Steorn's Orbo

...Alive enough to send lawyers my way, anyhow.

The original domain name for this blog included the words "Steorn" and "Orbo". When Steorn made it clear in their forums last year that they don't approve of domain names that include their trademarks, I changed this site's domain to dispatchesfromthefuture.com. I stopped promoting the original domain and turned it into a redirect leading to the new domain, so that existing links wouldn't just go dead. I figured I'd leave things that way unless and until Steorn expressed disapproval.

Well that finally happened this week. I received an e-mail from the international law firm Seyfarth Shaw LLP asking that I turn over the domain to Steorn. Here's an excerpt from the letter:

This firm has been retained by Steorn, Ltd. (“Steorn”) to protect its trademarks and domain names. Steorn is the owner of U.S. Trademark Reg. No. 3,386,304 and U.S. Trademark Reg. No. 3,382,850 for STEORN, dating back to at least as early as 2001, for technological services including research design and development in the field of energy systems, as well as technology consultancy advice and analysis in the field of energy systems. Steorn is the owner of U.S. Trademark Reg. No. 3,379,126 for ORBO for similar use. STEORN and ORBO are collectively referred to as the “Marks.”

I'll be happy to hand over the domain name, and would have been even without the scary threats of enormous fines that they were thorough enough to include. But I'm even happier to see that Steorn is still alive and well enough to care about their "energy systems"-related trademarks. Here's hoping "Orbo" has a future as more than just a name.

Irish president Mary McAleese visited the Steorn offices on October 4th.

Irish president Mary McAleese beside Steorn CEO Sean McCarthy

While this is further evidence that Steorn is still up and running, she unfortunately was not there to announce a prosperous future of free and clean energy. Instead, she was commenting on the success of Ireland's Bolton Trust, an institution providing capital to encourage the growth of innovative new companies, which has provided some funding to Steorn. Her speech, which never mentions Steorn specifically, can be found here.

After 3 1/2 months of almost complete silence from Steorn, CEO Sean McCarthy granted an interview last week which was published today at the Free Energy Truth blog. The difficult questions were left unasked, but the interview does give a feeling for what Steorn's been up to lately. Here are some excerpts:

On what they've been doing for the past few months:

We continue to work on Orbo. Obviously we are looking at different implementations of it, more reliable implementations of it both mechanical and non mechanical. We’re also looking at the material science behind these time variant magnetic transactions as in what’s the real driver for them. What makes one material have a different response from another material? We’ve looked at a lot of third party research, fund some research and obviously do our own research into this area, we have managed to rule out most of the drivers to time based domain response (eddy currents, heat and so on) but as to why ferrite has a different response to Iron – well more work to be done.

On where the second demo will be located:

It will most likely be in Dublin, Ireland.

On what their recently trademarked name SteornLab refers to:

An awful lot of what we have developed over the years has been based on tests... SteornLab relates to the productization of these testing technologies we’ve developed over the years.

On whether Orbo creates or extracts energy:

It’s a question of views. I would say that, in the same way as there is a mass/energy equivalent there is also a form of time/energy equivalent and whether you consider that energy creation or conversion is a matter of semantics.

On whether Steorn will license Orbo for military and weapons applications:

It’s specifically precluded.

On the development of the mechanical, as well as a solid-state version of Orbo:

We have some engineering issues that we are currently resolving in terms of mechanical systems; we are constantly looking at ways to capture and express the energy in a real world environment that are simpler and simpler and there is nothing simpler than a solid state device. So it’s in the plan, but its not something that we [are] actively engaged in at this time.

On whether anyone else has ever discovered the effect behind Orbo:

I think lots of people have. I can look at many of the other free energy claimants and understand exactly how they could work. I could also see why many would be difficult to replicate without understanding what was happening.

There are two main points that I take from this interview: 1) Steorn is still humming along, and still believes in what they have, and 2) Don't expect a second demo any time soon.

I add the second point because Sean thinks that the second demo will "most likely" take place in Dublin. If it were to take place further off than Dublin, a good deal of planning would be involved; so the fact that it's still not certain whether it will be in Dublin or elsewhere means that they haven't reached the point yet of planning for an actual second event.

Another curiosity is that Steorn is already looking to productize the testing technology they've acquired and developed for the purpose of testing Orbo. For them to spare the energy to develop a tangential line of business, does this mean they are running short of cash, or doubting the future prospects of Orbo, at least in the near term?

Steorn is still chugging away, and most signs are that they're still confidant in the development of Orbo. Once again, there's nothing new here – the message from Steorn is, as usual: just you wait.

This week a video emerged showing the successful engineer and inventor, Thieu Knapen, discussing Steorn's technology, which he has personally tested. His conclusion is unambiguous: Orbo generates free energy.

"Then I saw things that... I didn't believe."

Knapen founded the Dutch company Kinetron in 1984, where he invented the microgenerators used in watches that are powered by the movement of the wearer and so do not require a battery. Apparently Sean McCarthy has told the SPDC that Kinetron will be manufacturing the Orbo motors to power the demo devices that are set to be manufactured to coincide with the public release of the Orbo technology.

In the video Knapen is shown commenting on an early demonstration 'toy' designed to display higher energy output than input, but not designed to cycle perpetually. This video was made sometime before December 12th 2006, when it was presented to a small group at the Kinetica museum; it was also long ago shown to the SPDC. However, this is the first time that the video is available to the public. The documentary style editing and peppy background beat suggest that the video was put together as a promotional piece. It was allegedly found during an unrelated Google Video search by Steorn forum member RunningBare.

Today the Free Energy Truth blog announced that coming Friday will be an interview with someone who claims to have independently replicated the effect behind Steorn's free energy technology. If true, this would be the first time that anyone outside of Steorn has been able to replicate the effect and talk about it publicly. Of course, after the failed demo, repeated delays, and now complete silence that we've gotten from Steorn, it's reasonable to expect nothing less than full disclosure and a video of a self powered device before this claim is considered to be worth taking seriously. A successful demonstration, however, would beat Steorn to the punch and be the first display of a potentially revolutionary discovery. Further updates on this will follow as more information becomes available.

Update 8/31:

The previously announced interview has been posted at the Free Energy Truth blog; the interviewee is a man named "Blake". Consensus on the Steorn forum is that this is Alton "Blake" Walston, a member of the SPDC who has gone by the forum handle ablaker2.

Blake claims to have followed schematics provided by Sean McCarthy and built an Orbo device that ran continuously for at least 8 hours. According to his account the precise configuration of magnets in his device required a good deal of trial and error experimentation to get right, and after its initial 8 hour run he has thus far been unsuccessful at coaxing self-sustained motion from the device a second time.

While Blake claims to be committed to getting his Orbo spinning again, and says he'll be sure to have a video camera on hand next time when it does, as it stands now Blake has only an anecdotal account of a one-time event to offer, with no objective record of any kind that it actually took place. It's certainly interesting to have this story brought out from the confines of the SPDC, but until Blake's Orbo is running continuously, repeatedly, and on video, it remains nothing more than that -- a story.

It's now been over a month since CEO Sean McCarthy or any other member of Steorn has spoken publicly, to either the press or the forums. Whether they're hard at work or falling apart, they're just not talking.

The situation in the developers' club (SPDC) isn't much different. Apparently Steorn has given SPDC members a gag order, asking them not discuss the current situation. A few bits of information have slipped through anyway; enough to reveal that the SPDC doesn't know anything more about what Steorn's up to than do we. SPDC member my_pen_is_stuck wrote on July 31st, "Steorn don't even speak with the SPDC1 nowdays. Not a peep. Very weird." Later on August 5th he wrote, "I'm beginning to think that Grimer was on to something when he said the SPDC was a cult. Sean speaks, usual no evidence waffle, the SPDC bows down to kiss his ring. It's really fuckin' weird in there." On August 11th, GrantHodges wrote "There isn't any news on Steorn for this month. I'm in the SPDC and well . . .there isn't any news."

Given the silence from Steorn, some have wondered whether they'd packed up and cleared out. Forum member Crank, who lives a few miles from Steorn, dropped by their office on July 31st.
She reported back that the situation there was normal, and all employees were still present.

One older item of interest that came out recently is the design of the demonstration unit that Steorn intends to have manufactured in a limited quantity (100,000), to be sold off as part of the public introduction of the Orbo technology. The device, shown below, looks like a horsehead or "nodding donkey" style oil pump, sitting atop an oil barrel. A video of this device in action was made available to the SPDC, however Sean stated that the motion of the prototype unit seen in the video was not actually generated by an Orbo. So, it proves nothing except that Steorn is laying plans for the public introduction of Orbo.

Finally, some links. Two articles have been published recently about Steorn's claims (and failed demo):

Physics World
Metro Part 1, Part 2

And there's a new Google discussion group, Steorb, devoted to Steorn. Not very active these days, but people can post there without fear of the occasional bannings and threads deletions that occur at the Steorn company forum.

This period of silence from Steorn can only be the calm before a storm... but whether that storm will be a successful demonstration of free energy or just the collapse of the company, remains to be seen.

Far from disengaging from the media and quietly skulking away into obscurity, Sean McCarthy gave a fairly in-depth interview to the technology site Engadget that was published today. Much of it is an elaboration of what we have heard already: the reasons for the failure of the demo and Steorn's plans moving forward. Sean directly addresses the notion that the Orbo technology works only in the confines of his own mind, and confidently asserts that a successful demo will occur in the near future. Some excerpts follow:

So we will be doing a demo, again. Obviously people will believe it when they see it and I can understand the skepticism about that. It is a deferral, our guys are currently in the process of rebuilding some more robust systems and changing some parts to prevent the engineering thing from happening again and we'll be back out in the near future with it.

Regarding DrMike's opinion that Orbo is no more than a delusion on the part of Sean:

How can I criticize. We invited the guy to come from Canada to see something. He didn't see it. It's his opinion. He has no other basis, he has nothing else to work on, other than sitting and having a chat with us. I can't possibly criticize, Doctor Mike for what he said. It's exactly what I would have said, I probably would have been harsher if I had been in his shoes.

Again, obviously if I'm delusional, whatever answer I give is going to be based on my own delusions. The only thing that I can say -- I can say a couple of things about it. First thing is that the answer that anybody looking at us and wants to know will ultimately be delivered contractually. It's going to happen whenever it happens from a bunch of scientists. So unless they're delusional as well, if they agree with us then we deal with that at the time. If you stand back from the failed demo and say ok, I don't think anybody should believe this -- I wouldn't believe this in the circumstances, demo or no demo -- there is a process that's in place that's a real process where real scientists are going to draw a conclusion and that conclusion will be made public.

The other side of it which I think is why people have taken the delusional route is because an awful lot of people had expected us to rig the demo. They expected us to have a hidden battery or whatever it is. If we were in that business, believe me, there would have been a spinning wheel. But we're just not in that business, the business of scamming people or rigging demos. It failed, it's prototype technology. Huge disappointment to us. We'll redo it. But the answers to the question -- the demo doesn't answer the question, it provides some thoughts from supporting evidence when it happens. But the answer to the question will be done by professionals and then we're either be found to be delusional or not.

On Steorn's plans going forward:

Obviously we are going to have to redo the demo. There is no question that we are not going to do the demo. We will, as I said before, not pre-announce it this time. We will get it set up properly, but the ground rules will be identical. The ground rules will be physical public access to the device, online webcams so it will be as open as possible. If anybody has seen the intended device and then realizes that it's, well, not impossible obviously to hide a certain energy source, it becomes quite a convoluted process. So we are going to try and demonstrate the technology in it's simplest, simplest format in a place with public access where people can watch online and talk to people there.

That will be one thing we have -- and to invite skeptics along. We have to do that. We have to embrace the skepticism. But equally to understand, these are not intended to be slam dunk results, because they won't be. There will always be issues and rightfully so. A simple demo, no matter how long it lasts, isn't proof of the claim. Proof of the claim is scientific analysis. But we are going to have to do other things as well. I won't go into details, but the biggest mistake that we've made and obviously we have to learn from our mistakes was to pre-announce the London demo. We've paid the price for that, we won't do it again. But we will be doing probably an awful lot more than we had intended. Basically when it happens we'll be letting people know. It will not be that far away.

A final word:

I've met an awful lot of disappointed people. People who came, who believed, who wanted to see history made. Disappointed skeptics, people like Doctor Mike who we dragged half way around the world -- and all I can do is apologize to them and say look it didn't work, but we are going to do it again. It's not the end of the Steorn story. Unfortunately, I'm sure that many people wish they've never heard of us again but we'll be back and we'll be back in the not too distant future.

To read the full interview, click here.

Prior to their recent failed demo, Steorn made a number of preparations that would seem to indicate complete confidence on their part that the demo would be a spectacular success. They readied a stunning and provocative demonstration space, called in the media, and were set to stream the event live over the web. They also paid to fly in a knowledgeable physicist and skeptical forum member known as DrMike, offering him a chance to inspect the Orbo up close and report his findings.

Steorn's demo fell apart before it began. DrMike had the opportunity to talk with Sean, hear his apologies and explanations, fiddle with magnets in the small workshop Steorn had set up at the demo site, hear Steorn's story about how Orbo defies conservation of energy, and chat physics with other scientists who had shown up for the demo.

His opinion after seeing all of this? Orbo is nothing more than a delusion inside the mind of Sean McCarthy.

Sean lives in a world of delusion. His greatest strength is the ability [to] convince people of things, and it is also his greatest weakness. I am certain that Sean has seen a "start - stop" device operating. That it never existed outside his mind doesn't matter.

-DrMike

DrMike's full report states the case a bit more tactfully, but no less damningly:

I am certain Steorn really believed I would see something that resembled their claim... Watching Sean and listening to him talk (and boy can he talk!!) I am convinced he has seen everything he describes. Unfortunately, the rest of us have not... My conclusion after going through all this is that Steorn is neither hoax nor scam. It is delusion. The reason it seems surreal is because it is surreal - we are the real part of someone else's imagination.

What's more, after reviewing Steorn's technical documents describing how magnetic viscosity is employed to violate the laws of thermodynamics, DrMike is convinced he sees the flaw in their logic; unfortunately he can't share his idea with us due to Steorn's NDA, so we have little to go by but his confidence.

If it was a hoax, the whole upstairs [workshop] would not exist, nor would Sean have taken the time to go through all the details of how he thinks it all works. I can not describe any of those details without breaking the NDA, so it puts me in a fairly strange position. The flaws in the thought process are clear to me, but Steorn considers these details proprietary information.

There were only ever three classes of possible explanations for Steorn's claim; either it was a purposeful deception, an honest mistake, or a genuine method for generating free energy. Given the actions taken by Sean McCarthy and Steorn over the past year, as well as what we've found out about Steorn's history and finances, I'm willing to bet against the first option, purposeful deception (this would include all forms of deception such as scam, hoax, fraud, marketing tactic, alternate reality game, social experiment, film subject, etc.). DrMike, after having met and spoken at length with Sean and other Steorn employees, is also ready to discard that possibility.

Of the two remaining options, DrMike is convinced that Orbo is an honest mistake on the part of Steorn. But how can a company with dozens of employees, including a number of engineers and PhDs, maintain such a blatantly erroneous belief over the course of several years? DrMike explains this as the result of the force of will and the charismatic persuasion of one deeply delusional man, Sean McCarthy.

This story sounds terribly unlikely at first glance. What about all of Steorn's other engineers, who build and test Orbo devices? Wouldn't they have realized along the way that they had never actually witnessed proof of the basic assumption underlying their work? What about all of Steorn's other employees, hanging on for years as their company abandons "serious" work and devotes itself full-bore to the quixotic quest of defying the most basic laws of science? How could a single man be so delusional as to believe without a speck of evidence that he's accomplished the impossible, and yet preserve a veneer of coherence that allows him to maintain the confidence of his company and investors, and gather an international group of optimistic followers?

As unlikely as this may sound, a combination of delusion and charisma has been used to create mass movements in politics and religion throughout history. And the unlikeliness of this possibility must be weighed against the unlikeliness of its alternative: that despite the conservation of energy being among the most solidly proven and repeatedly demonstrated theories in all of science, and despite hundreds of years of failed empirical effort toward violating that theory, a simple arrangement of permanent magnets has accidentally been shown to create energy from nothing. And recall that no one who has made the pilgrimage to Steorn and is capable of reporting back to the public has yet seen a working Orbo. Not Crank, not Dr. David Timoney, not DrMike.

What does Sean McCarthy have to say these days, in the aftermath of his failed demo and as his mental health is increasingly being questioned? His confidence is unshaken. Recently he answered a series of questions on the Steorn forum, presenting the failed demo as a disappointment, but no more than a temporary obstacle:

Clearly no one involved in the company is happy about the failed demo, but despite this we also need to keep perspective - it's a failed demo[.] It has shaken to the core any confidence that people not involved with the company have, and this is understandable. But we know what we have so things are not as dire as people would like to make them. We will do the demo, and then move on.

About DrMike's allegations against Sean's grasp of reality, he replies:

I guess that in a way I understand his comments, its not true but in the circumstances I doubt that you will believe me.

Sean also gave a post-demo interview on Irish radio recently. (Click to listen; interview begins 20 minutes in.) He continues to seek media attention and his confidence appears to be intact. In the interview he states that a new public demonstration of Orbo "will not be too far away."

We now have Sean McCarthy, convinced he can pull energy from nowhere, and DrMike, confidant that Sean's claim is impossible and that he knows just where Sean's logic went wrong. Neither of these people are able to produce an ounce of solid evidence. Once again we are left with little information, weighing the odds between the impossible and the impossibler.

Sean asserts that a new and successful demo will occur, unannounced beforehand, in the near future. He also states that the previous failure will lead to more openness on Steorn's part, to public evidence of the reality of Orbo. If DrMike is right, then none of this will happen -- we'll never see a working Orbo, because Steorn can't make one and they won't fake one. As for this author, I'll keep an open mind to Steorn's claim until the end of the summer. If by then we haven't seen a working Orbo, I'll agree with DrMike that, for the good of his family and his employees, Sean McCarthy had best retire and spend some quality time in the care of a doctor.

Amidst all the talk about Steorn's spectacularly failed demonstration, it's easy to overlook the most interesting new bit of information that did come out of all this -- Steorn finally revealed what a working Orbo looks like. It appears that their press package for what they seem to have anticipated would be a successful media event included photos of Sean holding an Orbo device, and the central "rotor" disc does look to be spinning. The photo showed up in several articles during the past week, including coverage by the BBC, here. Below is a closeup of the Orbo:

Whether the Orbo is capable of working as claimed is as yet unknown, but that hasn't stopped people from analyzing how it's put together and how it would work if it could. Steorn forum member Axle posted several images showing an exploded view of the Orbo based on the published photos:

click to enlarge

The "stator" is shown in green and blue, and contains a circular arrangement of eight magnets fitted into slots around the periphery of a central cavity. In that cavity spins the "rotor", with four magnets around its circumference. The stator and rotor are connected by two bearings, seen in orange -- the weak links that, according to Sean, put an end to the demo.

Some of this detail is conjecture, given the quality of the photos that the design is drawn from. The design resembles a variation of a classic magnet motor, a recurring motif among attempts to create perpetual motion machines. A magnet motor cannot generate more energy than is put into it because, due to the way magnetic fields work, there will either be a stable state where the rotor is being pushed in one direction just as strongly as it is being pushed in the other direction, or else the operation of the motor will progressively weaken the magnets themselves until the spinning stops. If Orbo does work, then it's doing something very unusual with the configuration of magnets, perhaps (according to Sean) somehow taking advantage of the time variance involved in the effect of magnetic viscosity. (Some members of the Overunity forum are trying to figure out how this might work).

Until (and unless) Steorn reveals just how their Orbo is put together, all we can do is make speculations based on what little we have seen. But if Sean is holding a spinning Orbo device in these published photos, I think we can narrow down the possibilities of what it actually is to these four:

1) A fake -- hidden in there somewhere is a battery, strong enough to keep the device running for a few days (or maybe, as it turned out, just a few hours).

2) A type of "magnet motor" that will spin for a while, during which time the magnets themselves are weakened, eventually stopping the motion. This is in direct contradiction with Steorn's statement that tests showed no weakening of the magnets... but we've seen that Steorn's engineers (like any, to be fair) are not infallible.

3) A very low friction magnet motor that will keep spinning if held and jostled a bit, but that without this small input of energy will eventually slow to a halt. It's possible that such a device could have fooled Steorn into believing they had a perpetual motion machine. This is difficult to reconcile with Sean's claim that a test Orbo has been run continuously for several weeks, however -- unless it was being carefully cradled by a hopeful and deluded energy source for part of that time.

4) It just might, of course, be the real thing.

Soon after deciding to cancel the planned demo, Sean made an appearance at Kinetica to apologize for botching the event and to take questions. Below is a video of his talk, taken by Steorn forum member Zen Master Lee.

Sean accepts full blame for the failure and presents an explanation for it that is, at least in some respects, more credible than what we'd gathered so far. According to Sean, they had brought three working demo devices to London. The display device ran for four hours in London before being set up in the display space. Soon after being set up, however, it stopped running. Taking it apart, they isolated the problem to the two bearings in the device, which had apparently been damaged, resulting in increased friction. They proceeded to swap out the bearings with one of their other demo devices, started it up, and found that it quickly failed as well - more damaged bearings. Swapping out again, they've broken a total of 5 of the 6 bearings they had with them (from the three demo devices). They do not know what is causing the bearings to break; the fact that the failure appeared to be specific to the demo space itself led to the speculation that heat from the museum lighting was at fault, but that is far from certain.

Sean blames himself for going against the advice of everyone else at the company by allowing only three days for the engineers to set up the exhibit. As a result of having "dropped the ball big time", he's now facing a lot of pressure to make changes - from shareholders, people in the company, and the media. These changes may include a policy of greater openness, releasing videos of the working device and possibly even blueprints, as well as staging a successful public demo as soon as possible. One change he'll make for the next demo is that the event will not be announced until the device is in position for display, tested and working.

Sean comes across as being worn and disappointed, but still confidant in what he has. His stated intention is to produce a successful live demo in the near future. It's still just possible that this week's disaster will have been a bump in the road for Steorn, rather than the end of the line.