Despite the fact that a perpetual motion/free energy machine, which just generates energy out of nothing and keeps going on forever violates the most basic laws of physics, it has been a goal of mankind for centuries. The train wreck of the Steorn demonstration reminded me of some interesting reading on the subject I had done some time ago. At one time, before Newton’s laws were established, the pursuit of perpetual motion, for power generation was serious science.

However in the early 20th century a very interesting device was created which, at first appearance seemed to be the real thing, a true perpetual motion machine. The device was quite ingenious and had some in the scientific community thinking that an exception to the laws of thermodynamics had been discovered. It was created by R. J. Strutt, a well known scientist and made use of the latest rage in the scientific world: The substance radium, which had only recently been refined and produced by Marie Curie.

The Device was known as “Strutts Radium Clock” and consisted of a vacuum vessel with two small strips of foi which hung above a sample of radium to make an “electroscope.” as the radium decayed, it released charged particles (predominantly beta particles), which are high energy electrons. These caused a charge to build up on the foil strips, making them repel each other. They would spread apart until they came in contact with contacts which would discharge them to ground.

Here is a description, but there’s a mistake in it:

(click to enlarge)

Did you catch it? The writeup claims that radium can emit radiation forever, because no change in mass or radiation could be detected. This is not the case. Radium-226, the isotope used, has a half life of 1602 years. For this reason, the change in decay would be far too small to detect with equipment of the era during reasonable periods of time. It wasn’t long before the machine began to yield it’s secrets. First traces of helium were detected in the vessel (these being the biproducts of alpha decay, which emits helium ions.) Later, the half-life of radium-226 was established and then Einstein came along and explained where all the energy came from and it turned out the laws of thermodynamics still held. Still, it’s an interesting piece of history

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 11th, 2007 at 6:18 pm and is filed under Culture, Enviornment, Good Science, Nuclear. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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