In the summer of 1952, an explosion thundered in one of the laboratories of a scientific complex near Moscow, which belonged to the All-Union Research Institute of Electric Power Engineering. Several employees were killed. The causes of the disaster remained unclear: there was nothing to explode in the laboratory that stood on the outskirts, so that an accident was practically ruled out. Terrorist attack, sabotage, intrigues of foreign spies and enemies of the people who sold them ?! The investigation was personally led by Comrade Beria, and was led by Colonel Ivan Stepanovich Artyukhin. The revealed facts turned out to be so incredible that, both then and now, few people really believed and believe them. The fact is that in the institute laboratory No. 12, no less than a working perpetual motion machine was designed and launched!
A bit of history
What is this very perpetual motion machine? In short, it is something that cannot be, because it can never be, because its existence is contrary to the fundamental laws of physics. It is a way to extract energy from nothing. The first written evidence of attempts of this kind was left by Pietro Peregrino, a scientist from the French city of Maricoura, in 1269. Having conceived the siege of the Italian city of Lucerne, Karl of Anjou also called for military service and Peregrino. However, Pietro did not bother himself too much with military exploits. Most of the time he wrote letters to the Picardian nobleman Francesco Siger. The last of these letters is dated August 8, 1269, and it completes the cycle, which was subsequently combined into the treatise "The Message of the Magnet." Among other things, the treatise contains a description of “an ever-moving machine, which, once set in motion,would do the work for an unlimited time, without borrowing energy from the outside."
What started here! "Perpetual motion machines" (as a rule, these were complex combinations of wheels, levers, weights and counterweights) were not invented only by the lazy. There were also visual demonstrations. So, in the 18th century, the perpetual motion machine of Giacomo Offireus was very popular. He looked so convincing that even few scientists suspected deception. But when one of the skeptics set out to see what was inside this car, the designer broke the device.
Lomonosov intervened in the dispute
The sphere of scientific interests of Mikhail Lomonosov covered literally all the problems of natural science of that time. He also thought about thermodynamics, although he did not specifically deal with the problem of a perpetual motion machine. But the scientist considered such an engine impossible, which led him in 1755 to an exhaustive formulation of the law of conservation of matter: "All changes occurring in nature occur in such a way that if something is added to something, it is taken away from something else." Exactly 20 years after the appearance of the Lomonosov law, the Paris Academy of Sciences, exhausted under the weight of the manuscripts of unlucky inventors, decided not to consider projects of perpetual motion machines in the future.
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"A non-Soviet man lived in the hotel" Sovetskaya"
It was allegedly the Finnish engineer Mario Pikkalainen, who had arrived for a fruitful exchange of experience between Finnish and Soviet enterprises. However, Pikkalainen (and as it turned out after his arrest, American Howard Johnson) was not interested in the peaceful exchange of knowledge. He hunted for the industrial secrets of the USSR on the instructions of his overseas masters. Well, then everything went right along Vysotsky. “But working without assistants - maybe sad, maybe boring …”, “The enemy thought, the enemy was a dock …”, “And somewhere in the wilds of the restaurant of a citizen Epifan / A non-Soviet man was knocked out of his way and off his pantalyk”, “The enemy is not he was in charge, a fool, - the one to whom he entrusted everything, / He was a Chekist, an intelligence major and a wonderful family man.
The security officer who exposed Pikkalainen-Johnson was a state security officer, Major Kireev. But this will be later, and at first, hunting for information anywhere and in any way, Johnson managed to recruit a valuable source - a junior researcher of the same laboratory of the Research Institute of Electric Power Industry Vasily Adamtsev. Between 1950 and 1952, Adamtsev handed over 200 documents describing Soviet secret developments to an industrial spy. The content of one such document stunned Johnson. There it was stated that a perpetual motion machine was created and is operating in the N912 laboratory!
The order received by the spy was short: destroy the engine, blow up the laboratory, kill the inventor, steal the blueprints. But how do you accomplish this? It is almost impossible to penetrate the territory of the guarded special facility, and Johnson had no explosives. However, hardly in the overseas center of industrial espionage they believed in the reality of a perpetual motion machine. Most likely, they reasoned like this: we are talking about a new type of engine with low power consumption. But even such an engine meant a threat to the undivided domination of the oil monopolies! One way or another, the order has been received, and you need to carry it out somehow. Adamtsev was not good for "assistants" - he was cowardly and there were few opportunities. It was then that Johnson, during a "deep search" for accomplices, ran into Major Kireev. The spy was arrested and told everything during interrogations. And the explosion? The catch is that the lab went up in the airalready when Johnson was in custody (Adamtsev died in the explosion). Despite his willingness to cooperate, the spy could not explain who and how carried out the action entrusted to him. He just didn't know it.
Professor's diary
Meanwhile, events unfolded rapidly. The examination showed that the laboratory was mined not from the outside, but from the inside. The investigation team of Colonel Artyukhin carefully studied the personalities of everyone involved in one way or another in the activities of laboratory No. 12, with daily reports to Lavrenty Pavlovich Beria. But one of these people was no longer able to question.
Professor Ilya Petrovich Volgin was found dead at his dacha near Moscow with a knife in his back. The house bore traces of a hurried search. It is not known whether the killers found what they were looking for, but members of Artyukhin's group found a cache where the professor's diary was kept. But before moving on to its main essence, let us tell a little about the scientific views of Ilya Petrovich Volgin.
Who are you, Dr. Volgin?
He was a well-known radio specialist in his time, who worked in the Research Institute of Electric Power Engineering, and specifically in laboratory No. 12. Of course, the postulates of electrical engineering seemed to him unshakable: an electric current is an orderly movement of electrons along wires under the influence of a voltage applied to the ends of a conductor. He also knew that a chaotic thermal motion of electrons is always superimposed on the current. If you turn off the external voltage, the current will also stop. The chaotic motion will continue, but the electrons will no longer move in an orderly manner along the conductor. The ammeter will not register an electric current - its strength is zero. True, sensitive amplifiers detect chaotic voltages caused by the movement of electrons. After amplification, it is heard as noise in the speakers of a non-tuned receiver, or seen as flickering on the TV screen,when there is no station tuning.
There are electric rectifiers that pass electric current in only one direction. This means, argued Professor Volgin on the first pages of his diary, that such a detector is, in principle, capable of transmitting chaotic electrons in only one direction, delaying those going in the opposite direction. In this case, the detector will convert the chaotic thermal movement of electrons into a constant electric current … And an unprecedented thing will come true - energy from nothing!
Further, after many pages, the professor writes: “I found the possibility of converting a chaotic heat current into an ordered direct current. Draw electricity directly from the heat of the surrounding air. Yes, I invented the perpetuum mobile! The age-old dream of mankind has come true. The second law of thermodynamics is wrong! In our laboratory, I built a model of the apparatus …"
The next diary entry was dated two weeks later. It consisted of one jubilant word: "WORKS!"
The fiasco of the special services
After studying the professor's diary, a painstaking study followed what remained in the ruins of the laboratory. However, nothing similar to the wreckage of the car described by Professor Volgin in short was found. The interviewed employees of the research institute shrugged their shoulders in bewilderment. Of course, Professor Volgin did not work alone, but the scientists who died in the explosion, alas, could no longer clarify anything. No blueprints for the mysterious device were found anywhere, nor even a hint that such blueprints ever existed. But here it would be just right to recall the order received by Howard Johnson - "destroy the engine, blow up the laboratory, kill the inventor, steal the blueprints." It is logical to assume that such an order was not received by him alone, and those, others, were more fortunate. The stakes are too high! Perpetuum mobile, moreover invented in the USSR,would put an end to the world power of the oil kings forever.
The fate of the discovery
No further efforts by Colonel Artyukhin's group moved things off the ground. In the end, everything was blamed on Adamtsev, who had miscalculated something with the explosion and died. And the murder of Volgin? Well, these were the urks, they were looking for money. Now chase after them …
The riddle of laboratory N212 has not been solved until now. Did Professor Volgin really invent a perpetual motion machine or something similar? Or was he simply misled by temporary success, according to a number of leading electrical scientists? No one has ever done anything like it. The discovery, true or imaginary, cost Volgin's life (and others, in the laboratory). And one cannot guarantee that the professor's drawings are not kept somewhere in the underground safes of those to whom this discovery is not beneficial to this day.
Source: "Secrets of the XX century" No. 1-2