Joe Newman

Joseph Westley Newman (1935–2015) was an inventor, originally from Mississippi, who for years tried to sell a high-voltage motor (powered by a large number of batteries connected in series) as a free energy device. He called it an "electromagnetomic motor", and wrote all about it (along with his rant-heavy alternative physics that "explained" how it worked) in a self-published book.[1]

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While his device was published in the 1980s in such fora as Discover Magazine,[2] Newman steadfastly avoided refereed journals. The reason for this is that after a great deal of obfuscation and rigged testing, as well as repeated (and mostly ignored) challenges to debate a Ph.D. physicist on the matter, Newman lost an argument on the Senate floor with then-senator John Glenn (due to his astronaut training, Glenn was likely one of the few in the Senate who understood Newman's claims) and was pwned in a test by the National Bureau of Standards that showed that his device (a type of very high voltage motor, powered by a string of 9V batteries connected in series) could not produce more power than it used.[3]

A history of the whole sordid affair can be found in the book Voodoo Science.[4]

See also

References
  1. The Energy Machine of Joseph Newman (1986)
  2. The Energy Machine of Joe Newman Abstracted from an article in the May 1987 issue of Discover Magazine Skeptic Tank
  3. One Man's Tangle With the Patent Office (May 21, 1986) The New York Times.
  4. Voodoo Science: The Road from Foolishness to Fraud by Bob Park (2001) Oxford University Press. ISBN 0195147103.
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