PERPETUAL MOTION.

Dunstan Times, Issue 3383, 18 July 1927, Page 8

PERPETUAL MOTION.

A FRAUD OF A PAST GENERATION

A New Zealand youth claims to have solved the problem, of perpetual motion, which Newton declared to be impossible of solution, states a correspondent of the Manchester Guardian. Many machines have been constructed which their inventors fondly hoped would “go on for ever,” but their efforts might be summed up in the statement of the seventeenth-cen-tury Grench astronomer and mathematician. Philip de la Hire, who said that to discover perpetual motion would be to discover a body at once heavier and lighter than itself, and he added: “I would almost as readily impute ingenuity to vegetables and fossils, to the sensitive plant and the loadstone, or meditation to mussels, eogitatieeness to cockles, periwinkles, and rock oysters!” The perpetual motion machine that had the longest run was described in Blackwood’s Magazine in 1807, and it brought its inventor a guinea a daytill 1 lie fraud was discovered. It was the work of an Edinburgh clockmaker, who was clever enough to deceive “Christopher North” and several Scottish scientists. The machine was alleged to have kept going for several years, and Blackwood’s thought there was, “no reason why it should ndl continue lor ever.” When the clockmaker died, after a profitable tour in the South of England, it was found a watch spring, concealed in a piece of hollow mahogany that was thought to be solid, kept a steel bar in motion for twelve hours, at the end of which the inventor had some way of winding it up again unobserved.