Would you believe in an electric motor that is made almost entirely of plastic? What can run on airborne power? And "drag" free electricity directly from the electric field of the Earth? Consider one entertaining article from the magazine "Popular Science" as early as April 1971.
These wonderful machines are practically unknown today. Yet the world's first electric motor was electrostatic. It was invented in 1748 by Benjamin Franklin. In 1870, the German physicist J. K. Poggendorf built such a simple engine. The entire motor consisted of a plastic disc and two electrodes. But both of them never got the attention they deserved.
Poggendorf engine.
And then Oleg Efimenko appears on the stage. The Russian-born physicist attended classes at the University of Göttingen in the second half of the 1940s, where Professor R. W. Paul, demonstrated two square-shaped metal plates attached to the end of a pole. He stuck the device out of the window and flipped it 180 degrees. The galvanometer attached to the plates jerked violently.
Oleg Efimenko's engine.
I could never forget this demonstration,”he said after Efimenko. "And I was wondering why, if there is electricity in the air, it can't be used to light a light bulb or something."
Oleg Efimenko's engine.
And then Efimenko and his graduate student Henry Fischbach-Nazario developed and improved their engines. He experimented with electret motors. An electret is an insulator with a permanent electrostatic charge. It creates a constant electric field in the surrounding space, just as a magnet creates a constant magnetic field. And like a magnet, it can be used to build a motor.
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Testing of devices by Oleg Efimenko.
The so-called "climate experiment" was especially revealing. On the night of September 29, 1970, Efimenko and Walker went into an empty parking lot and raised an orange pole-antenna to an 8-meter height. At the end of the pole there was some radioactive material in a capsule tied to a wire. The experimenters connected an electret motor to the antenna, and, as Efimenko describes it, "the energy of the Earth's electric field was converted into continuous mechanical motion." Two months later, they successfully operated an air-powered motor.
At the University of West Virginia, Efimenko has a laboratory full of exotic devices that revolve and hum like a swarm of bees. "And, in principle," says Dr. Oleg Efimenko, "they can do everything that electromagnetic motors can do, and some things that they can do better."
Based on materials from Popular Science