More than 20 years ago, I ordered some mercury because I wanted to test it to make a perpetual-motion machine. I know, I know, I was crazy. But I couldn't figure out how to use the mercury after I had ordered it, and most of it is still in the original bottles to this day.

A few months ago I came across a perpetual-motion machine that I think works because it allows gravity to shift the weight that makes the wheel turn. I had a good idea (it turned out to be common) for forming such a wheel using telescoping tubes, where the heavy-metal tubes would telescope further out from the wheel's axle on one side of the wheel, then un-telescope on the other side, and thus there was more weight on the telescoping side to make it turn continuously. But the problem was in the energy lost to make the tubes telescope.

I then thought I saw a way to use mercury to alleviate that problem, but for a reason I can't remember, and because life called, and I stopped trying to find a solution.

But, now, there is a wheel online that totally makes the "telescoping" non-problematic by using water instead of sliding metal. Plus, I'm retired and life doesn't call anymore. The water is in bottles, and the bottles are angled just right to allow the water to "slide" (no friction) from one end of the bottle to the other at just the right/opportune time. The water fills only part of the bottles. Near the top of the wheel, the water slips over to the half of a bottle furthest from the axle, but then, on the opposite side of the wheel and near its bottom, the water slips back to the other end of the bottle, each bottle repeating this exactly. I can't see a better way to make a perpetual-motion machine.

There are videos showing wheel-based perpetual-motion machines that obviously work, though without ability to perform much work. However, there are people stuck (and some stuck-up) on the idea that these machines are impossible. They have the impression that friction renders such machines impossible because, sooner or later, the friction adds up to equal the power that turns the machine.

Not true, because the machine can repeatedly feed itself with power by putting more weight on the do-work half of the wheel. What the deniers need to learn is, so long as the machine re-feeds itself with power greater than the on-going counter-power of friction, the wheel will turn. The machine's total power is not finite, but infinite, as long as it feeds itself more power than the on-going friction.

I've drawn this on paper to study it, and, it seems, there's no reason that this machine can't continuously have more torque on one side of the wheel than the other.

Someone might be trying to hide this idea from the public because there is a video online where a guy says he's trying to copy the machine from someone else, and when he tries turning it in front of the viewer, but it won't turn on its own. But I noticed that he oddly used only seven bottles, which is why I say that he could be a plant to spread the idea that this wheel is a hoax.

A simple drawing will show that four bottles alone while come to a point where both sides of the machine have equal weight (called torque) on both sides of the wheel, and even seven bottles gets close to such a point so that eight are needed. Possibly, 16 could be better, but instead of using 16, it may be just as well to use eight bottles twice as large.

The reason I'm telling you this is that I happen to have "heavy water." You see, the heavier the water in the bottles, the greater the torque power, and so the machine will turn and create more work, first against friction, and secondly to turn an electrical generator. Luckily, generators turn with almost no friction when turned at slow speeds, and this wheel is a low-rpm "machine."

By now, you may have realized that my "heavy water" is the mercury, which weighs about 13 times as much as water. That's 13 times more toque, buddies. Does that look good or what? BUT, checking online, the price for mercury highly fluctuates lately at roughly $100 per pound, give or take $40. Nobody's going to sell a mercury-based perpetual-motion machine on the market, right now, that's for sure.

But, I think I would like a mercury wheel for tribulation use because, in doing the math this morning, I found that it will produce much more than pumping my water from the jet-pump. And in the tribulation period, pumping water is no minor benefit.

The first order of this morning was to find an online calculator that could help me find the horsepower that the machine could provide, and I found the perfect one here:
https://www.omnicalculator.com/physics/torque

"a unit of torque equal to the force of 1 lb acting perpendicularly to an axis of rotation at a distance of 1 foot." Make sure you choose inches for the top box, and "lbf" for the other boxes. For the top number, in the "Distance" box, I put 24 inches, meaning that the wheel will have a radius of 24 inches. For the second "Force" box, I put 2.5 pound-force, defined as the force by which gravity attracts 2.5 pounds while sitting on the ground. We all get that. I'm using 2.5 pounds of mercury in each bottle, equivalent in weight with .3 U.S. gallon of water.

The third box then gave the "Torque" on a wheel of 5 "lbf-ft" (= 5 pound-force per foot), a way of describing the work that's also called a pound-force for short. A pound force is the force of one pound of anything turning a wheel while attached to its axle from a distance of one foot.

There's no reason that we can't float metal balls on the mercury so that they go from end-to-end of the bottles along with the mercury. Iron doesn't react with mercury, but don't put your gold or silver coins/bars in it or the mercury will dissolve them. No fooling, in the trib, if you have this machine, you could use gold and silver in the mercury as long as they are protected. If gold is sealed in glass jars yet fills most of the jar's air, bonus, it'll sink because it's significantly heavier than mercury. Mercury is uninclined to enter the seal of a jar's lid even if some air can perchance get in and out.

A 5 pound-force will do significant work if it's at that level all the way around the wheel, or even if it pertains only to the do-work half of the wheel. But neither of these are true, because the distance of the mercury will not always stay 24 inches from the axle on the do-work half, and the mercury will be as many as 14 inches from the axle on the go-against-work half of the wheel. The number of pound-force units changes accordingly. On this wheel being described, the axle-to-mercury distance of 24 inches is the maximum, which is why I'm calling it a 48-inch wheel.

You agree to use my numbers at your own risk. Sign it in blood.

I have a five-pound bottle of mercury sitting on the counter that's 2 inches in diameter and 3 inches filled. That gives you an idea on cost for your choice of mercury quantity. If I make "bottles" with two-inch-wide round tubing, the 2.5 pounds I'm using in the calculations fills each bottle only 1.5 inches deep, and so if you are unhappy with the amount of wattage work this wheel will get, always remember that the bottles can be filled with more stuffings. It seems correct that filling wheel bottles half full is the maximum benefit.

Here's how the wheel looks. The red and orange lines are the bottles/tubes, the black lines are the spokes. View the larger circle as the clock (not a part of the wheel). Mercury is in grey. Spokes are 16-18 inches (take your pick) to where the inner ends of tubes attach, and tubes are 18 inches, all drawn essentially to scale. The water/mercury at the 3 o'clock spoke is at 4:30 on the clock; the water/mercury at the 9 o'clock spoke is where the bottom of the tube meets the spoke.

All four tubes on the horizontal and vertical spokes are almost perfectly balanced because the mercury in both the 9 and 3 o'clock spokes are the same distance to a vertical line (not shown) though the axle. That's what counts. The mercury in the other two spokes are, at average, both about 9 inches from a vertical axle line. However, at any moment, with additional turn/spin in the clockwise direction, the 12 o'clock spoke gets the liquid to the outer side of the wheel while the liquid at the 6 o'clock spoke transfers toward the axle line, keeping the 3 o'clock side of the wheel with a perpetual advantage.

The draw package I'm using is limited in what it can do. It wouldn't allow me to decide which side of the wood spokes the tubes show on. I suggest that four orange tubes should attach to one side of the wood, and the red tubes on the other side of the wood.

It's a challenge to find how much work a machine like this provides. I can only ballpark it from the diagram. Spokes are all 90-degree to the "bottles." All bottle ends and spokes in the drawings should point to 12:00 o'clock, 1:30, 3:00, 4:30, 6:00, 7:30, 9:00 and 10:30. The bottle attached to the 12 o'clock spoke has its end at 1:30, etc.

You can draw the clock circle faintly because it's not part of the machine. Have this circle of such a diameter that it goes through the mercury at the bottom of the bottles, on the do-work side of the wheel. All spokes come out of the central axle. On the go-against-work side, the mercury is always beside a spoke.

Make the bottles 18 inches long for some good advantage. They can best be plastic tubes, and for this discussion they are two inches in diameter so that all of the mercury, per bottle, is at their very ends filling about 1.5 inches of the two-inch diameter.

The key to doing torque work is the mercury distance from the axle; actual distance between the mercury and the axle is irrelevant. The only thing that matters is how far the mercury is from a vertical line going through the axle.

[Insert December 22 -- I've moved on from mercury to see if water in larger tubes can make this wheel work. I'm removing all talk that was once in this update about the wheel's advantage in inches. I've come up with a more-comprehensive way that includes momentgum on the wheel too. You can see details in the 4th update of this month, two updates from this one. End insert

The calculator above can be re-used now by entering 9 in the "Distance" box, which is the radius of the wheel. We again put 2.5 in the pound-force box for the weight of mercury, and the calculator tells us that this gets 1.875 pound-force per foot, defined as 1.875 pounds hanging 12 inches from the axle. This calculator simply changes the 9 inches to 12 inches while meanwhile changing (converting) the 2.5 pounds to 1.875. It's called "pound-force PER FOOT" because it's 12 inches from the axle.

However, pound-force per foot is used also with levers and non-wheel pivots, and then there's this on the definition of wheel-related "foot-pound": "a unit of torque equal to the force of 1 lb acting perpendicularly to an axis of rotation at a distance of 1 foot." As written, due to the word, "at," it sounds that foot-pounds act (in a circular direction) one foot from the axle.

Yet there is a non-wheel, linear foot-pound too, defined as lifting one pound through a distance of one linear foot. Can't that be used as one foot of travel AROUND a wheel that has mercury constantly falling? Yes, why not? When the mercury moves one foot around the wheel, isn't that a total work done equal to the weight of the mercury times 1? Yes, because foot-pounds are in units of 1 pound. We need to find how much the 2.5 pounds of mercury weighs when at one foot from the axle instead of 9 inches.

The Watt Quest

Don't spend half your life trying to figure out a way to make the machine turn on its own without knowing that millions of people have already tried it without success...until someone did it with water transfer. Here it is, the video that spurred me to using mercury:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=50Aag0J0Qe4

I didn't re-see this video until after writing above; I didn't know he used TEN water bottles, or I would have made ten spokes on the machine above. Something to think about. The wheel is turning about .5 revolution per second. I can't tell how large the bottles are.

He's got probably less than a 24-inch radius on the do-work side of the wheel, when measured to the center of the water. There's nothing to compare the sizes of the wheel or bottles. If that's an 18-inch diameter wheel, it would be, from the axle, about 15 inches to the center of the water at the maximum-work position of 9 o'clock. At 3:00, the water is about 12 inches from the center of the water to the axle, a difference of only three inches between sides, whereas my design has this specific difference at about seven inches. My wheel should therefore spin faster, liquid weight being equal.

The water transfers to the do-work position about the 10:30-10:00 point, though much of the water is already weighing in the right direction by 11:30, a good design. He has the spill-over sooner than my design probably due to the use of ten bottles.

Much of the forward motion is from the water falling fairly hard to gravity thanks to the momentum. In your final build, make your wheel support system more stable than what you see here. Of course.

Just found his first video showing the sizes of the wheel and water bottles with something to compare them to, and at one point, I spotted 17 fluid ounces on the label, meaning he's got only 1/13th of a gallon, which weighs only .65 pounds. Just imagine, the mercury wheel is a hot-rod in comparison. Later below, I find that his arrangement gets about 3 running watts.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1pYdyx0EpdM

At the very end of the video above, he shows the "machine" sitting idle, meaning it won't run unless the water spills over and allows gravity to keep it going. A machine that will start on its own, without a first push, is going to be proof of power.

[Insert -- Long story short, I wasn't able to find a reliable way to get the watt production using a nine-inch advantage that I had calculated for the mercury wheel, and so to make for less reading for you, I'm removing much of the rest of this update. It's probably better if we find water-wheel videos with owners explaining how many watts they get with whatever water weight they have.

I'll leave bits and pieces below that help us to understand anything to do with wattage. End insert]

...Here's the goods from someone else:

Amount: 1 foot-pound-force per second (ft lbf/s) of power
Equals: 1.36 watts (W) in power

https://www.traditionaloven.com/tutorials/power/convert-ft-lbf-per-seconds-to-watts-w.html

...Someone writes: "Watts reflect work being done at a GIVEN MOMENT, NOT the energy consumed over time." Watts is the running power, not per second.

...I'm reading that "1 foot-pound is equivalent to: 1.3558179483314004 joules (exactly)". A joule and a watt are siblings.

...A HP is a considerable amount of force. There seems to be fables out there to explain how the horsepower was derived from what a horse could lift or drag, but note that the inventors may have been using numerology secretly because they made 1 HP = exactly 33 foot-pounds. Plus, 1 HP = 33,000 foot pounds per minute. A google offering says that a foot pound is the energy "required to raise 1 pound a distance of 1 foot." But that seems inconsistent because it makes 1 HP the force of 33 pounds raised one foot, yet 1 HP is said to be 550 foot-pounds per second.

Someone writes: "Horsepower was created many years ago by James Watt when he determined how much work, in foot-pounds a horse could achieve in a minute. 1 horsepower is the same as a horse moving a 330 lb load 100 feet in a minute. Therefore, 1 hp = 33 foot pounds." Looks like freemasonic code to me. None of those numbers look correct, so beware what you find from google offerings.

I still haven't come across the wattage of a foot-pound without seconds. How many watts are needed to lift one pound a distance of one foot off the ground? As a foot-pound per second = 1.36 watts, it follows that 1 watt = 1 / 1.36 = .735 foot-pounds per second. But this doesn't tell the difference between a foot-pound and a foot-pound per second.

Let's Build One Mercury Machine

Below is what the wheel can look like, where the outer tube ends pass by spoke ends by a short distance. For example, if the spokes are 4 feet long, the tubes can pass 1 foot past the spoke ends to make the wheel 6 feet in diameter. The software didn't allow the spokes to show on a side of the wood of my choosing, so I made it appear that all tubes are attached to the far side of the wood. It shouldn't be that way in a real situation. Put the orange tubes to one side of the wood flat, and the red tubes on the other flat side.

Similarly, I couldn't get the tubes to cut across the front of all spokes; the latter's ends should be cut at 45-degrees to accomodate the seating of the tubes.
http://www.tribwatch.com/photos/perpetualWheel2.png

I've tried different design scenarios. I haven't been able to find any advantages by angling the bottles either up or down. They are best placed at 90 degrees with the spokes.

The mercury-advantage or disadvantage is changed by the length of the spokes. I've plied with this design (on paper) long enough (a week) to see what works best; I can help you understand the dynamics. On a four-foot-wide wheel, it's counter-productive to shorten spokes to 12 inches long. I've done the math. And making them longer than about 17 inches is likewise counterproductive. For maximum mercury power, spoke lengths are best made 14-17 inches from the axle.

Consider that, if the spokes are just one or two inches long, it places all bottle ends at the axle, and this only balances each wheel side, no good. In other words, without spokes at all, and only bottles emanating from the axle, there's no advantage on either side. You need the spokes to provide the advantage on the do-work side.

Spokes are necessary to start the work on the do-work side's 12 o'clock spoke. The sooner work can begin at the top, the better. The spokes need to be long enough to get this part of the job done, it's as simple as that, no wiggling out of it. Angling the bottles downward a little is deceptive, for its starts the mercury transfer a little sooner only in regards to the position of the spoke, but the transfer begins at the 1:30 position just the same, and that's what counts.

In the design described at the top of this page, the bottles are all at 90-degrees to the spoke ends. I'd keep it that. Spoke ends are about 7 inches short of the outer circle, but making them a few inches shorter seems to make no difference in output. By making the spokes longer than 17 inches, we can get the mercury to start working sooner at the top, but the downside is that the go-against-work side gets mercury further from the axle. It's not productive.

With spokes at about 17 inches, the bottle on the 12 o'clock spoke is horizontal toward the 1:30 o'clock position, and thus ready to transfer mercury at that moment. I don't want mercury transfer after 1:30 because that's the start of the powerhouse part of the wheel, when the circle direction changes fast from horizontal-ish to vertical-ish.

The great news is that it doesn't matter how much longer the tubes get, they increasingly punch out more power with length. The extra inches of mercury on the do-work side are barely countered on the opposite side. Four spokes on the go-against-side (from 7:30 to 12:00) can be a mile long, and there's no difference in output. And the only spoke that assists that side in countering production is at the bottom where gravity does the least work in countering production.

Once the mercury transfer begins, the mercury rides the outer wheel all the way to about 7:40. You just measure the mercury at each of eight clock positions to get the average mercury-axle distance, and you then use whatever inches of advantage you arrive to, to figure out how much power you might get.

This design gets about 9 inches of advantage as per 31 inches on one side and 22 on the other. You need to take a good look at that because, if it were a 9-inch advantage where the score was 100 to 91, then I'd agree that it doesn't look hopeful for turning a wheel, but when 9 inches is almost a third of the do-work side, and almost half of the go-against-work side, that looks like significant power.

Or, forget the measurements, and build a rudimentary wheel, then strap eight lead barbells of 2.5 pounds each to the outside of each bottle (they can be 2 x 4s for the test) exactly where they would be in my/your design. Position the wheel appropriately while holding it with your hand, then let go. If the wheel does a hard half-spin, there's no reason that it won't turn continuously with 2.5 pounds of mercury instead.

Keep the wheel light by not using a rim for the outer circumference. All you need are eight spokes, or, if ten is better, then ten. One uncut length of material the diameter of the wheel makes two spokes opposite each other. It's much stronger to run the spokes across the axle than to end them there. Just drill holes in the center of the lengths to fit the axle.

I'm thinking that wood could be used for spokes if you're not trying to impress your friends; it's easy to drill, and easy to clamp the bottles to. Wood is more than sturdy enough to hold the bottles of mercury, and probably lighter than metal spokes. But get kiln-dried wood, because it's straight and light. It's extremely simple to build, and only a small nuisance if you don't like this sort of building.

The wood can be 1 x 6, each piece about four feet or longer, with mercury at 4.5 to 5 feet strongly suggested rather than 4 feet. Attach one to the other (square piece of plywood between each?), making a cross shape, with about four bolts (not screws) and tough, large washers. Let the washers dig into the wood when tightening the bolts. Attach the crosses to make one unit. Make the axle long enough so that, later, you can add more spokes if you wish.

Bearings should be new for maximum performance, no sense skimping on the final design. But you can test your machine without bearings by just letting the spokes turn on their holes (a little grease). It dawns on me that I should try a water-filled wheel (or anti-freeze), with 4-inch PVC tubes because I have a basement that doesn't freeze. In this case, I should use a 1.5" steel rod about 24 inches long from table bearing to table bearing. Adding salt to water keeps things from growing in it. I was wondering whether I could hang the wheel from rafters instead of setting on a table. That'll take some thinking.

Bromine is more than three times as dense as water, requiring thinner tubing. It's a few dollars per pound. I don't know anything about it, whether it acts up when swished around on this wheel. Bromine vapors are fatal. Maybe just stick to water and larger tubing, especially as 4-inch PVC comes in thin wall.

You need to find a way to make sure that the wood doesn't slip on the axle. The axle needs to be one unit with the wood. You don't want the one slipping on the other. To attach the crosses so that when one turns they both turn and keep timing, cut out a piece of round or square plywood to go between them at the axle. Drill a center hole for the axle in this piece of plywood, then bolt both crosses to each other with this plywood sandwiched between them. You now have eight spokes as one unit. Add spacers (pieces of wood or tubing) as needed between spokes, to get more distance between spokes so that the far end of a tube can brush nicely past another spoke for attachment to it.

You don't include the mercury as part of the friction on the machine because all the mercury as a unit is what turns it. It doesn't matter how heavy it is because mercury will always be stronger than the friction. If you fill the tubes with Cheerios, probably not.

There are table-mounted bearings that would be super for this, one on each side, with a metal rod connecting them. The bearings come with pins to lock the rod to themselves. The rod spins, and so you need to connect the rod to the wood in some way. Provide a way to gear-down the axle by connection to this rod.

We could use something like pillow block bearings, but without the bearings, bolted to the wood spokes. You need one on each side of the wheel. Instead of the bearings, the small circular part of the pillow lock needs a threaded pin that tightens against the rod to make the wood (the whole wheel) one piece with the rod. The wood and rod need to spin together as a unit. The table-mounted bearings allows one to set the rods on stands, one on either side of the wheel.

These bearings are made for high speeds, and will therefore not wear down very fast for our purposes. Slip an axle rod into the bearings and let that be your axle. If the rod can be threaded, you can extend it easily for attachment to the gears. Or, use a tube (instead of solid rod) between bearings so that you can slip a threaded rod into it.

The 1 x 6's are of a good width to seat tube "bottles." That is, 6 inches gives good width for clamping the tubes with two or three metal straps. The other end of the tube will get constant abuse. But even a 1 x 6 is not wide enough for 18-inch-long tubes unless the other end of each tube is connected to something strong.

Attach the tubes to the flat side of each 1 x 6 spoke, and let the spoke be long enough to reach the end of the neighboring tube that attaches to its own spoke. Now you have both ends of the tubes connecting to a spoke.

Connect the tubes to the flat of each spoke with metal brackets if they fit snug to the tubes, but if not, use metal strapping. Don't use screws to connect brackets / strapping to the wood; use small bolts; you don't want the tubes to shake loose. Plastic brackets could crack.

NEW AND GREAT IDEA: Listen carefully. From the axle, a wood spoke goes out about 17 inches (for a four-foot wheel) before a tube is attached to it. The same spoke continues for some 8 inches more (or longer, if you like) to the neighboring tube, and so you have those 8 inches onto which you can attach another tube! The wheel can thus have 16 tubes with 8 spokes!!! WOW!

One end of the tube can be glued shut with a cap, but the other end should of course be fitted with a threaded coupling to get the mercury out, or to add more. Transparent tubing would be nice to keep an eye on the inner workings.

My first design will use a bicycle rim with my wood spokes clamped to its outer circumference. If that works, I'll make the machine more enduring. Check in on this page from time to time to see if I've built it. I'm not in a hurry, but this winter would be a good time.

Buying a tribulation property with a shallow well is better than a deep well. The deeper the water, the more watts needed to get it to the water tank. It's a big deal.

However, it occurs to me that one could make a long, skinny, tube-shaped water tank to be slipped into the well pipe so that the pump needs only pump a fraction of the depth of water. Something to think about. It may do nothing of benefit.

I have a shallow well with water about four feet beneath the lowest water tank, as well as a beaver pond about 12-14 feet beneath the lowest water tank. The pond is needed only in dry summers for a month or two. Winter keeps the shallow well topped up all winter. It's a very fortuitous situation I didn't know of when buying this property.

This discussion is continued in the next update, and the one after that has a reason to place the remnant 24 inches from the axle, at the rim of the wheel, a really big deal.