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Orbo Free Energy Demo Botched

Widely publicized pending demo of Steorn's free energy prototype at the Kinetica Museum in London, promised to be streamed live around the world, opens with the device not working and a no-show on the Orbo demo site for first 24+ hours.

by Sterling D. Allan
Pure Energy Systems News
Adapted from press release
With a few updates

LONDON, ENGLAND -- Steorn, an Irish technology development company, announced on July 4th that they would publicly demonstrate a real-life application of their Orbo free energy technology for the first time.


Free Energy

Steorn's Orbo technology is said to be based on the interaction of magnetic fields, allowing the production of clean, free and constant energy. The company announced that the exhibit on display will demonstrate work being done by the spinning of a clear polycarbonate wheel with no recourse to external energy -- at least not any that is perceivable using present methods of scientific analysis.

The company says that Orbo free energy technology is fully scalable and can be applied to virtually all devices requiring energy, from cellular phones to cars. 


Botched Start Due to Technical Difficulties

A company press release dated July 4th announced that people from around the world would be able to view the exhibit via live web cams, and that they would be able to select different camera angles and thus be able to view the exhibit from various positions.

The demonstration was originally announced to begin at 6:00 pm Eastern Time, July 4 in the Kinetica Museum gallery of London, but "due to slight technical difficulties", the publication of their real-time streaming was postponed to July 5th.

A person, apparently in the know, reported to the Steorn forum:

"...they ran into some technical issues, firstly a problem with the bearings, which was fixed once identified. The next issue appears to be an environmental issue. We think possibly the temperature from the lighting system in the immediate area, but this has to be further assessed in the morning."

As of 6:00 am Eastern, July 5th, 24 hours after it was supposed to air, the officially designated demonstration link (http://steorn.com/orbo/demo) had been pulling up blank, or with a "not authorized" error message.  This could be due to the site not being able to handle the high volume of traffic being sent there from a fair number of popular news services that have carried the story, including Wired, Slashdot, EnGadget, Geekzone, RTE News, Silicon Republic, Belfast Telegraph, Irish Times, EarthTimes, Inquirer, and Product Reviews.

This delayed start has resulted in a barrage of predictably negative comments posted on these various news and discussion sites.

http://www.steorn.com/orbo/demo/demo.html provides an animated view of the room, showing the angles of the respective cameras.  Camera one gives the best shot, straight on.  Camera 2 looks straight down from the ceiling. Camera 1 View: (Gerbil Not Included) As of July 6, 2007; 18:30 pm London Time, when the cameras were finally turned off, the motor demonstration has not yet shown any motion.  The shape of the device resembles the Perendev, a video of which has been seen by many thousands of people.

Camera 3 view At 22:45 pm London Time, July 5, the second full day has passed with no working demo.

Later (as of at least 14:15 pm London time, 10:15 am Eastern, July 5), the site pulled up, with the following opening notice:

"We are experiencing some technical difficulties with the demo unit in London. Our initial assessment indicates that this is probably due to the intense heat from the camera lighting. We have commenced a technical assessment and will provide an update later today. As a consequence, Kinetica will not be open to the public today (5th July). We apologise for this delay and appreciate your patience."

According to the museum web page announcing the Orbo demo:

The Museum opens at 11AM [London] on Thursday 5th July.

'Orbo' can also be watched via a 24 hr live stream beginning on 5th July by clicking on the Orbo banner located on Kinetica's home page or clicking here.

Visit 'Orbo' at Kinetica Museum from 5th - 13th July, 11am - 6pm.

The 4th of July Steorn press release originally stated:

The exhibition at the Kinetica Museum, in Spitalfields Market, East London, will be open for a private view only today but will be open to the public from every day from 11am to 7pm, Thursday 5th July until Friday 13th July inclusive, when the exhibition will close. Admission is free and the museum is based at SP2 Pavilion, Spitalfields Market, London E1 6AA. 

Those who traveled great distances to see this demo are not going to be thrilled about this let-down.

This botched start is a serious setback for Steorn, who had hoped to prove so many skeptics wrong, but who are now gloating with words to the effect, "who ever expected anything but this?"

At least with the cameras now accessible, the curiosity factor returns.  The simple demo device resembles the Perendev magnet motor, a video of which has been seen by probably several million people.

On June 6, Steorn finally opened the doors to allow observers into the room, though the device still was not working.

Steorn had no doubt hoped to have the thing running in time for Al Gore’s Live Earth concert on July 7th, which is expected to be viewed by as many as two billion people around the world, hosted in 10,000 locations, in addition to the Internet.  That would certainly reverse their bad luck, if they could attain favorable mention during that environmentalist rally.

However, at the end of the day on June 6, Steorn posted an update to their press release, saying that the demonstration would be postponed to a later date.  According to CEO, Sean McCarthy:

"Technical problems arose during the installation of the demonstration unit in the display case on Wednesday evening. These problems were primarily due to excessive heat from the lighting in the main display area. Attempts to replace those parts affected by the heat led to further failures and as a result we have to postpone the public demonstration until a future date.  We apologise for the inconvenience caused to all the people who had made arrangements to visit the demonstration or were planning on viewing the demonstration online."

Steorn's Challenge to the Scientific Community

On 18th August 2006, Steorn placed an advertisement in The Economist to attract the attention of the world's leading scientists working in the field of experimental physics. The advertisement issued a challenge to the world's scientific community to step forward and prove its claims wrong.

Several thousand scientists stepped forward to take the challenge, but only 22 were appointed to test Steorn's claims. The review process began in January 2007 and is still ongoing. Steorn will publish the results of the process following its completion.

In the press release, Sean McCarthy, CEO of Steorn, commented: "We've decided to demonstrate our Orbo technology in a global and public forum to raise greater awareness amongst the product development community. We want to give equal access to developers so they can use this technology to power products that will bring benefits to everyone. Ultimately, it's also a reminder to the world that this free energy technology is being validated and will definitely happen. 

"We expect the vast majority of our audience to view the exhibit online, but rather than just stream a demonstration of the technology from an undisclosed location, we purposely decided to have a tangible working device that people could come and physically see for themselves."


Top 100 Technology

Since they first made their announcement last August, Steorn's technology has been listed in the New Energy Congress' "Top 100 Energy Technologies".  However, the NEC does not concur with Steorn's explanation of how the technology works (energy ex nihilo), but expects that reasonable scientific explanations will be forthcoming once the scientific community has had enough time to study and characterize the effect.  Neither does the NEC think that Steorn is the only company to have discovered and harnessed such an exotic effect.  Their listing includes several other technologies of similar ilk.

# # #


SOURCE:

• Steorn Press Release, July 4, 2007

Comment

Proposed Demo Could Have Run on Stored Magnet Power

On July 8, 2007, New Energy Congress member, Mark Dansie wrote:

I have been silent on this issue for 9 months now. However I would like to propose the following.

The device Steorn was going to demonstrate would prove nothing. It is possible to have magnetic devices run for days if not weeks using the energy stored in them. However once placed under load they soon fail as the energy stored in the magnets is consumed. If this is all they can come up with after all this time I am disappointed. I will wait till we have the outcome of the scientific committee review but at this stage I wont hold my breath.

RESPONSE 1 -- AGREE:

On July 8, 2007, NEC member, Sterling D. Allan wrote:

I agree that the demo Steorn set forth -- if it had worked -- would not have proven their claim of a feasible energy source using magnet power; because there could be enough energy stored in the magnets from their creation, to run a wheel like that for longer than the proposed demo duration.

However, I disagree that such a demo would have been worthless, because even showing magnets in such a "storage" capacity would still be interesting science.  It just wouldn't serve as a feasible energy generating method.  This principle should remind anyone who is pursuing magnet motor technology that their data must include documentation that the magnets are not being depleted. 

RESPONSE 2 -- DISAGREE:

On July 10, 2007, NEC member, Vlad wrote:

The magnetic energy stored in a permanent magnet is trivial. It may easily be "extracted" by sharp blows to the magnet, or by heating it. Otherwise, the motion of magnets or wires (relative to permanent magnets) in a device in no way uses or depletes their stored magnetic energy. The magnetic field can be used as a tool in cohering the local vacuum for extracting energy (some claim they've done it) but it will still act as a catalyst in a chemical reaction (without being consumed in the process). 

I recommend a very good and simple book on magnetic materials (that explains well magnetic domains formation, demagnetization, etc): Introduction to Magnetic Materials by B. D. Cullity and C. D. Graham

If you want more elevated material on this (difficult) subject (energy stored in a magnet) let me know and I'll recommend some articles from a specialized IEEE magazine.

* * * *

REPLY:

On July 10, 2007, Sterling D. Allan wrote:

I don't know everything about magnets, but neither does anyone else. Those who know the most, still don't know all. 

Given that there are yet undiscovered or unresolved mysteries, I don't think it is prudent to rule out the possibility that magnets could loose their gauss in process of providing output power, similar to a battery loosing its charge.

That is an interesting scenario, but not a practical one.  The practical one is where a particular magnet configuration provides a net energy gain for human use.

I bet that those magnet "experts" would immediately reject any possibility that magnets could be used in a magnet-only configuration to generate energy, whether it be rotation or solid state. Yet my imagination says that there may be a principle of magnetism that we do not yet understand that allows for such a scenario, similar to sticking a wind turbine up in the air to harness the moving air. It could be, for example, that a certain magnet configuration creates a local vortex like the drain in a bathtub, in which a flux is created by the funnel's action; and magnetic energy is converted into rotational energy, and the transfer of that energy is self-perpetuating, as long as the "drain" is open via that magnet configuration.

* * * *

"We Screwed Up"

Steorn's CEO states the obvious: "we screwed up" - Steorn brought three systems to London, one of which they got working for "about 4-hours" on Tuesday night. As we all know by now, it mysteriously ceased to function after it was moved to the display room. (Engadget; July 7)

* * * *

MIB Interference?

On July 9, 2007, MM wrote:

[Engadget reports:] "...it mysteriously ceased to function after it was moved to the display room. " 

Do you suppose there could have been unseen interference? Why did it apparently perform in one location, and undoubtedly in Ireland, but not in the display area? 

With all that was hanging on the success of this event I suspect that the problem might not have been with Steorn's design. I cannot imagine that after all these months and countless private demos that there appliance would just mysteriously stop because they made a mistake. Very powerful people were watching this, men with unlimited resources and technology that could have disrupted their energy field remotely.

* * * *

Google News

Below is an archive of returns for a Google News search on "Steorn" as of July 8, 2007; 10:00 am Mountain time.

Javno.hr Perpetual commotion Toronto Star,  Canada - 7 hours ago Perhaps this is what observers of Irish company Steorn are thinking these days. Nearly a year has elapsed since the firm put an ad in The Economist ... Seven reasons why Steorn's perpetual machine will never work TECH.BLORGE.com Steorn shuts down its "free energy" demo Salon Free energy? Erm, not yet, says Steorn Guardian Unlimited engadget - Gearlog all 38 news articles » Steorn cancels free energy demonstration ZDNet UK, UK - Jul 6, 2007 We have had to make the unfortunate decision to deffer the public demonstration of our technology that was due to start on the 4th. ... Steorn Again ZDNet UK, UK - Jul 5, 2007 More precisely, Steorn has taken over the Kinetica Museum, an arty space in the remains of London's Spitalfields Market, put up a load of banners and as ... The Steorn Show is over - for now Geekzone, New Zealand - Jul 6, 2007 By Gary R, in New Tech, posted: 6-JUL-2007 23:50 The public demo has been pulled until further notice. According to this press release on their web site ... Steorn Orbo Web Cams are live Geekzone, New Zealand - Jul 5, 2007 What Steorn have displayed is a small perspex wheel on a covered perspex plinth which is totally transparent. There is no apparent control box, ... Steorn Orbo free Energy Technology to be shown Today I4U - Jul 5, 2007 Irish company Steorn keeps the world wondering if they really have a new key technology that produces free and clean energy. Steorn calls the energy ... Update on Steorn's Orbo boondoggle engadget, CA - Jul 5, 2007 We've got an update for all those who tuned in yesterday at 6pm London then again at 6pm New York only to not view the "proof" of Steorn's "free energy" ... Steorn Free Energy Demonstration a No Go Geekzone, New Zealand - Jul 5, 2007 PESN even go as far as to say that the Steorn demo site may be blocked due to extreme traffic becuase it was reported on sites such as Geekzone. Cool. ... Powered By Blarney? Forbes, NY - Jul 6, 2007 Dublin startup Steorn is promising to demonstrate an invention in London this week that uses magnets to crank out a limitless supply of clean, cheap energy. ... Display of Irish firm's 'free-energy' machine delayed Belfast Telegraph, United Kingdom - Jul 5, 2007 Dublin-based Steorn claims to have developed free energy technology called Orbo which could power everything from vehicles to mobile phones. ... Product Reviews Global Warming: Steorn Orbo infinite clean energy from thin air Product Reviews, UK - Jul 4, 2007 Steorn is an Irish company that is making a bold statement that if true will change everyone’s life. Steorn have created a machine called the Orba which ... Steorn's Orbo "free-energy" machine demonstrated tomorrow! engadget, CA - Jul 4, 2007 Here we go, after months of doubt over claims of a magnetic machine promising "infinite clean energy," Steorn will be putting their wares on display for ... Perpetual motion machine hits 'technical' snag VNUNet.com, UK - Jul 5, 2007 Irish company Steorn claims that its Orbo machine will produce free, clean power to electrical generators. The firm took out a full page advert in The ... 'Free' energy technology goes on display Irish Times, Ireland - Jul 4, 2007 Steorn is challenging worldwide cynicism over its claims to have stumbled upon a revolutionary discovery that creates clean, constant energy and could end ... 'Free energy' device to be revealed RTE.ie, Ireland - Jul 4, 2007 Steorn, which is based in Dublin, claims to have discovered a method of creating clean, constant energy, which it claims could end the global fuel crisis. ... Yet another example of credulity begetting credulity ScienceBlogs - Jul 6, 2007 It looks as though the "intelligent design" creationists are down with Steorn's claimed free energy machine as "evidence" against materialism: Steorn's ... Surprise! Perpetual Machine Demo Cancelled Wired News - Jul 6, 2007 Steorn, the people behind Orbo, have packed up and gone back home to Ireland. Attempts to replace those parts affected by the heat led to further failures ... Orbo Free Energy Demo Has Botched Start PESN, UT - Jul 5, 2007 Widely publicized pending demo of Steorn's free energy prototype at the Kinetica Museum in London, promised to be streamed live around the world, ... Goodwins Oracle of zdnet ZDNet UK, UK - Jul 5, 2007 Ruppert was the only reporter who did some research into the Steorn pseudoscience. So, I thought it would be cool if he kept going at it, if whichcraft ever ... Perpetual Machine to be Demonstrated Today Wired News - Jul 4, 2007 Steorn, the Irish company behind the controversial free energy device Orbo, will be displaying the technology in London's Kinetica Museum, and online. ... Problem delays demonstration of energy-from-nothing device CBC Saskatchewan, Canada - Jul 5, 2007 Steorn, a technology development company, said it would show its Orbo "free energy technology" on Thursday at the Kinetica Museum gallery in London. ... Free Power from Perpetual Motion Geekzone, New Zealand - Jul 4, 2007 Well, a company in Ireland called Steorn claims to have created a total 'free energy' device using magnets. Of course someone had to make the magnets which ... The Perpetual Energy Machine: Art Project? Wired News - Jul 5, 2007 ... the buzz of the iPhone, the Orba free energy device from Steorn is certainly garnering some attention, due to its world-changing promise of free energy. ... Irish firm to put free-energy machine on display today Belfast Telegraph, United Kingdom - Jul 4, 2007 Steorn claims its Orba device uses the interaction of magnetic fields to generate a constant source of free and clean energy. If true, the technology would ... Irish breakthrough: free, constant energy supply? TECH.BLORGE.com, Australia - Jul 5, 2007 By John Pospisil Steorn, an Irish company based in Dublin, claims to have discovered a technology breakthrough in energy production and invites the public ... "Infinite free energy" machine to be demonstrated tomorrow Neoseeker - Jul 4, 2007 The machine is called the Orbo, and is made by the Dublin-based company Steorn. Tomorrow's public demonstration will not be the world's first exposure to ... Gizmodo.com Here's One Magnetic Free Energy Machine That Actually Works Gizmodo.com, Hungary - Jul 6, 2007 OK, so it isn't the finest week for free-energy machines, but perhaps the boys at Steorn are just giving this category a bad name. ... The heat is on Orbo Siliconrepublic.com, Ireland - Jul 5, 2007 05.07.2007 - Last night at 11pm, a device by Irish technology company Steorn that claims to create energy out of thin air, failed to make its first public ... Irish technology claims to produce free, constant energy supply TECH.BLORGE.com, Australia - Jul 5, 2007 By Ruben Francia Steorn, an Irish company based in Dublin, claimed to discover a technology breakthrough in energy production and invites the public to ... Irish company unveils free energy technology Earthtimes.org - Jul 4, 2007 Dublin - Irish company Steorn on Wednesday in Dublin unveiled its much-heralded "clean, free and constant energy" technology that it claims could end the ...

See also Steorn Free Energy - index at PESWiki.com Magnet Motors - index at PESWiki.com More Stories by Sterling D. Allan PESN (Pure Energy Systems News) - Feature stories on cutting-edge, clean energy technology. Free Energy News (.com) - Daily cutting-edge, clean energy technology news from around the world PESWiki Latest - Newest feature pages in the publicly-editable energy directory. This Week in Free Energy™ - Ten-minute recap each Sunday, 7:50 - 8:00 pm Mountain. Free Energy Now (.net) - in-depth interviews

Page composed by Sterling D. Allan June 8, 2007 Last updated July 17, 2007