Restless Device

What if we could build a machine that ran forever without using up any fuel? Such a machine would be a perpetual motion machine, and, sadly, it is impossible. Even so, people have been trying to build them for as long as people have been building machines. Perpetual motion machines appear in many early books about machines, and hundreds have been patented. In this episode I look at how and why these impossible devices have interested so many people for so long. The answer is related to how people see inventors and to a tension between thermodynamics and the technological imagination. In the end, perpetual motion machines also give us a way to think about today's ecological concerns.