Steorn's Orbo

On December 17th, Steorn CEO Sean McCarthy did give a lecture and take questions at the Dublin Institute of Technology, as promised. Audio recordings of the talk can be found here (downloadable) and here (streaming).

First off, once again no Orbo was demonstrated. Most of the talk consisted of information that we've heard before: Steorn's early days and how they accidentally discovered the anomaly underlying Orbo, some background on the law of conservation of energy and on previous claimants of free energy devices. A brief overview was given of the principle said to underlie Orbo's magic: the time variance of magnetic interactions is exploited to make these interactions asymmetrical, so that slightly more energy comes out than is put in. Finally, Sean threw in some mentions of well established physics mysteries such as dark energy, suggesting not only that science still has a lot of fundamentals left to learn, but also that there may be a connection between dark energy and the source of Orbo's excess power. (Such wild speculations, especially in front of an audience with members who ask serious questions involving Atlantis and "levitational energy", may do little service to Steorn's goal of gaining establishment respect for their work.)

But one new morsel of information did come out of this talk: a road map of Steorn's future. Besides continuing to wait for results to come in from the "jury" of scientists, Steorn will be inviting 300 engineers to license the Orbo technology, at no cost, in order to replicate it. This is intended to be another prong in the assault on the established skepticism regarding perpetual motion machines (the other prongs being the jury and a still forthcoming public demonstration of a working Orbo) and the first step in launching the technology. According to Sean, these engineers will be invited to begin working on their own Orbos starting in February, 2009.

Here are a few excerpts from the talk:

This is really the kick-off of a sequence of lectures that we'll be doing over the course of the next six to nine months. [...] Fifteen universities down in the Middle East in February and March, then about 30 in Europe then possibly in the U.S.

What we are prepared to do is to launch the technology starting next year.

We license the core technology to people who develop products. And that process starts in February of next year. [...] But then understand what the technology is. We are a head-to-head company, we're not going to be selling generators or turbines or anything like that. What we do is we license the core technology to people who develop products. And that process starts in February of next year.

We're going to be asking 300 engineers or engineering organizations to start replicating this for us. [...] The other thing I'll say, to get away from the Nigerian scam artist claim, is access is completely free, we'll not be asking anybody for any money, what we are asking people to do is they have to have a suitable qualification, they have to understand engineering, and we're also asking them to sign a development license which is a right to use our patented technology, and the technology is patented, to develop and either prove it for yourselves or force it out into the market.

Q: Has there ever been a motor produced...
Sean: Yeah.
Q: ...a self powered motor...
Sean: Yeah, absolutely.
Q: ...that runs continuously?
Sean: Sorry?
Q: That runs continuously.
Sean: Nothing in the real world runs continuously.
Q: Only a 100% motor would run continuously.
Sean: Yeah, until something breaks on it.

The process of us engaging in a very public manner with the engineering world starts next February. We don't expect the engineers to just come in so we're putting in to the public domain an awful lot of information. That they'll at least say maybe this is worth ten minutes of my time today.

In terms of complexity... this is not easy to build. This is incredibly difficult and incredibly complicated stuff to work with. Um, the only fair analogy that I think that I can give it, and if you do get involved with it you'll probably find out, it's kind of like building a hard disk drive. Now, the kind of accuracies and tolerances and balances that are involved are very difficult so, if you do try to get involved, [...] virtually every engineer or scientist knows how a hard disk drive works. Very few of them can walk into their garage and build one. The challenges are not dissimilar. And we've had to develop all kinds of other stuff around this to build real systems, you know, we've developed magnetic bearings and all kinds of you know, um, stuff that we've had to wrap around this to allow ourselves to reliably build these reproducible items. So the engineering challenges are not in any way minuscule.

One question that audience members brought up repeatedly during this talk is: Why aren't you demonstrating a device? If Sean intends to give at least 45 of these talks around the world starting in February, as he claims, he'd damn well better have a spinning Orbo up there with him by talk 3 or 4 if he doesn't want to start getting laughed off stage.

For those of us watching with interest from the sidelines, the long dry spell seems to be over, and we're now back to business as usual: Steorn promising exciting new developments ...always just a few months away. Now our eyes are on February. Will hundreds of engineers really be invited to replicate the Orbo? Will any of them succeed? Will one of these engineers, or Steorn itself, finally show off a working device? Or, will we again be given a new date to look forward to, just a few more months further down the road?

Steorn has added a new page to their web site, advertising a series of talks they'll be giving, beginning this month:

Our 'talk' initiative is designed to give people within the technology development community an opportunity to understand the Orbo proposition and ask questions in a direct, face-to-face format.

The programme of talks starts in Dublin on the 17th December 2008 and will involve a sequence of talks in universities around the world, including the US/Europe and the Middle East.

After the near total lack of communication from Steorn over the past 16 months (!) since their failed London demo, it's become clear that they're intent on keeping out of the public eye until they're good and ready. Is it now that time? Will this "talk" be just another pie in the sky lecture with nothing on display but a few charts and graphs? Or... is Steorn ready to show a spinning Orbo that, after all these months of perfecting, can take the heat of a public demonstration without jamming up? Stay tuned.

Update 12/10:

Further information about Steorn's December 17th talk is found on the page pictured below, received from a member of the faculty at the Department of Mechanical Engineering at DIT. It was posted previously here but without mention of a source; I wanted to verify its authenticity before passing it on.

In an interview that appeared in Ireland's Sunday Tribune newspaper August 10th, Steorn CEO Sean McCarthy asserts that development of their Orbo technology, as well as its testing by a jury of 22 scientists, is still on track -- and that Steorn expects to launch Orbo and demonstrate it publicly before next summer.

According to Steorn, its challenge to the academic community to independently validate Orbo is continuing.

It anticipates a full launch before next summer, and says any further public demonstrations of the technology will now coincide with the commercial launch.

While this news means that Steorn hasn't disappeared entirely and isn't just quietly hoping for the rest of the world to forget about their physics-defying claim and the disastrous attempt at unveiling it last year, all signs are not so positive. The focus of this same Sunday Tribune article is on Steorn's financial information for the year 2006. Amidst heavy losses of nearly €6 million and flush with €8 million of new funding lured from private investors who wanted to own a piece of the company's claimed free energy technology, Steorn's two directors, Sean McCarthy and Michael Daly, drew incomes averaging at least €175,000 each. A hint of fraud? Or merely enough confidence on their parts to allow them to pursue business as usual?

For us, watching from the sidelines, it certainly is business as usual: Great things are coming, according to Steorn, but in the meantime all we can do is wait.

July 4th, 2007: The day that a small Irish company dumbfounded the scientific community and changed the world by paving the way to complete independence from fossil fuels.

That's the way Steorn would have liked to have seen history written, anyhow. Instead, the day produced just another in a long line of failed demonstrations of "free energy" devices. Just another brick slid cleanly into place in the skeptic's narrative that Steorn is delusional at best, fraudulent at worst.

A glass-walled showroom in the center of London. A carefully thought out space. Several computer terminals around the periphery would allow awestruck witnesses to notify far way friends that the world is about to change forever. All lights converge on the raised pedestal in the center of the room, supporting a box housing a perpetually spinning disc. Everything is made of clear plastic so anyone can see there's no power being piped in from elsewhere. Finally, to drive home the enormity of the moment (and entertain the waiting throngs of visitors) the room is decorated with a collection of quotes that are not subtle in celebrating the glorious victory of creative risk-takers over small-minded skeptics.

Much style, little substance: the Orbo showroom one year ago.

In retrospect, those quotes drip with arrogance and folly. They are some of the most delectably ironic morsels that day brought us, so I thought it would be appropriate to collect them here on this anniversary.

True science teaches us to doubt and in ignorance, refrain.

Isn't it astonishing that all these secrets have been preserved for so many years just so we could discover them!

People who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those who are doing it.

If the facts don't fit the theory, change the facts.

The beginning of knowledge is the discovery of something we do not understand.

The more original a discovery, the more obvious it seems afterwards.

I can believe anything, provided that it is quite incredible.

It is the tension between creativity and skepticism that has produced the stunning and unexpected findings of science.

Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.

For an engineer, nothing is impossible.

When seen in the context of Steorn's failed demonstration, these quotes are tragic, or darkly comic, depending on how much sympathy one has for Sean McCarthy's crew. But the fact that they were there to begin with... the fact that all of this tremendous thought, effort, and expense was put into creating the perfect presentation space... means something. It means that Steorn, or at least some of the most important people there, really and truly believed that they were going to pull it off. Why did they believe that? And do they still believe that it will happen? As long as these questions remain unanswered, there's still a story here.

...Alive enough to send lawyers my way, anyhow.

The original domain name for this blog included the words "Steorn" and "Orbo". When Steorn made it clear in their forums last year that they don't approve of domain names that include their trademarks, I changed this site's domain to dispatchesfromthefuture.com. I stopped promoting the original domain and turned it into a redirect leading to the new domain, so that existing links wouldn't just go dead. I figured I'd leave things that way unless and until Steorn expressed disapproval.

Well that finally happened this week. I received an e-mail from the international law firm Seyfarth Shaw LLP asking that I turn over the domain to Steorn. Here's an excerpt from the letter:

This firm has been retained by Steorn, Ltd. (“Steorn”) to protect its trademarks and domain names. Steorn is the owner of U.S. Trademark Reg. No. 3,386,304 and U.S. Trademark Reg. No. 3,382,850 for STEORN, dating back to at least as early as 2001, for technological services including research design and development in the field of energy systems, as well as technology consultancy advice and analysis in the field of energy systems. Steorn is the owner of U.S. Trademark Reg. No. 3,379,126 for ORBO for similar use. STEORN and ORBO are collectively referred to as the “Marks.”

I'll be happy to hand over the domain name, and would have been even without the scary threats of enormous fines that they were thorough enough to include. But I'm even happier to see that Steorn is still alive and well enough to care about their "energy systems"-related trademarks. Here's hoping "Orbo" has a future as more than just a name.

Irish president Mary McAleese visited the Steorn offices on October 4th.

Irish president Mary McAleese beside Steorn CEO Sean McCarthy

While this is further evidence that Steorn is still up and running, she unfortunately was not there to announce a prosperous future of free and clean energy. Instead, she was commenting on the success of Ireland's Bolton Trust, an institution providing capital to encourage the growth of innovative new companies, which has provided some funding to Steorn. Her speech, which never mentions Steorn specifically, can be found here.

After 3 1/2 months of almost complete silence from Steorn, CEO Sean McCarthy granted an interview last week which was published today at the Free Energy Truth blog. The difficult questions were left unasked, but the interview does give a feeling for what Steorn's been up to lately. Here are some excerpts:

On what they've been doing for the past few months:

We continue to work on Orbo. Obviously we are looking at different implementations of it, more reliable implementations of it both mechanical and non mechanical. We’re also looking at the material science behind these time variant magnetic transactions as in what’s the real driver for them. What makes one material have a different response from another material? We’ve looked at a lot of third party research, fund some research and obviously do our own research into this area, we have managed to rule out most of the drivers to time based domain response (eddy currents, heat and so on) but as to why ferrite has a different response to Iron – well more work to be done.

On where the second demo will be located:

It will most likely be in Dublin, Ireland.

On what their recently trademarked name SteornLab refers to:

An awful lot of what we have developed over the years has been based on tests... SteornLab relates to the productization of these testing technologies we’ve developed over the years.

On whether Orbo creates or extracts energy:

It’s a question of views. I would say that, in the same way as there is a mass/energy equivalent there is also a form of time/energy equivalent and whether you consider that energy creation or conversion is a matter of semantics.

On whether Steorn will license Orbo for military and weapons applications:

It’s specifically precluded.

On the development of the mechanical, as well as a solid-state version of Orbo:

We have some engineering issues that we are currently resolving in terms of mechanical systems; we are constantly looking at ways to capture and express the energy in a real world environment that are simpler and simpler and there is nothing simpler than a solid state device. So it’s in the plan, but its not something that we [are] actively engaged in at this time.

On whether anyone else has ever discovered the effect behind Orbo:

I think lots of people have. I can look at many of the other free energy claimants and understand exactly how they could work. I could also see why many would be difficult to replicate without understanding what was happening.

There are two main points that I take from this interview: 1) Steorn is still humming along, and still believes in what they have, and 2) Don't expect a second demo any time soon.

I add the second point because Sean thinks that the second demo will "most likely" take place in Dublin. If it were to take place further off than Dublin, a good deal of planning would be involved; so the fact that it's still not certain whether it will be in Dublin or elsewhere means that they haven't reached the point yet of planning for an actual second event.

Another curiosity is that Steorn is already looking to productize the testing technology they've acquired and developed for the purpose of testing Orbo. For them to spare the energy to develop a tangential line of business, does this mean they are running short of cash, or doubting the future prospects of Orbo, at least in the near term?

Steorn is still chugging away, and most signs are that they're still confidant in the development of Orbo. Once again, there's nothing new here – the message from Steorn is, as usual: just you wait.

This week a video emerged showing the successful engineer and inventor, Thieu Knapen, discussing Steorn's technology, which he has personally tested. His conclusion is unambiguous: Orbo generates free energy.

"Then I saw things that... I didn't believe."

Knapen founded the Dutch company Kinetron in 1984, where he invented the microgenerators used in watches that are powered by the movement of the wearer and so do not require a battery. Apparently Sean McCarthy has told the SPDC that Kinetron will be manufacturing the Orbo motors to power the demo devices that are set to be manufactured to coincide with the public release of the Orbo technology.

In the video Knapen is shown commenting on an early demonstration 'toy' designed to display higher energy output than input, but not designed to cycle perpetually. This video was made sometime before December 12th 2006, when it was presented to a small group at the Kinetica museum; it was also long ago shown to the SPDC. However, this is the first time that the video is available to the public. The documentary style editing and peppy background beat suggest that the video was put together as a promotional piece. It was allegedly found during an unrelated Google Video search by Steorn forum member RunningBare.

Today the Free Energy Truth blog announced that coming Friday will be an interview with someone who claims to have independently replicated the effect behind Steorn's free energy technology. If true, this would be the first time that anyone outside of Steorn has been able to replicate the effect and talk about it publicly. Of course, after the failed demo, repeated delays, and now complete silence that we've gotten from Steorn, it's reasonable to expect nothing less than full disclosure and a video of a self powered device before this claim is considered to be worth taking seriously. A successful demonstration, however, would beat Steorn to the punch and be the first display of a potentially revolutionary discovery. Further updates on this will follow as more information becomes available.

Update 8/31:

The previously announced interview has been posted at the Free Energy Truth blog; the interviewee is a man named "Blake". Consensus on the Steorn forum is that this is Alton "Blake" Walston, a member of the SPDC who has gone by the forum handle ablaker2.

Blake claims to have followed schematics provided by Sean McCarthy and built an Orbo device that ran continuously for at least 8 hours. According to his account the precise configuration of magnets in his device required a good deal of trial and error experimentation to get right, and after its initial 8 hour run he has thus far been unsuccessful at coaxing self-sustained motion from the device a second time.

While Blake claims to be committed to getting his Orbo spinning again, and says he'll be sure to have a video camera on hand next time when it does, as it stands now Blake has only an anecdotal account of a one-time event to offer, with no objective record of any kind that it actually took place. It's certainly interesting to have this story brought out from the confines of the SPDC, but until Blake's Orbo is running continuously, repeatedly, and on video, it remains nothing more than that -- a story.

It's now been over a month since CEO Sean McCarthy or any other member of Steorn has spoken publicly, to either the press or the forums. Whether they're hard at work or falling apart, they're just not talking.

The situation in the developers' club (SPDC) isn't much different. Apparently Steorn has given SPDC members a gag order, asking them not discuss the current situation. A few bits of information have slipped through anyway; enough to reveal that the SPDC doesn't know anything more about what Steorn's up to than do we. SPDC member my_pen_is_stuck wrote on July 31st, "Steorn don't even speak with the SPDC1 nowdays. Not a peep. Very weird." Later on August 5th he wrote, "I'm beginning to think that Grimer was on to something when he said the SPDC was a cult. Sean speaks, usual no evidence waffle, the SPDC bows down to kiss his ring. It's really fuckin' weird in there." On August 11th, GrantHodges wrote "There isn't any news on Steorn for this month. I'm in the SPDC and well . . .there isn't any news."

Given the silence from Steorn, some have wondered whether they'd packed up and cleared out. Forum member Crank, who lives a few miles from Steorn, dropped by their office on July 31st.
She reported back that the situation there was normal, and all employees were still present.

One older item of interest that came out recently is the design of the demonstration unit that Steorn intends to have manufactured in a limited quantity (100,000), to be sold off as part of the public introduction of the Orbo technology. The device, shown below, looks like a horsehead or "nodding donkey" style oil pump, sitting atop an oil barrel. A video of this device in action was made available to the SPDC, however Sean stated that the motion of the prototype unit seen in the video was not actually generated by an Orbo. So, it proves nothing except that Steorn is laying plans for the public introduction of Orbo.

Finally, some links. Two articles have been published recently about Steorn's claims (and failed demo):

Physics World
Metro Part 1, Part 2

And there's a new Google discussion group, Steorb, devoted to Steorn. Not very active these days, but people can post there without fear of the occasional bannings and threads deletions that occur at the Steorn company forum.

This period of silence from Steorn can only be the calm before a storm... but whether that storm will be a successful demonstration of free energy or just the collapse of the company, remains to be seen.