A good stage magician knows how to draw your eye away from critical portions of the performance. After all, if a lot of people are looking directly at the hand that pulls the card from in his sleeve, some of them would notice it, and it would take a lot out of the show. So he'll use his other hand to draw your eye away and hide the trick.
In a perpetual motion machine show, the performer needs to keep the investor's eye away from the central premise. If anyone actually measured how much energy is going into the machine and how much is coming out, they would see that the purported free energy device is really an energy sink, and cut off funding. So to distract the mark from the completely incorrect central premise of the perpetual motion machine, the performer finds other problems to visibly contend with. These can be political problems like
Judge Penfield Jackson and
Senator John Glenn blocking Joe Newman's patent application, the mining interests at the CDNX squashing Xogen, or the ever present men in black. A less confrontational (and for my taste, more artful) distraction is part of the invention itself. Automobiles are complex machines, and sometimes fail to work properly even when there is gas in the tank, so it's a time honored tradition to retrofit cars with perpetual motion machines to provide a plethora of reasons why "the car" needs more work.
We can see the misdirection in action in the
2004-08-02 update from Emerging Tec.
The hydrogen generator is still working just fine and the work does not seem to be showing any effect on the components – at least so far. We are running different models on different kinds of water and studying the run characteristics for peak efficiency and energy consumption.
Electrolysis has been working for almost two hundred years. I'm glad nothing has changed. Just what they need to be looking at is how much energy is consumed per unit volume of H2 produced. If it's more than 20 kJ per litre of H2, they need to find another hobby. If it's less than 13 kJ / litre of H2, they need to call Dupont to work out an agreement. If it's less than 11.8 kJ, they need to order their tuxedos and learn to say "please pass the salt" in Swedish.
1. The generator works just fine
2. It is capable of powering anything that does not consume more than 3/10 liter of hydrogen per second without the use of additional units.
Great. Supposing there are no measurement errors, 0.3 litres of H2 per second is about 3.5 kW. So how much power are they drawing to generate this?
3. We have successfully applied it to a small engine and it works just fine WHEN RUN AT A STEADY SPEED AND THIS IS THE PROBLEM!!!!!!!
Uh oh. Nothing about the power. And ALL CAPS ALREADY. Instead, we have a problem with the tuning of a small engine. Did that engine even run right on gasoline? Why not first check the power required to get 300 ml / sec of H2?
4. We are attempting to adapt it to an automobile that is capable of going down the street in a reasonable manner without excess storage of hydrogen. If we suddenly accelerate we do not have responsiveness to sudden need without a surge tank or other storage device, which we flatly do not want to do. In case you haven’t noticed no one is saying a car cannot run on hydrogen – or propane or methane - hybrid cars are doing just that - are they not.
Since nobody is saying that cars can't run on H2, what point is Emerging Tec trying to make by retrofitting a car to run on H2? Why not first verify the perpetual motion claim? By the way, hybrid cars run on gasoline, not H2.
5. A suitable gas that is cheap to produce, burns clean, and is abundantly available - that is the problem. Quite frankly if it was magnetic flux or strategic alignment of the planets or zero point energy, the same people would be throwing stones and the same talking heads would be wagging. All the ones that believe that we will forever be enslaved to the tyranny of a huge infrastructure from which we must obtain, on bended knee, with hat in hand - our daily energy allowance.
Yes, generally, the same critics who say you can't run on a car on water would say that you can't do it with zero point energy, with nothing but magnets, or by altering orbits of nearby planets. But why not take out the meter and figure out how much power it's taking to get 300 ml / sec of H2 before we try attaching rockets to Mars to move cars on Earth?
6. In the face of all this we are saying that we can go get that hydrogen directly from water at the rate of 3/10 liter per second and we believe it is possible to adapt that device to an automobile. Will we – we believe so with all our heart and soul and we are working on it – we do not have an answer yet but we are attempting to get that answer in our target window.
How hard can those guys really be working if they still haven't managed to measure how much electricity they are using?
7. Everyone is finally stateside even if missing a lot of gear, which we are now reproducing.
I don't think they ever had the gear. They want Bill Alexander to buy them gear.
8. Will we make a 100 days – we certainly believe so or we would not have said it – and yes we still want to put one on an Indy car. The problems of sudden acceleration will be solved – when – as soon as it is solved, is all we can say. Remember this has not been done before and we gave or best estimate and a stiff challenge to the engineers.
Why an Indy car? Why not something more pedestrian like a
Delorian or a
1955 Licoln Futura?
9. Now, with this fresh ammunition all you nay sayers and all the combatants can all gang up and say whatever you want – this information is for those who truly wish to see oil freedom – we are boldly stating something and we believe it sincerely. Are we God? – no. Can we predict the future? – no. Do we have the privilege of second guessing what others do? – no. Unfortunately when you are the one doing it instead of the one talking about it you do not have these luxuries.
G-d wouldn't need to take any meters out to figure out how much electrical power the electrolysis unit is drawing. Bill Alexander does need to, but he doesn't do it.
10. Time will tell is all we can say – but we believe strongly enough that we have bet the ranch on it – unlike those that merely talk about it who have absolutely nothing to lose either way.
Too bad about the ranch.
11. One thing that no one can take away from us is that we are producing a lot of hydrogen for very little energy and we are doing it from virtually any kind of water.
What nobody can take from me is my Olympic gold medal for the long jump, my world chess championship, my victory as the lead of an Iditarod champion dog team, my tripple crown.
12. OF COURSE if we can only produce a car that runs with a lag time between rapid acceleration we will have failed as a commercial endeavor as it is not likely people will want to wait 1 1/2 to 2 seconds or more after hitting the accelerator to get the responsiveness they expect. Does that mean that a car cannot run on water – no – it does mean that if we want to sell a lot of them we must fix the acceleration problem and we believe we will. Of course others have fixed this through battery banks and hybrid drives – but – we do not want to do that. We want to do just what we said we believed is possible and we will continue on that path until we solve the acceleration issue and will fight a hybrid device until it is proven that it cannot be done any other way.
Why not just demonstrate the perpetual motion machine and leave it to actual automotive engineers to work on the details?
13. Now that we have a full team some will be working on stationary engines and generation of electricity from a hydrogen driven generator while we continue to work on the acceleration problem.
14. Freedom from oil does not depend on a viable performance from a car but if all we solve is stationary engines we will not have made a fraction of the impact we believe is possible. A car that runs on water is no longer a question – the question is - can it be made commercially viable to the extent that the driving public is satisfied with its performance and is weaned away from gasoline.
Where did that question get answered?
Lastly, do not send me any emails wasting your time or mine by telling us we are crazy, crooks, charlatans or poor bumbling misguided souls. I have those already and have squandered enough time trying to explain, in as reasonable a manner as possible what the challenge is. We are not writing a scientific paper or trying to get a University Building named after us or trying to become famous. We certainly are not trying to convince any one of anything. We are trying to adapt a hydrogen generator that generates 3/10 liter of hydrogen per second to obtain reasonable performance in a variety of applications including cars, truck, busses, boats and stationary engines without excess storage of “ on board “ hydrogen and at a cost that makes it the energy of choice for the next 50 years. Only that and nothing more!
That's the point exactly! Since they don't want to change any minds, it's important not to take any power measurements. Bill Alexander is already convinced enough to keep funding them to work out the issues with "the car", so they just need to keep him away from any electrical meters. Well done.
