Perpetual motion
Virginia Mills looks back through the archives at attempts to solve an impossible problem.
25 September 2018
5 min read
The lure of perpetual motion, however, is such that designs continued to be submitted to the Royal Society, by individuals as diverse as reverends and shoemakers, even after it had been repeatedly debunked. There appears to have been a mistaken belief that the Society offered a prize for anyone who could solve the conundrum.
Virginia Mills
Archivist, the Royal Society
Virginia is the Royal Society’s early collections archivist, responsible for looking after the pre-1900 material in the archive and the records of the past Fellowship. She has previously worked in other scientific archives at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew and the Natural History Museum, London.
If you’ve dropped into the Royal Society lately, you may have seen on display an object that seems rather an interloper at the UK’s academy of science: an invention purporting to be a perpetual motion machine.
A genuine perpetual motion machine – one that will run indefinitely without an external source of energy to power it – is not possible as it violates the laws of thermodynamics. The bicycle wheel spinning non-stop in the Royal Society since July is the creation of David Jones, who, under the pseudonym ‘Daedalus’, wrote science columns for Nature, New Scientist and The Guardian. In these features, Jones would propose fantastic inventions with a grounding in scientific principles, but then test the boundaries of possibility by taking his ideas into the realms of fantasy.
Many have tried to discern the disguised workings of Daedalus’s perpetual motion machines, but I’ve heard that only one person ever suggested the right answer t
