Perpetual motion machines are impossible, right? They violate the laws of thermodynamics. And yet people have been trying to engineer one for centuries. YouTuber gzumwalt posted a video of what looks ...

James is a published author with multiple pop-history and science books to his name. He specializes in history, space, strange science, and anything out of the ordinary.View full profile James is a ...

On Sept. 20, 1913, rumors were running rampant around North Dakota that J. W. Kennedy, of Mandan, North Dakota, had invented just such a machine. A news clipping about J.W. Kennedy and his perpetual ...

Perhaps the most persistent nonsense in physics: the perpetual motion machine. Bad ideas come and go in physics. But there’s one bit of nonsense that is perhaps more persistent than all others: the ...

A wheel weighted with swinging mallets. A cylinder rotating in a sealed, water-filled container. A siphon that transfers liquid back and forth in a seemingly endless loop. These may sound like the ...

My favorite shelf in the home library is where Raymond Roussel, the Comte de Lautréamont, E.T. A. Hoffmann, Leonora Carrington and other writers form a brilliant phalanx of eccentricity and marvel. I ...

F.L. Minnick, a resident of the Wilson Hotel in Spokane, claimed to have produced a “perpetual motion” machine. He said, in a written statement to the Spokane Daily Chronicle, that the machine is ...