Bruce DePalma History

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Yet “proof of principle” for his invention was apparently provided when a large N machine, dubbed the Sunburst, was built in 1978 in Santa Barbara California. The Sunburst machine was independently tested by Dr. Robert Kincheloe, professor emeritus of electrical engineering at Stanford University. In his 1986 report (presented to the Society for Scientific Exploration, San Francisco, 6/21/86), Kincheloe noted that the drag of the rotating magnetized gyroscope is only 13 to 20 percent of a conventional generator operating at an ideal 100 percent efficiency. The DePalma N machine therefore could produce electricity at around 500 percent efficiency.
In Kincheloe’s cautious summary: “DePalma may have been right in that there is indeed a situation here whereby energy is being obtained from a previously unknown and unexplained source. This is a conclusion that most scientists and engineers would reject out of hand as being a violation of accepted laws of physics and if true has incredible implications.”
“The jury is still out on the DePalma N machine,” says physicist Harold Puthoff, a senior fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Austin, Texas. “It isn’t clear where the reported excess energy is coming from – whether out of the electromagnetic field or as the result of some anomaly associated with rotating bodies in terms of inertia. The DePalma machine needs to be replicated on a broad scale to see if it actually works. Though I’m rather skeptical, I certainly would encourage independent laboratory experimentation. While such a phenomenon would have seemed to absolutely go against the law of energy conservation a number of years ago, we now recognize that the potential for extracting energy out of so called empty space is in fact a reality.”
Dr. Puthoff believes that a new, non polluting energy source may be achieved by tapping the force of random fluctuations of jostling atomic particles within a vacuum. “We now know that empty space is filled with what are called vacuum fluctuations: huge amounts of energy that suddenly burst forth from the nothingness of space. Zero Point Energy is the general term applied to the theories that attempt to explain the concept of tapping into the abundant power available directly from the vacuum of space itself.
DePalma described his N machine and outlined a theory to explain its workings in a paper, “On the Possibility of Extraction of Electrical Energy Directly From Space,” published in the British science journal, Speculations in Science and Technology (Sept 1990, Vol 13 No 4). So far, the scientific establishment either has ignored DePalma’s controversial claims or remains unaware of them.
DePalma is quick to point out that the N machine is not a perpetual motion machine, that mythical contraption long sought by many frustrated inventors. “The perpetual motion machine is only supposed to run itself. It could never put out five times more power than is put into it. Perpetual motion schemes used conventional energy sources, whereas the N machine is a new way of extracting energy from space.”
Meanwhile, other countries, notably India and Japan, are vigorously pursuing what might prove to be a technological breakthrough. (is this yet one more example of the Invented in USA/Made in Japan syndrome, the outcome of American shortsightedness and vested interests?) In India, eminent engineer Paramahamsa Tewari is currently testing his invention, called the Space Power Generator (SPG), which essentially replicates DePalma’s N machine. With 5 kilowatts total power input, the SPG is reportedly yielding 30 kilowatts of electrical power output. (correspondence to B. DePalma 8/13/90).
Tewari, a senior engineer with India’s Department of Atomic Energy-Nuclear Power Corporation, also directs the Kaiga Project, India’s largest atomic power facility, in Karnataka. He freely acknowledges his debt to DePalma, who has shared his experimental results with Tewari for many years. According to Tewari, “The electrical power generated by the Space Power Generator is indeed commercially viable and should be brought to the notice of the general public.” He has urged India’s Atomic Energy Commission to create an independent research group to advance free energy technology. Tewari also credits John Wheeler, the prominent American physicist and discoverer of the black hole, for his steady encouragement. Wheeler, who had been searching for a mathematical theory that would predict free energy, applauded Tewari for his efforts to develop such a theory, and the two scientists corresponded for a number of years.
The Japan Science Foundation, under Japanese government auspices, awarded grants to two universities and one company to produce models of the N machine and to investigate how it works. Kazama Giken Corporation is commercially supplying small N machines for research and educational purposes. Another Japanese company, Panasonic/National, is also pursuing this technology. Shiuji Inomata, Ph D president of the Japan Psychotronics Institute and senior scientist at the Electrotechnical Laboratory in Ibaraki, has been instrumental in sparking the interest of Japan’s scientific community in the N machine.
“One day man will connect his apparatus to the very wheelwork of the universe… and the very forces that motivate the planets in their orbits and cause them to rotate will rotate his own machinery,” predicted Nikola Tesla, the Croatian born American electrical genius whose discoveries and inventions rival those of Edison. Proponents of the N machine believe that it taps directly into a primordial energy source, meshing with the wheelwork of the cosmos.
“Electrical engineering took a wrong turn 160 years ago,” according to Tewari, referring to English scientist Michael Faraday’s pioneering work of the world’s first dynamo. In 1831, Faraday performed a series of experiments which led to the modern electric induction generator, having two moving parts–a rotor and a stator. Faraday moved a wire near the pole of a magnet, producing an electrical potential across the ends of the wire. This induction principle is used in all the electrical generators we use today. And that’s precisely what Tewari means by a “wrong turn.” In that same year, 1831, Faraday also performed a simple yet ingenious experiment with a rotating magnetized conductor. The resulting phenomenon (free energy?) has yet to be explained in terms of conventional scientific theory.
By cementing a copper disc on top of a cylinder magnet, and rotating the magnet and disc together, Faraday created an electrical potential. After pondering this phenomenon for many years, he concluded that when a magnet is rotated, its magnetic field remains stationary.
Thus, he reasoned, the metal of the magnet moves through its own field, and the relative motion is translated into electrical potential.
Faraday’s experiments led him to the revolutionary conclusion that a magnetic field is a property of space itself, not something attached to the magnet, which merely serves to induce or evoke the field.
Known for over 150 years, the Faraday homopolar generator, as his contraption is called, has been viewed by a handful of visionary inventors as a basis for evoking the free energy latent in space. They see is as the prototype for a generator capable of providing its own motive power with additional energy to spare. When the world embraced Faraday’s two piece induction generator, whose drawbacks include mechanical friction and electrical losses, the enormous potential of the Faraday homopolar generator was abandoned, in the opinion of free-energy proponents.
Following in Faraday’s footsteps, DePalma in 1978 speculated that free energy could be tapped from the matrix of space simply by magnetizing a gyroscope. “I reasoned that the metal of the magnetized gyroscope moving through its own magnetic field, when rotated would produce an electrical potential between the axle and the outer edge of the rotating magnetized flywheel.”
This insight led to his N machine, essentially a one piece rotating magnetized flywheel, Instead of having a rotor and a stator, as do conventional generators, the n machine only has a rotor. Half of the flywheel is the north pole, the other half is the south pole. One electrical contact is put on the axle, another contact is placed on the outer edge of the gyroscope, and presto, electricity is taken directly out of the magnet itself.
For 150 years after Faraday’s controversial experiment, no one bothered to see whether or not a rotating magnet generator would have to do the same amount of work as a conventional induction generator in order to produce an identical power output. Then, in 1978, the Sunburst homopolar generator was built. Testing determined that its output power exceeded the input needed to run the machine, that it was significantly more efficient that an induction generator.
Opinions differ as to the exact mechanisms by which the N machine generates energy. In 1977 Tewari created a minor sensation when he put forth the theory that space is filled with a dynamic medium whose swirling motion is the source of all matter and energy. In his Space Vortex Theory, more fully developed in his 1984 book, Beyond Matter, the Indian engineer inventor postulated that a void lies at the heart of the electron– a void whose high speed rotation within a vacuum could produce energy from space. Tewari’s theory is based on the assumption that the electron has a definite structure, and is not just a homogeneous “droplet of charge.”
According to Tewari, the movement of “voids” in the spinning magnetized cylinder of his Space Power Generator liberates free energy out of the space between the machine’s axis and the magnet. He readily admits that this sounds incredible, by the yardstick of known laws of physics. Tewari says he never would have developed his theory had he been trained as a physicist rather than as an engineer, since his ideas differ so radically from conventional physics.
“Tewari’s explanation is perfectly possible,” comments DePalma. “He is attempting to conceptualize what’s happening between the atoms and where the energy is liberated.”
“My own approach,” continues DePalma, “is that space is all around us like the sea of water the fish swim in. The only way you know it’s there is to distort it in some way, and the simplest way to distort space is with a magnet.” DePalma maintains that his own conception of magnetism as a distortion of a pre-existent homogeneous field is, “the first new thought on the fundamental nature of magnetism since Oersted.” For example, modern science says that energy is a constant substance in the universe, and that the conversion of energy from one form to another will lead to the heat-death of the universe eons from now. In contrast, DePalma says, “My cosmos is an open-ended universe, one in which energy can be evoked from space itself. All energy comes from space,” he maintains, “and there are various processes which can release this energy, the simplest of which is lighting a match or rubbing two sticks together.”