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Steorn & Claims of Free Energy

What it all comes down to is "Can the power which throws mighty Jupiter around the Sun power my electric shaver?"
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No, but it should be possible to extract some energy from Jupiter's momentum. Eventually Jupiter would fall into the Sun, but you can't have everything.
 
Orbo Free Energy Demo Botched
http://pesn.com/2007/07/05/9500478_Orbo_Demo/
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.

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.
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Interesting!

On the one hand, the timing coinciding with the Live Earth broadcasts seems to be evidence that Steorn expected their demo to work, and to gain kudos from the link with Live Earth. Hence there is something genuine going on - nobody wants to be left with egg on their face.

On the other hand, this could be a double-bluff: because nobody wants to be left with egg on their face, the public will assume this was a genuine attempt to demonstrate new technology....

However, if this is a hoax, it is still unclear who is being hoaxed, and why.
Hoaxes are either for pure devilment (and this example seems a bit extreme for that) or for financial gain, and so far it's not clear who loses if this is a hoax, apart from Steorn itself.
 
If they simply turn off those excessively hot camera lights, shouldn't the unit start functioning again? (This is assuming, of course, that it ever worked in the first place.)

Cooler lighting arrangements could then be worked out.

Broiling-hot camera lights were a television problem 50-60 years ago, but I didn't realize that they still are.
 
OldTimeRadio said:
If they simply turn off those excessively hot camera lights, shouldn't the unit start functioning again? (This is assuming, of course, that it ever worked in the first place.)

Cooler lighting arrangements could then be worked out.

Broiling-hot camera lights were a television problem 50-60 years ago, but I didn't realize that they still are.
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I wondered that, your average cheap webcam works with normal room lighting, simply link up those to the internet rather that go for full scale TV lighting.
 
However, if this is a hoax, it is still unclear who is being hoaxed, and why.
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maybe steorn have hoaxed themselves :( it seems to be how this sort of thing often works out...
 
That article though, said the demonstration was not working for the first 24+ hours.

How many hours is +? Did they ever get a demonstration working or not?
 
Short answer: No.


What is it you wish to know OTR? I accept most major credit cards, but prefer AMEX Platinum.
 
A very long article, worth the read.

http://www.engadget.com/2007/07/17/the- ... -of-steorn

It varies from configuration to configuration. I think the largest efficiency that we would have physically measured would be about 485%. These numbers can be misleading. For example we might be getting 485% per joule, which means were getting 4.85 J out, but there could be a configuration that's could be delivering 130% efficiency yet delivering 10 joules. So, the technology itself is pretty well researched in terms of punch line efficiency it's 485%, but that wouldn't be the optimum output of the system. Obviously we're more focused on direct power output of a device than the punchline numbers. 485 to 1 is 4.85, but we could easily say, 10 to 12 joules off of a system is going to have a lower punch line efficiency. And power output is obviously the key factor, energy output is obviously the key factor.

So you guys have been trying to bring the scientific community into the fold. Obviously kicked off by the full page ad in The Economist and there's the open invitation...

[laughs] It was a brave decision.

Well, it definitively opened you guys to a lot of criticism. My publication is definitely not excepted from that. I think it's one of those claims to where you're just going to have to put up with the lumps.

We knew it. Again, the only way I can describe this is that we didn't set out to do this. We stumbled upon it. I wouldn't believe a word of it if I wasn't working here and so in deciding the best route for the company was to go and do this, what they call a slap in the face of science. We had no illusions at all of how it looked or how it would be conceived, what we would be called and so on. But at the end of the day we have to face that, but it's a relatively easy thing to face when you know what you have is real because, you realize there is an end to it and we can get on with the business of business.

I think part of the reason why people didn't and don't take it seriously is partly because there is no [credible] university affiliated with the research. The fact that you guys were not out to actually invent this new science and that there was no big name physicist behind it at the time is, I think, what is most damaging to your credibility.

To be fair, I don't think of there's an awful lot of what we could have done with respect to credibility. But the other thing to recognize in terms of the August thing [running the ad in The Economist] is that we achieved our objective, and our objective was to get qualified scientists engaged. As much as we get an awful lot of criticism, and obviously the event the last couple of weeks haven't helped, the bottom line for us is that process has started and that process will end with very qualified people doing the analysis. So were quite happy to sit here -- happy is the wrong word -- but we're quite willing to sit here and take the smirks or the laughs or the cries of fraud and so on because August was a big victory for us because our biggest concern in doing all of this, is, well, what if no scientist responds? That would have been a disaster for us. The fact that we got ridiculed, that was going to happen anyway.
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rynner said:
However, if this is a hoax, it is still unclear who is being hoaxed, and why.
Hoaxes are either for pure devilment (and this example seems a bit extreme for that) or for financial gain, and so far it's not clear who loses if this is a hoax, apart from Steorn itself.
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Recall that Steorn is a former e-business company that saw its market vanish during the dot.com bust. It stands to reason that Steorn has re-tooled as a Web marketing company, and is using the "free energy" promotion as a platform to show future clients how it can leverage print advertising and a slick Web site to promote their products and ideas. If so, it's a pretty brilliant strategy.

Eric Berger, writing on the Houston Chronicle website.
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Wikipedia Link
 
i'm not sure i agree with that assessment... perhaps it's a great strategy if you want to end up labelled as a bunch of liars/deluded people promoting something that doesn't work :?

people do often grasp onto particularly bizarre ideas when their life/business/whatever is generally going down the pan... maybe that's closer to what's going on :(
 
Well, I tried to find that quote on the Houston Chronicle website - but couldn't. It's only on Wikipedia - so maybe it's been retracted (other articles exist in the blog section by Eric Berger on his views of Steorn - though strangely they contradict his opinion here). And "It stands to reason..." is a wild, sweeping statement for a reporter to say .
 
Just to muddy the waters..

Percentage puzzle

SCOTTISH POWER sent a letter to its customer Alan Arnott headed "Important information about your energy account". Under the heading "Common sense ways to save energy" it told him: "Switch your TV, hi-fi or video off at the mains and you'll save 60 per cent of the energy it uses on standby mode." Like Arnott, Feedback would have guessed that switching everything off would be a 100 per cent saving. Does Scottish Power know something about electricity that we don't?

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg1 ... 142.600_fb

:D
 
Well, here we are one year on from The Attack of The Camera Lights of Doom and what has happened? Nothing, nada, zip. No news on their website since October. So just how poerwful were those lights, and have the military tested their destructive capabilities?

I stand by my earlier comment:


misterwibble said:
Hang on, I'm getting a precognitive flash.
This story will continue to bounce around the net for the next few years, with occasional press releases saying that developments of some kind are imminent and then it'll go silent.
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It looks like misterwibble was right on the cards with his above quote of himself.

Something made me check today and Steorn is now totally silent, even the on site forum is now gone.
A pity as there was good info on there and links to other projects and ideas.

RIP Steorn . . . . . . until you resurface in the conspiracy section or Richard and Sean make a comeback with a time travel device/teleporter/anti grav drive/talk to the dead machine/Bee-Human translator/online lies generator.

:?
 
I take it back


There has been a STEORN update :shock:

I had the following email which I initially thought was a fake.

However http://www.steorn.com/Default.aspx has been updated with press release and video

Dublin, 10 February 2009.

After six years of research and development, Steorn launches the first of the four technology streams associated with the development of Orbo technology.

SteornLab is a range of laboratory and test equipment targeted at organisations developing rotary and magnetic systems. The first two SteornLab products are available to purchase from today.

A second technology range, ZeroF passive magnetic bearings, is scheduled for commercial launch during summer 2009.

The Steorn commercialisation and e-learning platform, SKDB, will launch alongside the much-anticipated Orbo technology towards the end of 2009.

The final testing of the SKDB commences with a call for 300 engineering organisations / qualified engineers to sign up. There will be no subscription charge for those involved in this final testing phase, just a requirement to enter into our standard developer licence agreement.

"2009 represents a turning point for Steorn, Orbo and our other technology ranges," said CEO Sean McCarthy. "It marks the end of a long cycle of R&D and sees us making a strong push towards commercialisation - our plans show the business reaching profitability in the next 12 to 18 months."
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Could it possibly be true..... Im more of a Biologist than a Physicist.

Rynner, what sayeth thee?
 
Well, I've just watched the video.

10 minutes of not-even-hot air. Several talking heads, all repeating many of the same sort of bland generalisations. It left me none the wiser, just hungry for real technical details.

Now I understand that these technical details would be priceless as trade secrets, and need to be kept under wraps until Steorn can get cast-iron patents or other commercial protection for their discoveries, but this just leaves those of us on the outside yearning for something to get our teeth into.

I haven't looked at the rest of the website yet, but the products they claim to be launching now seem less than exciting, and seem to imply that there's still a lot of research to be done before the dream of free energy can be realised.

But the whole production looks rather slick, which raises another mystery, the financial basis of this research organisation that has been going for so long with very little to sell.

I think we should send the team from "Hustle" in to see what's going on.... :twisted:
 
rynner2 said:
...

I think we should send the team from "Hustle" in to see what's going on.... :twisted:
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It does look like there's a classic bit of punter teasing going on.
 
Nevertheless I am delighted to see this phenomenon back on its feet. I will watch closely with fortean eyes and report any changes on this thread.

It would be a world-changing topic if it were true & they have now had plenty opportunity to say "Oops our figures were wrong - how embarrassing. Sorry" So I now think a mistake is out of the question.

This is either real or top quality male bovine excrement.
 
Just ran across this on Boing Boing

Jury reports that Steon's Orbo does not produce free energy
Posted by Mark Frauenfelder, June 23, 2009 2:19 PM |

The Orbo doesn't work, reports a jury of scientists and engineers selected by perpetual motion company Steorn to analyze its technology.

" Twenty-two independent scientists and engineers were selected by Steorn to form this jury. It has for the past two years examined evidence presented by the company. The unanimous verdict of the Jury is that Steorn's attempts to demonstrate the claim have not shown the production of energy. The jury is therefore ceasing work."

The blogger who runs a blog about Steorn says:

"As I see it there have always been three possibilities for Steorn: either they truly have free energy technology, or they're a fraud, or they're mistaken and delusional. Today's development can be taken as weighty evidence that they are, in fact, mistaken and delusional"

Steorn Jury Announcement
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Boing Boing Link
 
No end in sight for charlatans on the internet

http://stjury.ning.com/forum/topics/jury-announcement

despite 'Free energy' or perpetual motion or what other claptrp they are trying to con people into investing in being in violation of one of the most fundamental laws of physics, completey impossible and ignored by all national patent offices

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_law ... modynamics

and despite a jury of 22 scientists saying they have failled to produce free energy this Steorn company is still trying to say they will have it working 'soon'
It makes you wonder if this stern company also has teams of nigerians with a share of 10.5 million dollars for anyone who will help them to get it out of the country.

No wonder the world is in such a mess if this is what people are willing to invest in.
 
eburacum said:
What it all comes down to is "Can the power which throws mighty Jupiter around the Sun power my electric shaver?"
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No, but it should be possible to extract some energy from Jupiter's momentum. Eventually Jupiter would fall into the Sun, but you can't have everything.
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sadly due to the law of consevation of momentum if you take power from a planet orbiting a sun then you will cause a change to the orbit so it might work for a bit but you eventualy make the planet spiral into the sun.CLUNK
All these laws related to the three laws of thermodynamics are hard to get past, you can lobby parliment but it wont do much good I don't think.


The British scientist and author C.P. Snow had an excellent way of remembering the three laws:

1. You cannot win (that is, you cannot get something for nothing, because matter and energy are conserved).

2. You cannot break even (you cannot return to the same energy state, because there is always an increase in disorder; entropy always increases).

3. You cannot get out of the game (because absolute zero is unattainable).
There is a certain beauty to it I think.

Don't get conned by folks who wibble on about zero point energy which is basically what this company is doing in a round about way, there is a huge amount of energy in the zero point field but its impossible to extract it as it doesn't exist in a usable form. you need to have an energy differential to be able to extract energy from any system and its impossible to create that differential in the zero point field.
 
They're still at it:

http://www.steorn.com/demo/
Visit Steorn's Orbo technology demonstration at the Waterways Ireland Visitor Centre in Dublin

We are delighted to announce the live demonstration of Orbo technology. As well as streaming live to the world via steorn.com, we are opening the demonstration to the public for free. Come down to the Waterways Ireland Visitor Centre to see our technology at work.

During December there will be a series of talks about Orbo technology by Steorn CEO, Sean McCarthy. Then in January we will be streaming the validation and replication. Full schedule of events to follow.

Opening hours
Admission is free. We are open Monday to Saturday, 10am to 7pm, and Sundays 12pm to 6pm.

15th – 23rd December 2009
5th – 31st January 2010

Where it's on
The demo takes place at the Waterways Ireland Visitor Centre, Grand Canal Dock, Dublin 4, Ireland.

etc...
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Perhaps ramonmercado or other Dublin residents would like to visit and report back...?
 
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