Aldo Costa (inventor)

Aldo Costa is a French inventor of what he claims to be a perpetual motion machine.

His device is remarkable for its size, standing some 18 metres high in the back yard of his home. He was, apparently, denied planning permission to make one 100 metres high.

The machine operates on the shifting-weight overbalanced wheel principle, sometimes called an Arabian wheel. Weights around the outside of the wheel are moved so the they're to the outside when going down and the inside going up. The idea is that one side of the wheel is always heavier than the other, creating a rotational force.

Unfortunately, as with other devices of this kind, the energy created by the unbalanced weights falling is merely equal to what's required to lift them to become unbalanced in the first place (the weights must be moved upwards at the bottom and top points).

References

* "A Machine To Die For", documentary by Eliot Jarvis, 2004 [http://www.abc.net.au/programsales/s1178520.htm]

* "Reinventing the Wheel", Wired Magazine, December 2004 [http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.12/start.html?pg=5]

* Donald Simanek's Museum of Unworkable Devices, Overblanaced Wheels web page, as of June 2008 [http://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/museum/overbal.htm]