„About Orffyreus' gift I have been keeping, / at the same time laughing and weeping.“ The Perpetuum Mobile – A Small Phantasmagoria from the Eighteenth Century

The perpetuum mobile reappears throughout history as a dream of technical reason. On the face of it, it relieves us for good of the drudgery of work but it signifies more generally the quest to get something for nothing, to achieve benefits without cost. This pervasive desire informs technical optimism, it is frustrated in the most mundane ways, but it never gives up. Inventors imagine that there is always just one small missing cog that would save the design, in the meantime they employ hapless laborers to secretly drive their machines. These are the ones that finally present the bill to the visionary dreamers. This becomes evident in a survey of mostly 18th century proposals, most famously that of Johann Ernst Elias Beßler or Orffyreus. Even before the age of thermodynamics and proof of the impossibility of the perpetuum mobile, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg was among the majority of 18th century scientists who would meet any such proposals with incredulity. Accordingly, he engaged with such claims with an in equal parts curious and satirical attitude. And even after the age of thermodynamics, the perpetuum mobile persisted in the artistic imagination, for example, of Paul Scheerbart or Leonid Leonov.