm nor deny that it was correct and that's the closest he ever got to giving it away hmm but yes these are a couple of other designs I don't know if that helps you figure things out but these are some of his other but we all know that he's necessarily they work in the same way on the same basis just with different sort of outcomes but I still see the same thing I see boxes moving through these u-shaped what I would assume would be a [Music] are you a bar a U-shaped magnet and here again a similar see okay now that I'm maybe these don't have anything to do with because they're all insulated they're not completing any kind of circuit I think maybe that is also I think it might also be a distraction and the light that's coming in might be a distraction this we did a whole episode on this and it was we got more mail yeah for that one episode and we actually had a difficulty even in framing the episode because you can't prove a negative sure there's no there's no percentage in that yeah so we decided to buy some kits that promised over unity and when none of them worked we said well we've given it our best shot but something tells me this is not the first um perpetual motion machine that has arrived at the Royal system absolutely not so people seem to persist in the opinion that the Royal Society would give a prize to anyone who solved this perpetual motion mystery impossibility there never was okay people kept writing and writing to the Royal Society well into the 20th century saying I've solved it I want a prize there was no such prize there was a longitude prize of course um but yeah no no price you guys were a little late and paying that one we were a bit overdue on that bill yeah um so I've got an example here um which is from the 18th century um of a debunking of a perpetual motion machine and so this is um a document written by um John Theophilus de saguier I don't know if I'm pronouncing his name right he was a French Huguenot who came to London um and in the 17 in 1714 Isaac Newton appointed him as the curator of experiments at the Royal Society so they had these weekly meetings at the society and he would be responsible for demonstrating things that the fellows had requested or that designs for experience that he'd come up with um and one of the papers that he presented to them um was about this um so a wheel at Hesse Casale made by um or therius um so or Furious was a sort of scientific pseudonym pseudonym for a German entrepreneur whose name real name was Johann Brussel and he came up with this pseudonym by a cipher where he arranged all the letters of the alphabet in a circle and then used the exact opposite letters to his surname to come up with a pseudonym so that he's he became known as all Furious yeah I like that it's cool right I kind of want to figure out what mine would be now yeah um but uh yeah so he was an entrepreneur a sort of um he had various clients with an alchemist and watchmaker and then he he came up with these perpetual motion unbalanced wheels and he took them around Europe and Royal courts were engaging him and they really believed that he had come up with it that he'd solved them yeah um but but yes so but desergie at the Royal Society explains why um the so-called um perpetual motion um so it's of late so much talked on and on account of it it's wonderful phenomenon that a great many people have believed um it to be actually a self-moving engine so accordingly he has attempted to um debunk it basically because he's saying a lot of time and money is being spent on this oh and it's a waste of time essentially so yeah he goes on to outline why um it's not possible that a weighted wheel could continue to move just based on gravity and weight so people have reported to him that they could hear weights moving in his wheel um and when um a mathematician did sort of try to examine it it's crazy he smashed it he smashed it up he didn't want them looking at it so the debate goes on whether he really believed it or whether he that he created a petrol motion machine or if he knew it was a fraud but he got a lot of people on board and this is that this is um disaggregate's diagrams sort of showing why the weights and the motion of gravity wouldn't um sort of sustain indefinitely and this is a very common approach to the professional machine I've seen many designs along this using gentle curves that reset and it is all about can you get it to one to move at the halfway point and yeah it's just never gonna happen we've got something even earlier actually than this 1721 we've got a book from 1588 which is actually even before the society existed but um fellows very kindly like to sometimes give us books from their collection they've done that throughout history so this was donated this book from 1588 and it's by um a book of various and ingenious machines is the title of it um although it's in Italian and French um and yeah so the engineer who wrote this as Agostino romelli an Italian engineer and it's mostly water wheels but this one specifically um he mentions that the person who commissioned this water wheel from him said that he was concerned that his stream we can see the stream source of water running at the top that it wasn't always strong enough to power the wheel so could he please put a perpetual motion machine device in the middle I don't know why you'd ever need both if you'd achieved the actual perpetual motion machine in the middle you would surely not need the water at all but um oh and so is this what this is you see he describes it as the inner wheel was designed at the request which looks very similar yeah a couple hundred years later a hundred years uh of this of the of the same sort of arrangement of gentle curves around that axis wow oh so none of this is part of the perpetual motion that's just that's the water wheel part of it and then he's added this Edition um so yeah as I said it's in French and Italian so I I but part of it um I had a rough translation of and the tone of it to me was as if ramelli as an engineer knew that this was nonsense he says I have included this so that people may include it where it is relevant you know I think he knew that that was never but he wasn't going to be so forward as to say it was a lie or that the gentleman was mistaken exactly fair enough yeah I think it was delicate way of saying I took the commission but really it's not a Perpetual washing machine that is thrilling this is an amazing group of artifacts right because this is a hugely humans are compelled by this idea I mean every single time I know that when this video goes up they'll be in the comments someone goes what about a generator and a motor yeah I mean this machine got a massive response when it was put on display in the 1980s and people were invited to write their letters to David Jones or didalus as he called himself and to try and explain it and so we've got it also in the archive all these different suggestions of how it might work I'm gonna be making some day I'm taking pictures and it'll be making some diagrams I'll send you what I think yeah I'll send you my actual breakdown of what I think it's very interesting yeah we'll add it to the collections so you will be in the Royal Society archive I don't know if you would like now it's guaranteed that you're gonna get some feverish drawings okay great yeah thank so much this is really thrilling it's been a pleasure to talk to you [Music]

Channel: Adam Savage’s Tested

Views: 4,667,753

Keywords: tested, tested adam savage, royal society, brady haran, objectivity, the royal society, perpetual motion, perpetual motion machine, test, physics, machine, mystery, theory, david jones, secret, laws of thermodynamics physics, laws of thermodynamics, newton, conservation of energy, conservation of momentum, Martin Poliakof, numberphile brady haran, adam savage royal society, what is a perpetual motion machine, what is perpetual motion

Id: QdEdYfxMx-0

Length: 15min 13sec (913 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 03 2023