Do you know who David Edward Hugh Jones is? Or maybe you've heard of his "alter-ego" Daedalus of DREADCO (Daedalus Research Evaluation and Development Corp)? Not?
And yet this is a very interesting person, he was a research chemist and inventor. Also for 38 years, starting in 1964 in the New Scientist edition. Jones published research papers weekly under the pseudonym Daedalus. These notes, along with additional commentary and implementation sketches, were then compiled into two books: The Inventions of Daedalus: A Compendium of Plausible Schemes (1982) and Additional Inventions of Daedalus (1999).
But our channel David Jones is interesting because he collected the so-called "perpetual motion machines", which for some reason worked. The most famous of them was and remains the "Perpetual motion machine", designed in 1981. It should be noted that this was the first public experience of creating such mechanisms, which was carried out by Jones.
So, David Jones' First Perpetual Motion Machine: a bicycle wheel suspended in a square metal frame with a plexiglass case. Three metal boxes are attached to the inside of the wheel. And the word "DREADCO" is also written on a plate that hangs on a metal rod in the center. That's the whole mechanism. The wheel is a moving element of the machine, but its energy source … or it is deliberately hidden … or it is not.
This "moving machine" was created by Jones at the request of the publisher New Scientist for a display by the British Association for the Advancement of Science in York in 1981. The mechanism was later exhibited at the Faculty of Physical Chemistry at the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne so that members of the public, scientists or anyone else could try to figure out how it works.
And the most interesting thing is that David himself from the very beginning made it clear that his cars were "fake", and called himself "the court jester in the palace of science." He talked a lot, said he used "trick tricks" and "cunning distractions", and scientists were "surprisingly gullible", failing to see the clue.
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Almost four decades have passed since then, the mechanism itself was donated to the Royal Society for preservation in 2018, after the death of the inventor. And until now, no one has been able to solve the riddle of Daedalus - why and why the wheel has been spinning for four decades, silently and not paying attention to anything.
Before his death in 2017, Jones gave a secret envelope to his former colleague Martin Polyakof, in which he reveals the secret of his mechanism. But Polyakof is in no hurry to open the envelope and the secret of the machine. He says in one interview: “Part of me really wants to know how it works. But are we really so stupid that we cannot guess for ourselves?"