Perpetual Motion 89 



use railway carriages shaped like double cones to run automatically 

 up the double inclined plane, as in the well-known lecture experi- 

 ment. At the end of every ascent he proposes to run the carriage 

 do2vn again upon a parallel track on a reversed incline. 



Very few words must be given to my conclusion. The en- 

 quiry has been very laborious, but has been so interesting that It 

 has never become wearisome. I find it stated in one grave pub- 

 lication that the time spent on inventing and constructing perpetual 

 motion devices has not been lost, any more than in the parallel 

 case cf the philosopher's stone, in the search for which the foun- 

 dations of chemistry were laid. I utterly disbelieve this. I have 

 not been able to discover one single invention of value or one foot 

 of progress in mechanical science to show for all the lifetimes of 

 labour and enormous sums of money spent on the quest. Nor 

 d(.)es it seem that experience has brought wisdom. Every day the 

 same old, old devices are being re-invented, and the waste of time 

 and energy is too great. Just as I am closing there comes to me 

 a drawing from the "Sunday Pictorial" of July 30th last, showing 

 a machine, with motor and dynamo, with the heading — "Perpetual 

 Motion Secret Discovered ? " And at the foot of the drawing the 

 following — "Device invented by Joseph Roes, a Belgian-American, 

 whose name must be added to the list of those who claim to 

 have discovered perpetual motion. After the power has been 

 generated gear wheels communicate it to a motor, which in time 

 runs a smaller motor This motor partly rewinds a spring and 

 keeps it in a semi-wound state." 



Yet there is nothing philosophically inconceivable in one class 

 of perpetual motion, not that dealt with in the preceding pages, 

 which denies the conservation of energy, but the vast class of the 

 possible future which shall utilize the inconceivable stores of 

 dynamic energy that are all around us, — the motion of the earth 

 at one end of the scale, the vibration of the atom at the other. 

 No one among us may live to see any advance in that direction, 

 but 1 am confident that this conquest lies before mankind, though 

 in what manner and by what devices is still hidden from us. 



