That Fuelless Motor

Of all the amazing developments of science in recent months the most amazing and, if found practical, the most important, is the motor invented by a Pittsburgh electrical engineer which operates without fuel or other humanly devised sources of energy. Already a small motor has been built, according to reports. It draws its power directly from electrical currents in the air or the ground.

Witnesses who have seen it operate pronounce the demonstration "very impressive" and "actually uncanny." It would be this if it functions at all, and if it functions effectively it would prove the nearest practical approach to perpetual motion ever devised. Yet it would not be a perpetual motion machine. The earth and the heavens above the earth are unquestionably charged with energy, as has long been known to scientists, and this engine somehow contrives to attract itself and utilize some of this power to keep its "wheels turning." In view of what has preceded it in the shape of scientific discovery of late, a world already stunned by these wonders seems ready to believe in a device fraught with tremendous revolutionary possibilities.

What it might mean if found practical really stupefies imagination. It may mean that airplanes may be operated without fuel, the propelling engine taking its energy as it goes along from the air or earth, and that similar engines installed in automobiles would obviate the necessity of gasoline or other fuel to propel the car. Boats on the lakes and rivers, ships on the ocean, trains over the land, power plants of industrial manufacturing concerns — anywhere and everywhere where power today is generated by coal or oil or wood as fuel — would undergo a change and, comparatively speaking, get its fuel for nothing. Power stations located along stream or on the edge of huge dams because of hydraulic advantages would no longer be needed, for generating plants could be located anywhere central to their markets. Indeed, if the discovery of this inventor should prove feasible, power stations to generate and distribute electrical energy would not be necessary at all. In every home and building would be installed an individual unit capable of drawing energy out of the air or earth and distributing it in the form of light and heat and energy.

But there is a fly in the ointment. At least two of the greatest American scientists who have had most to do with electrical research, Dr. Michael Pupin, professor of electromechanics at Columbia University, and Nikola Tesla, a pioneer in wireleas and inventor of the induction motor, are frankly skeptical. Dr. Pupin is quoted as saying in regard to the new fuelless motor demonstrated at Detroit, "if it were practical, I believe such a machine would have been invented years ago." Dr. Tesla, who has experimented extensively in the problem of obtaining motive power without fuel from the heat of the sun and the energy of the earth and air, holds a patent for a motor pleking up current from a wire suspended in the air and has demonstrated that a small motor may be run by tapping the earth, but the amount of power possible he designates as "mouse power" and its limitations make it impractical, he declares.

Inventors have a way sometimes of confounding the scientists and the question of the practicability of the device now offered must remain open to further demonstration. It will be very important, as has been said, if true. This remains to be seen.