The devious deceptions of David Jones

Zach sent me a link to this. I think it is great.

David Jones is a true genius and a hero of the Athanasius Kircher Society. Between 1964 and 1996 he wrote the “Daedalus” column for New Scientist and later Nature. Each week he would propose a different completely implausible scheme based on entirely plausible scientific principles — like coating the moon in magnesium oxide to make it twenty times brighter. Those brilliant columns were collected in a now out-of-print book, The Further Inventions of Daedalus: A Compendium of Plausible Schemes (Last check: Amazon has 12 copies left) [[UPDATE: Amazon has only 1 very expensive copy left, but they also sell the original Inventions of Daedalus, which we trust is just as brilliant]]. Jones is also a serious chemist, best known for the modern theory of bicycle stability and for determining that there was arsenic in Napoleon’s wallpaper.

We recently stumbled upon the Museum of Unworkable Devices, a site dedicated to man’s quest to conquer perpetual motion, and were touched to find a short homage to our hero Jones:

David Jones has built a number of ingenious “fake” perpetual motion machines for museums and trade shows. These are beautifully made of bicycle wheels, sewing machine parts, plumbing hardware and other embellishments. They are displayed in glass or clear plastic cases with no obvious means for energy input. Observed by visitors daily, they slowly turn, day after day, without diminution of speed, over periods of a year or more, seemingly in defiance of the laws of physics. Sometimes a nice prize is offered to anyone who can puzzle out the precise secret of their operation. Jones once said that an analysis of the entries showed that many engineers thought that he really had discovered the secret of perpetual motion, while many physicists proposed methods of deception that couldn’t possibly work.

Thanks for passing that along, Zach.