1. ABSURDITIES
In this class may be included those inventions which have been made or suggested by honest but ignorant persons in direct violation of the fundamental principles of mechanics and physics. Such inventions if presented to any expert mechanic or student of science, would be at once condemned as impracticable, but as a general rule, the inventors of these absurd contrivances have been so confident of success, that they have published descriptions and sketches of them, and even gone so far as to take out patents before they have tested their inventions by constructing a working machine. It is said, that at one time the United States Patent Office issued a circular refusal to all applicants for patents of this kind, but at present instead of sending such a circular, the applicant is quietly requested to furnish a working model of his invention and that usually ends the matter. While I have no direct information on the subject, I suspect that the circular was withdrawn because of the amount of useless correspondence, in the shape of foolish replies and arguments, which it drew forth. To require a working model is a reasonable request and one for which the law duly provides, and when a successful model is forthcoming, a patent will no doubt be granted; but until that is presented the officials of the Patent Office can have no positive information in regard to the practicability of the invention.
The earliest mechanical device intended to produce perpetual motion is that known as the overbalancing wheel. This is described in a sketch book of the thirteenth century by Wilars de Honecourt, an architect of the period, and since then it has been re-invented hundreds of times. In its simplest forms it is thus described and figured by Ozanam:
"Fig. 5 represents a large wheel, the circumference of which is furnished, at equal distances, with levers, each bearing at its extremity a weight, and movable on a hinge so that in one direction they can rest upon the circumference, while on the opposite side, being carried away by the weight at the extremity, they are obliged to arrange themselves in the direction of the radius continued. This being supposed, it is evident that when the wheel turns in the direction ABC, the weights A, B, and C will recede from the center; consequently, as they act with more force, they will carry the wheel towards that side; and as a new lever will be thrown out, in proportion as the wheel revolves, it thence follows, say they, that the wheel will continue to move in the same direction. But notwithstanding the specious appearance of this reasoning, experience has proved that the machine will not go; and it may indeed be demonstrated that there is a certain position in which the center of gravity of all these weights is in the vertical plane passing through the point of suspension, and that therefore it must stop."
Fig. 5.
Fig. 6.
Another invention of a similar kind is thus described by the same author: