For those who don’t remember or didn’t hear, in 2006 an Irish company made a big splash by taking out an expensive ad in the Economist announcing they’d made a perpetual motion machine called Orbo. They then appointed a jury of scientists and engineers to review it. Perpetual motion fantastists or scam artists are not at all uncommon, but these guys did it in a 21st century way, and with a lot of polish and pizazz: so much so that many thought that they may have done it has a publicity stunt as part of wider goals (that could still be correct).
The jury’s announcement itself is here and the confirmation on Steorn’s own website from which we can take it that the announcement is real is here.
Why surprising? I am amazed that such clever scam artistes didn’t rig their jury more effectively.
Absolutely, totally, preposterously, transparently obvious as a scam, and
Yet swallowed whole by a lot of people, some of them reasonably smart.
There seems to be no scam so ridiculously scammesque that you can’t fool some people with it as long as you give it a little (sometimes very, very little) verisilimitude and tell people they can make money off it.
Heh, I’ve been somewhat peripherally following the Steorn story, checking out their forums every now and then; and no matter how ludicrous the whole thing got (what with the supposed demonstration at the Kinetica museum in London being a complete no-show and all), there still always appeared to be a sizeable contingent of ‘true believers’. I think I’ll be taking a look over there now. Thanks for the update!
EDIT: Wow, reading the announcement on their page, they actually have the nerve to still claim that it works… Even talking about commercial implementation by the end of the year!
They are talking about commercial implementation because it sounds like a step that would come well after the invention was well developed and reliable. In other words, it’s an attempt to sound confident and strong and pass right over Orbo not working. Of course, the idea that one could actually be thinking about commercial implementation of an invention that one can’t implement in a sufficiently “reliable and consistent manner” to even convince a jury that you have an idea that works is laughable.
Note that the jury took two years to return a verdict. I would say that Steorn figured that if they appointed a jury the appearance of confidence inherent in agreeing to do so would be sufficient to convince your more gullible sort of investor to invest, and they knew they could string out the jury for ages by dribbling out data etc over a long period. The con must be reaching its end game by now.
Well you see they “… made it clear from the outset that the publicity that we sought was not in any way an attempt to raise funds…” and they were in no way interested at all in raising any investment. No sir. Not even the [cough]8.1million Euros[cough] that they obtained by way of investment.