The monster mechanical delusion: nineteenth-century controversies concerning perpetual motion

Abstract The history of attempts to make a perpetual motion machine is not (just) the saga of irrational efforts to defy the laws of thermodynamics. In the eighteenth-century Enlightenment there were good reasons to believe in perpetual growth both in Nature and the economy, just as the planets and Sun appeared to move perpetually in the heavens. Why not machines also? In nineteenth-century Britain numerous purported perpetual motion devices were patented and promoted as potential investments in unbounded energy sources. While such frauds were finally prevented by a change in law in 1932 that rendered patents for perpetual motion devices impermissible the lessons learned from six centuries of failed attempts to deliver practical forms of perpetual motion gave some of the strongest evidence to support the First and Second Laws of Thermodynamics. In the twenty-first century the energy industry’s solar, wind, geothermal and tidal power generation can now secure effectively free energy to move our machinery for the indefinite future.