FRINGE

Patently Curious

One sunny morning in the environs of Washington, D.C., I’m standing in an overgrown suburban backyard, slapping mosquitoes while trying to get a photograph of a “free energy” model railroad car on a small folding table. Tom Valone lines up the car, lets it go, and an array of cunningly oriented magnets draws it forward. The little car accelerates, runs off the end of its track, and tumbles into the grass.

This is more impressive than I had expected. But what would happen if the track were circular? Would the magnets on either side of the track push the little car around and around indefinitely?

Valone isn’t sure about that. “You should look at a different patent from the same inventor,” he says. “It uses magnets in the form of archways. Two witnesses have told me that when they visited the inventor, they saw a model running in a circle continuously for two hours.”

I always seem to have this kind of problem with free-energy demos. The real demo is someplace else, or it happened at some other time, or the people who saw it have disappeared, or the inventor refuses to talk to a journalist because he’s afraid that his idea will be stolen. “Where, exactly, does the inventor live?” I ask.

“In Virginia.”

Valone’s own house is in Virginia. “So why haven’t you visited him?”

“Oh, I’m too busy.”

This is the odd thing about Tom Valone. He has a fevered interest in fringe phenomena, catalogs them with obsessive zeal, yet seems more interested in describing them than evaluating them. As he puts it, “I hope to create a ripple effect. If I make people aware of things, their perception of what they should do on their own may change.”

Despite his unconventional interests, Valone has a solid background in conventional science. He received a Bachelor of Science in physics and a Bachelor of Science in electrical engineering at SUNY Buffalo in 1974, and remained at SUNY, teaching college classes in subjects such as engineering physics, technical physics, electronics, digital logic, microprocessors, and environmental science. After he received a master’s in physics in 1999, he took a job as an examiner at the U.S. Patent Office, specializing in the utterly conventional subject of electrical testing and measurement.

He had an ulterior interest, however. “Academic scientists,” he says, “tend to value journal publication exclusively. That’s their benchmark for credibility. If they don’t see it in an academic journal, they don’t think it’s true. But this is a very tunnel-vision approach. Patents provide an alternative view of innovations occurring in the world, from authors who usually don’t publish journal articles.”

And so in his spare time he gathers information — patents, especially — on every obscure invention he can find. At this point he is probably the most broadly informed authority on the kind of basement tinkering that ventures into gray areas beyond the conventional laws of physics. While most of us tend to dismiss such work, Valone is like an open-minded juror who regards a defendant as being innocent until proven guilty. In his world, claims are worthy of consideration until proven false.

His open-mindedness led him into big trouble in 1999, when he conceived a “Conference on Future Energy.” He obtained permission to hold it in an auditorium at the State Department, taking advantage of an Open Forum Speakers Program that existed “to explore new and alternative views on vital policy issues of the day.” Unfortunately, “new and alternative” didn’t mean the same thing to them as it did to him.

Robert Park, a PR writer for The American Physical Society (APS), is notorious for denigrating, ridiculing, humiliating, and eviscerating any individual who propounds propositions that Park, in his wisdom, finds implausible. When he learned that Valone’s conference would include a former Los Alamos scientist discussing cold fusion, he was appalled that federal real estate should host such heresy. He contacted Peter Zimmerman, who had just been hired as a State Department science advisor, and Zimmerman duly used his clout to have the conference evicted.

Physicist Tom Valone looks at technologies most scientists consider junk.

By Charles Platt

Tom Valone outside the main building of the Patent Office, where he is employed as a patent examiner.

Photography by Charles Platt

Worse was to come, as Valone found himself the target of a jihad waged by guardians of establishment science. At a meeting of APS, Zimmerman boasted about his efforts to have the conference shut down. Meanwhile, Valone was fired from his job at the Patent Office. He tried to get it back, but the process lasted more than six years, during which he furthered his education and received a doctorate. Finally an arbitrator reinstated him and awarded back pay for the entire period, less 30 days.

“My conference was just an open forum for people who had unusual inventions in the energy arena,” Valone says, still sounding genuinely puzzled that it could have sparked such retaliation. “Some were deserving of critical review, but others were solidly acceptable.”

The magnetically powered railroad car in his backyard does not seem solidly acceptable (to me, at least), but the local mosquito population is waging such a relentless jihad of its own that I decide I have given the railroad car as much critical review as it is going to get. We retreat into Valone’s house, where two walls of the living room are covered with shelves carrying books on topics from yoga to UFOs. A back room crammed with disorderly stacks of papers serves as an interim office for the Integrity Research Institute, a small enterprise that he runs with his wife.

Since I seem skeptical about the railroad car, he digs out the relevant patents: #5,402,021 for the linear track and #4,877,983 for the one with archways, both issued to Howard R. Johnson. The magnets are mounted in such complex configurations that analysis of the aggregate force is almost impossible. Valone nods enthusiastically. From his point of view, this means the design cannot be refuted. From my point of view, it means it cannot be evaluated.

He shows me another patent, #4,215,330, issued in 1980 for a similar array of magnets that entices a steel ball up to the top of a ramp, where it drops down and apparently could roll back to its starting point, ready for another trip. This idea has been picked up by Jean-Louis Naudin, a French free-energy advocate who provides detailed construction blueprints at jnaudin.free.fr/html/s102jlnp.htm.

PERPETUAL MOTION DEMO: Magnets separated by diminishing intervals provide a net force to drag a steel ball up a wooden ramp. The ball falls from the apex of the ramp into a channel, guiding it around for the next ascent. Would it work? The best way to find out would be to build it.

THE KURE TEKKO MOTOR: Mutual magnetic repulsion forces the rotor around inside the spiral stator until it reaches a gap where an electromagnet encourages it to make the next revolution.

Valone is probably the most broadly informed authority on the kind of basement tinkering that ventures into gray areas beyond the conventional laws of physics.

The magnetically powered model railroad car in the backyard of Valone’s suburban home.

Valone in a shed he uses as a workshop in his backyard.

Valone unearths another magnetic propulsion concept, described in Popular Science in June 1979. This is the Kure Tekko magnetic motor, which interests Valone because it uses the under-exploited concept of a “magnetic gradient.” A magnetic rotor turns inside a spiral-shaped stator that is also magnetic. Mutual repulsion accelerates the rotor as its distance from the inner surface of the spiral increases. At the end of the spiral is a gap that the rotor must cross before it overcomes the repulsion of the stator to begin its next cycle.

“The Japanese used a solenoid to take the rotor across the gap,” says Valone. “Of course, this consumes electricity. But there may be a better way.” He shows me a paper from the IEEE, entitled Transactions on Magnets, describing a piezoelectric laminate that may be capable of switching the force from a static permanent magnet in the same way that a transistor switches electricity. This indeed has fascinating implications — depending how much switching power it consumes.

When I ask Valone how he came to be so open-minded, he turns the question around. “I always wondered why other people were less open-minded,” he says. “I promised myself that as I grew older, I would never lose my curiosity, and the ability to solve mysteries that others had overlooked. I felt that this was a youthful quality I needed to keep.”

He agrees that his open-mindedness has the potential to lead him astray. “My ability to perceive reality is conditioned by my beliefs,” he says. “If I believe in free energy, I’ll start thinking I see it in all the wrong places. So many inventors have been self-deceived. Ninety percent of the people who claim they have free energy don’t have it.”

Still, he suggests that open-mindedness is precisely what the world needs right now. “Where are we going to get energy from in the future?” he asks. “None of conventional science can answer that question. Unfortunately federal dollars are tied into projects that aren’t going anywhere, because politics have dominated science, and scientists all over the world are afraid to stick their necks out. We are losing our innovative ability in this country.” He pauses to emphasize the point: “The only approaches that have promise today are unconventional.”

Additional Sources:

Tom Valone’s Integrity Research Institute (users.erols.com/iri).

The Basement Mechanic’s Guide to Building Perpetual Motion Machines (makezine.com/go/simanek) includes actual photos of construction projects which, unfortunately, don’t quite work. (See Donald Simanek’s article about perpetual motion, page 70.)

Wikipedia article about the Simple Magnetic Overunity Toy (SMOT), which some claim produces more energy that it uses (wikipedia.org/wiki/SMOT).

Wikipedia article about Steorn, Ltd., a Dublin, Ireland-based company that claims to have invented a perpetual motion machine (wikipedia.org/wiki/steorn).

Charles Platt has been a senior writer for Wired magazine and has written science fiction novels such as the Silicon Man. He wrote “Electric Avenue” in MAKE, Volume 05.

5 Fringe Power Plays

Since Tom Valone maintains such a generously stocked clearinghouse of unconventional concepts, he’s well-situated to suggest a Top Five of those that he believes could have the most far-reaching consequences. Here are his picks, in no special order: