Joe Newman



Joseph Westley Newman was an inventor, originally from Mississippi, who for years tried to sell a high-voltage motor (powered by a large number of batteries connected in series) as a free energy device. He called it an "electromagnetomic motor", and wrote all about it (along with his rant-heavy alternative physics that "explained" how it worked) in a self-published book.

While his device was published in the 1980s in such fora as Discover Magazine, Newman steadfastly avoided refereed journals. The reason for this is that after a great deal of obfuscation and rigged testing, as well as repeated (and mostly ignored) challenges to debate a Ph.D. physicist on the matter, Newman lost an argument on the Senate floor with then-senator John Glenn (due to his astronaut training, Glenn was likely one of the few in the Senate who understood Newman's claims) and was pwned in a test by the National Bureau of Standards that showed that his device (a type of very high voltage motor, powered by a string of 9V batteries connected in series) could not produce more power than it used.

A history of the whole sordid affair can be found in the book Voodoo Science.