Steorn's Orbo

Steorn became known to the public back in 2006, when they ran a brazen full-page ad in The Economist declaring their discovery of free energy technology, and calling for a jury of scientists to "test our technology and report your findings to the world." After nearly three long years that jury has reported their findings today, and they do not bode well for Steorn.

The jury, whose identities have not been made public until today, have posted a blog to announce their findings. The announcement reads:

In August 2006 the Irish company Steorn published an advertisement in the Economist announcing the development of “a technology that produces free, clean and constant energy”. Qualified experts were sought to form a “jury” to validate these claims.

Twenty-two independent scientists and engineers were selected by Steorn to form this jury. It has for the past two years examined evidence presented by the company. The unanimous verdict of the Jury is that Steorn's attempts to demonstrate the claim have not shown the production of energy. The jury is therefore ceasing work.

The jury consists of scientists and engineers in relevant fields from Europe and North America, from industry, universities and government laboratories. Information about individual members can be found at http://stjury.ning.com/

R.I.MacDonald
Chairman, Steorn Jury

Steorn soon issued a rebuttal on their news page:

Steorn today confirmed that the internet ‘blog’ stjury.ning.com had been posted on behalf of members of the Jury of scientists that Steorn had engaged to conduct an independent review of its Orbo Technology.

In a statement, Steorn CEO, Sean McCarthy said that “he was grateful to the Jury members for the time and effort that they had devoted to the process.”

McCarthy continued on to state that he “fully understood the frustration of the Jury members with respect to the time that the process was taking. Implementing Orbo in a reliable and consistent manner had remained a challenge for the organization, one that we had made no secret of. Due to these difficulties we had focused on providing the Jury with test data relating to the underlying magnetic effect behind Orbo. This work concluded at the end of 2008.”

McCarthy concluded by stating that “during 2009 the company had resolved the key technical problems related to the implementation of Orbo and is now focused on commercial launch towards the end of this year, at which time academic and engineering validation would be released concurrent with public demonstrations”.

As I see it there have always been three possibilities for Steorn: either they truly have free energy technology, or they're a fraud, or they're mistaken and delusional. Today's development can be taken as weighty evidence that they are, in fact, mistaken and delusional.

Some have suggested that the jury never existed, that Steorn had made it all up as part of a scam. This idea has been refuted, and with such clumsiness on Steorn's part that it becomes clear that they had little idea of what they were doing when they commissioned this jury. If after three years they could not present convincing evidence for this effect, then in the best case they were irresponsibly premature in announcing their discovery to the world &mdash and in the worst case, there never was a discovery at all, it was just a series of mistaken measurements.

Steorn now states that they've solved the technical problems (or rather just the "key technical problems", meaning there may well be others left unsolved) standing in the way of implementing Orbo in a "reliable and consistent manner." Why had they not bothered to address these problems before announcing it to the world and signing up a jury to test it? The fact that Steorn has behaved with such unfounded confidence in the past gives me little comfort that they know what they're doing now.

With this jury announcement, the clock is ticking for Steorn. Only the most foolish investors would continue to pour millions of dollars into a company that has so thoroughly failed a test that it had set up for itself. Steorn has stated, again today, that they intend to release Orbo commercially toward the end of 2009. If this does not occur, I expect that it is finally the end of the show.

Today I received the following from Said Salim Hamdan Al-Abri, the head of the IEEE engineering society at Sultan Qaboos University, who graciously responded to my question of whether he was present at Sean's talk and if an Orbo device was demonstrated:

Yes Sir
I was there and he talked about some kind of motors that he invented.
Unfortunately I could not understand the talk very well may be because of his xent and my poor english.
One of the amazing and seems unbeleivable thins is that the motor which he proposed has an efficiency of 17000!!!!!!!!!!!

While this is only one unverified report, it sounds like Sean McCarthy did hold the planned talk in Oman, but there's no indication that he had an Orbo to show off (given that it is referred to as the motor that "he proposed"). Why on earth would he be traveling the globe to stoke interest in his incredible claims, without bringing along a single shred of evidence to support those claims? One possibility is that the current talks are seen as 'warm-ups', outside of the reach of major media, and that he doesn't believe a demonstration is required yet. Another possibility, of course, is that there just isn't anything to be demonstrated.

Update:

In response to a follow-up question, Mr. Al-Abri made clear the Orbo was a no-show:

No he did not show us any actual motor. It was just power point slides.

Update 2:

The following was received from Arif Saeed Malik at SQU:

I have not had a chance to listen to Sean. But I asked my friend who attended it and he told me that he just talked about it. Apparently he tried to demonstrate but then said that it is not properly working due to set-up problem.

Interesting... has yet another Orbo demonstration fallen prey to 'technical difficulties'?

Last Wednesday, February 18th, Steorn's Sean McCarthy was scheduled to give a talk at Qatar University. Thus far, no word has been heard about how this talk went, whether an Orbo was demonstrated, or even if the talk took place at all. Another event is scheduled for this Wednesday, February 25th -- this time at Sultan Qaboos University in Muscat, Oman.

If you were there for Sean McCarthy's talk in Qatar last week, or will be at his talk in Oman this week, we want to hear from you! It's just possible that these talks represent the beginning of a technological revolution of unprecedented proportion, and if you were there to witness it, there are many, many people who want to hear what you have to report. Questions most in need of an answer include:

1) Did the talk take place?
2) Was an actual Orbo device shown? Did it appear that self-sustaining motion was demonstrated?
3) How many people were in attendance and what was the general reaction of the audience? What is your reaction?

If you can answer these questions, please shoot me an e-mail at contact(at)dispatchesfromthefuture.com. Thanks!

In related news, details about this week's talk in Oman have been posted to the Sultan Qaboos University web site, here, and are reprinted below.

Seminar Announcement - Monday, February 23, 2009
Title: Introducing Orbo: A new way of looking at magnetic interactions in asymmetric system
By: Sean McCarthy, CEO of Steorn Ltd.
Date: Wednesday 25th February, @ 2:00PM
Venue: Lecture Theater 2

After tomorrow's planned talk in Qatar, Steorn will continue the Middle East leg of its Orbo world tour next week, with a stop at Oman's Sultan Qaboos University next Wednesday, February 25th, according to an article in the paper Zawya.

What's most intriguing is the specific wording of the article; according to Zawya, "[Steorn] will be showcasing its technology", and will "unveil its ground-breaking technology" (emphasis added). This wording could be the result of poor translation (as we saw in the Qatar advertisement) or of a misunderstanding of Steorn's intentions (reportedly an organizer of the Dublin Institute of Technology talk had expected Sean to demonstrate the Orbo at that event, too). On the other hand, it just might mean exactly what it says: that Orbo will be publicly demonstrated, for the first time, in Oman. If so, this raises the question of why Sean will not (or of whether he will) demonstrate Orbo at the Qatar event, tomorrow. In my opinion, Steorn can't pull off many more presentations that are all talk and no show, like he did at D.I.T., and continue to hope to be taken seriously. If Sean has anything worth showing, now is the time to show it.

The full article can be found here. An excerpt is reprinted below.

A controversial Irish alternative energy company which claims to have discovered a source of free energy that defies the basic laws of physics, will be showcasing its technology at a special presentation scheduled at Sultan Qaboos University next week. Dublin-based Steorn Ltd, a privately held technology development firm, says it will be unveil its ground-breaking technology, branded as 'Orbo', on February 25. The event is part of a series of presentations planned at key universities in the Gulf and the Middle East ahead of the proposed commercial rollout of the technology later this year.

Steorn hopes the presentations will inspire the student and engineering faculty towards engaging with this new technology. "Our focus is on getting our Orbo technology into the hands of organizations that will push it into the market," says CEO Sean McCarthy. "We are starting this process in the Middle East, a region with a strong energy heritage and a real commitment to the development of alternative energies for the future." The presentation at the SQU, as well as those scheduled elsewhere around the Gulf, notably the UAE, Qatar and Bahrain are expected to generate international interest, given the fierce controversy surrounding Steorn and its so-called 'free energy technology'.

With last week's introduction of Steorn's revamped site, we learned some more specifics about the series of talks that Steorn plans to hold, around the globe, over the course of this year. The first stop is the small Arab nation of Qatar. The talk, to be held February 18th, has been reported by at least two Arab media outlets, Qatar's The Peninsula and the United Arab Emirate's Zawya.

DOHA: The Finland[sic]-based alternative energy company Steorn will kick-start its Middle East ‘face-to-face’ discussions regarding the principles behind its newly-developed controversial Orbo technology, from Doha.

The first leg of its tour is scheduled to start from Qatar University on February 18, before moving on to a number of universities in the UAE, Oman, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain. The Steorn announced that it will hold a number of presentations throughout the Middle East during the first half of this year. Similar tours across Europe and he US will commence during summer 2009.

Orbo is a technology that creates energy from magnetic interactions. It provides free, clean and constant energy at the point of use. It is a platform technology that can be engineered to power anything from a phone, to a fridge to a car.

However, a section of scientists have challenged this claim saying energy cannot be simply created.

Neither the site for Qatar University nor the site for their College of Engineering mention Steorn on their calendars, though it appears that few events are posted to those calendars at all.

In other news, several sites have posted articles reporting on Steorn's announcements of last week. These include the following:

Engadget: Steorn returns, promises to open Orbo specs, give you a pony
The tongue-in-cheek approach makes it clear that Engadget gives little credence to Steorn's claims after 2007's failed demo.

ZDNet: Steorn is at it again!
Rupert Goodwins appears to fall squarely in the 'scam' camp on the question of Steorn.

OhMyNews: Steorn Raises the Magnetic Curtain
Of the current batch of media coverage, this is the only one that approaches the topic with a positive bias. The author, a member of Steorn's SKDB developer forum, seems to take the existence of a working Orbo for granted.

The Young Witness: Everything you need to know about science
A light humor column that lumps Steorn in with with the anti-gravity effect of dropping a cat with a buttered toast attached to its back.

Update 2/15:

Sean McCarthy's talk has been added to the Qatar University calendar. Available from that page is a 3-sheet PDF with a description of the talk:

The presentation is on the topic of "conservation of energy and specifically our claims with respect to energy in asymmetric magnetic systems." ... The purpose of the presentation is to provide an insight into the principle [sic] theory and possible applications of the technology and is esigned [sic] only to inform and stimulate student engineering and research understanding and interest.

Today Steorn unveiled their updated web site, and there's a lot that's new.

The video on the home page sums up the biggest news: Steorn is about to release Orbo, its claimed 'free energy' technology, to developers. They are calling for 300 qualified engineers to sign up for free, non-commercial development licenses. These engineers will be invited to join the Steorn Knowledge Development Base (SKDB), an online community of Steorn developers that includes a set of "e-learning modules" to walk potential developers through all of the physical principles necessary to understand how Orbo works. The SKDB, which has been in beta with a small set of members for over a year, will at first be open to 300 new engineers, but is then expected to open up to anyone who's interested sometime in 2009. Commercial development licenses will also be available later this year.

In addition to the SKDB, Steorn has announced the release of several Orbo-related commercial products. Their USB Hall probe is used to record magnetic flux. The magnetic torque measurement system is designed to measure the torque of a rotary magnetic system, by subtracting away external influences such as friction, gravity, and air drag. ZeroF passive magnetic bearings eliminate friction by using permanent magnets to separate the moving parts. Each of these products appears to be geared at building and testing systems based on the Orbo technology.

Finally, the Steorn site now features a page briefly explaining how Orbo works, and announces a series of talks to be given at engineering universities around the world, beginning in the Middle East this month, continuing to Europe in the summer, and finishing in the United States in autumn.

It looks like Steorn is going ahead with the plans they announced in December, to begin the commercialization of Orbo in February. If it weren't for the fact that Orbo is supposed to be impossible, and that there still remains not a single photo or video of a spinning, self-sustaining device anywhere on Steorn's site, this would look like any other exciting but routine product launch. Orbo's promise of free energy feels closer than ever today, but yet again it's still too early to be certain that this isn't all just smoke and mirrors. Hopefully we'll learn more soon as these 300 engineers sign up and begin to try to replicate Orbo on their own.

The front page of Steorn's web site has changed in the past 24 hours -- all the previous content is gone, replaced with a blue curtain and the date "4 February 2009". According to Sean McCarthy's December talk at the Dublin Institute of Technology, February is when Steorn will begin the process of going public with its Orbo technology, and that just might begin tomorrow. According to Sean, Steorn will begin by calling for 300 engineers to sign NDAs and begin replicating Orbo. An open call for engineers may be all we see in February, but it's just possible we'll finally get a glimpse of the one thing behind the curtain that really matters, if it exists at all -- a perpetually spinning Orbo.

On December 17th, Steorn CEO Sean McCarthy did give a lecture and take questions at the Dublin Institute of Technology, as promised. Audio recordings of the talk can be found here (downloadable) and here (streaming).

First off, once again no Orbo was demonstrated. Most of the talk consisted of information that we've heard before: Steorn's early days and how they accidentally discovered the anomaly underlying Orbo, some background on the law of conservation of energy and on previous claimants of free energy devices. A brief overview was given of the principle said to underlie Orbo's magic: the time variance of magnetic interactions is exploited to make these interactions asymmetrical, so that slightly more energy comes out than is put in. Finally, Sean threw in some mentions of well established physics mysteries such as dark energy, suggesting not only that science still has a lot of fundamentals left to learn, but also that there may be a connection between dark energy and the source of Orbo's excess power. (Such wild speculations, especially in front of an audience with members who ask serious questions involving Atlantis and "levitational energy", may do little service to Steorn's goal of gaining establishment respect for their work.)

But one new morsel of information did come out of this talk: a road map of Steorn's future. Besides continuing to wait for results to come in from the "jury" of scientists, Steorn will be inviting 300 engineers to license the Orbo technology, at no cost, in order to replicate it. This is intended to be another prong in the assault on the established skepticism regarding perpetual motion machines (the other prongs being the jury and a still forthcoming public demonstration of a working Orbo) and the first step in launching the technology. According to Sean, these engineers will be invited to begin working on their own Orbos starting in February, 2009.

Here are a few excerpts from the talk:

This is really the kick-off of a sequence of lectures that we'll be doing over the course of the next six to nine months. [...] Fifteen universities down in the Middle East in February and March, then about 30 in Europe then possibly in the U.S.

What we are prepared to do is to launch the technology starting next year.

We license the core technology to people who develop products. And that process starts in February of next year. [...] But then understand what the technology is. We are a head-to-head company, we're not going to be selling generators or turbines or anything like that. What we do is we license the core technology to people who develop products. And that process starts in February of next year.

We're going to be asking 300 engineers or engineering organizations to start replicating this for us. [...] The other thing I'll say, to get away from the Nigerian scam artist claim, is access is completely free, we'll not be asking anybody for any money, what we are asking people to do is they have to have a suitable qualification, they have to understand engineering, and we're also asking them to sign a development license which is a right to use our patented technology, and the technology is patented, to develop and either prove it for yourselves or force it out into the market.

Q: Has there ever been a motor produced...
Sean: Yeah.
Q: ...a self powered motor...
Sean: Yeah, absolutely.
Q: ...that runs continuously?
Sean: Sorry?
Q: That runs continuously.
Sean: Nothing in the real world runs continuously.
Q: Only a 100% motor would run continuously.
Sean: Yeah, until something breaks on it.

The process of us engaging in a very public manner with the engineering world starts next February. We don't expect the engineers to just come in so we're putting in to the public domain an awful lot of information. That they'll at least say maybe this is worth ten minutes of my time today.

In terms of complexity... this is not easy to build. This is incredibly difficult and incredibly complicated stuff to work with. Um, the only fair analogy that I think that I can give it, and if you do get involved with it you'll probably find out, it's kind of like building a hard disk drive. Now, the kind of accuracies and tolerances and balances that are involved are very difficult so, if you do try to get involved, [...] virtually every engineer or scientist knows how a hard disk drive works. Very few of them can walk into their garage and build one. The challenges are not dissimilar. And we've had to develop all kinds of other stuff around this to build real systems, you know, we've developed magnetic bearings and all kinds of you know, um, stuff that we've had to wrap around this to allow ourselves to reliably build these reproducible items. So the engineering challenges are not in any way minuscule.

One question that audience members brought up repeatedly during this talk is: Why aren't you demonstrating a device? If Sean intends to give at least 45 of these talks around the world starting in February, as he claims, he'd damn well better have a spinning Orbo up there with him by talk 3 or 4 if he doesn't want to start getting laughed off stage.

For those of us watching with interest from the sidelines, the long dry spell seems to be over, and we're now back to business as usual: Steorn promising exciting new developments ...always just a few months away. Now our eyes are on February. Will hundreds of engineers really be invited to replicate the Orbo? Will any of them succeed? Will one of these engineers, or Steorn itself, finally show off a working device? Or, will we again be given a new date to look forward to, just a few more months further down the road?

Steorn has added a new page to their web site, advertising a series of talks they'll be giving, beginning this month:

Our 'talk' initiative is designed to give people within the technology development community an opportunity to understand the Orbo proposition and ask questions in a direct, face-to-face format.

The programme of talks starts in Dublin on the 17th December 2008 and will involve a sequence of talks in universities around the world, including the US/Europe and the Middle East.

After the near total lack of communication from Steorn over the past 16 months (!) since their failed London demo, it's become clear that they're intent on keeping out of the public eye until they're good and ready. Is it now that time? Will this "talk" be just another pie in the sky lecture with nothing on display but a few charts and graphs? Or... is Steorn ready to show a spinning Orbo that, after all these months of perfecting, can take the heat of a public demonstration without jamming up? Stay tuned.

Update 12/10:

Further information about Steorn's December 17th talk is found on the page pictured below, received from a member of the faculty at the Department of Mechanical Engineering at DIT. It was posted previously here but without mention of a source; I wanted to verify its authenticity before passing it on.

In an interview that appeared in Ireland's Sunday Tribune newspaper August 10th, Steorn CEO Sean McCarthy asserts that development of their Orbo technology, as well as its testing by a jury of 22 scientists, is still on track -- and that Steorn expects to launch Orbo and demonstrate it publicly before next summer.

According to Steorn, its challenge to the academic community to independently validate Orbo is continuing.

It anticipates a full launch before next summer, and says any further public demonstrations of the technology will now coincide with the commercial launch.

While this news means that Steorn hasn't disappeared entirely and isn't just quietly hoping for the rest of the world to forget about their physics-defying claim and the disastrous attempt at unveiling it last year, all signs are not so positive. The focus of this same Sunday Tribune article is on Steorn's financial information for the year 2006. Amidst heavy losses of nearly €6 million and flush with €8 million of new funding lured from private investors who wanted to own a piece of the company's claimed free energy technology, Steorn's two directors, Sean McCarthy and Michael Daly, drew incomes averaging at least €175,000 each. A hint of fraud? Or merely enough confidence on their parts to allow them to pursue business as usual?

For us, watching from the sidelines, it certainly is business as usual: Great things are coming, according to Steorn, but in the meantime all we can do is wait.