Once upon a time, the greatest minds in Europe were trying to meet the challenge of turning lead into gold. Lead is heavy and cheap. Gold is heavy and quite valuable. Surely it can't be THAT hard to transmute lead into gold, can it? So the greatest alchemists in medieval Europe tried to find ways to convert lead into gold.
It wasn't so easy. After much effort, some guys said they had learned how to convert lead into—well, it looked like gold. The skill needed to do this was that of the magician, or prestidigitation—sleight of hand. They would start out with a piece of lead and put it into a magical machine. After a suitable delay, it came out as (apparently) gold. If the moves were done properly, it could even pass assay. The opportunities for bunco artists were quite good in those days.
People really wanted to BELIEVE that they could get a ton of gold just starting from a ton of lead. The development of modern chemistry put an end to this. These days, almost nobody wastes much time trying to convert dross into gold. There are better projects....
As we've seen, these better ways to generate money involve perpetual-motion (P/M for short) machines. Sometimes, euphemistically, they're called "over unity" or "free energy." They claim they can provide an energy output that is "over unity" compared to the amount of energy input. Of course, people have long been trying to make P/M machines using obscure mechanical or electrical schemes.
Many times, these inventors were sincere—but mistaken—about how their scheme did (or did not) have fatal flaws. But since the demand and desires were so great, some of these "inventors" would make up elaborate fakes of getting out energy with no visible input. Whether the basic scheme was mechanical, chemical, or electrical, they would make sophisticated cheats to keep it running. Some guys used compressed air in hidden chambers to keep it running. Other times, it was hidden batteries or cords and cables activated by a remote partner. So the art of ingenious contrivance made it seem that the energy was generated INSIDE the invention. Actually, it was just the power source that was hidden inside. (Recently a sphere was shown that would rotate for an indefinite time—just sitting there spinning—and it wasn't even in a vacuum. Yeah, it would spin until the hidden battery in it ran down.)
I remember the Dean Drive. That goes way back. Mr. Dean first invented a set of levers so that his invention would climb up a pole or rope (U.S. Patent 2,886,976, filed 1956, issued 1959). Then he claimed that he had improved the invention so the machine would ascend and levitate in the air without any pole or rope! The mechanism he designed was a set of levers and counterweights and gears. The principle was claimed to be "rectifying centrifugal force." This was demonstrated by setting this machine on a bathroom scale and applying ac line power to a motor that turned the machine's input shaft. The scale would show a decrease in weight!
Wow, just keep that up, continue the improvements, and it will levitate right off the ground! (Of course, the possibility that a bathroom scale would have some dynamic nonlinearity and could give a false reading in the presence of ordinary vibration wasn't obvious to most people.) If you could generate a little force with a little power, you could generate MORE levitation force with more power.
So let's connect a whole ARRAY of these "Dean Drives" to a nuclear submarine, which would provide the electrical power. It took only a little arm-waving to prove that this could levitate and lift the nuclear submarine right up into space. Back in 1955, we could use a batch of Mr. Dean's drives to generate our space program without any need for expensive rockets.
I recall reading this in ANALOG Science Fiction magazine. I was a little skeptical. There MUST be something wrong with this scheme. Then I figured it out: If you could use a Dean Drive to generate a force in the middle of the air, without grabbing onto anything, then you could put it on the end of a long arm and provide it some power. The force it generated would start the arm rotating. When the arm got up to a high enough speed (e.g., in a vacuum), that force multiplied by the speed would be LARGER than the input power. One could extract more energy than the input and generate a perpetual-motion machine. Since this was not possible, the Dean Drive was surely a hoax.
Of course, the marvelous disclaimer in the front end of the magazine was a clue: "Everything in this magazine has no basis in fact, and nothing is necessarily true..." (a paraphrase). It was hard for me to reconcile this with the sincere statements in the stories, but I finally figured out where the truth lay.
The study of thermodynamics has been very serious and intense for over 150 years. The First Law of Thermodynamics states that energy is always conserved and is not created or destroyed. Thus, you cannot get out of a system more energy than you put in. (Let's leave e = mc2 out of this.)
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