56 THE SEVEN FOLLIES OF SCIENCE 



for a few hours, he would have silenced all objectors far 

 more quickly and forcibly than he ever could have done 

 by any amount of argument. 



And in his case there could have been no excuse for 

 his not making a small machine "after the plans that he 

 published and even patented. He was wealthy and could 

 have commanded the services of the best mechanics in 

 London, but no working model was ever made. Many in- 

 ventors of perpetual-motion machines offer their poverty 

 as an excuse for not making a model or working machine. 

 Thus Dircks, in his " Perpetuum Mobile " gives an account 

 of " a mechanic, a model maker, who had a neat brass 

 model of a time-piece, in which were two steel balls A and 

 B ; B to fall into a semicircular gallery C, and be car- 

 ried to the end D of a straight trough DE ; while A in its 

 turn rolls to E, and so on continuously ; only the gallery C 

 not being screwed in its place, we are desired to take the 

 will for the deed, until twenty shillings be raised to com- 

 plete this part of the work ! " 



And Mr. Dircks also quotes from the "Builder" of 

 June, 1847 : " This vain delusion, if not still in force, is at 

 least as standing a fallacy as ever. Joseph Hutt, a frame- 

 work knitter, in the neighborhood of the enlightened town 

 of Hinckley, professes to have discovered it [perpetual 

 motion] and only wants twenty pounds, as usual, to set it 

 agoing." 



The following rather curious arrangement was described 

 in "The Mechanic's Magazine" for 1825. 



" I beg leave to offer the prefixed device. The point at 

 which, like all the rest, it fails, I confess I did not (as I 

 do now) plainly perceive at once, although it is certainly 

 very obvious. The original idea was this to enable a 



