7/13/86
LUCEDALE, Miss. – In the piney woods southwest of this southwest Mississippi town, off the broken blacktop and two miles down a rutted sand and dirt road, through three gates, past the “Keep Out” and “Beware of the Dogs” signs, smack in the middle of nowhere, sits Joseph Westley Newman, a man who says he can change the world. In this land where heat devils beat from the ground in waves, Newman says he can bring water to the desert places of the world, eliminate poverty, and improve the quality of everyone’s life. If only Newman’s enemies will let him. Newman does not look the part of a savior. He sports hair waved across his head in the style of a Baptist deacon. In the heat Newman is calm, cool and certain. He carries a gaze direct as a laser. He says, “What I have done will revolutionize the world.” What has Joe Newman done? He has built the Revolutionary Energy Machine. His government, Newman’s proclaimed enemy, says his machines are frauds. Not so, says Newman. Instead they are the bootstraps by which mankind can pull itself up. Across the tidy, tile-floored workshop from Newman sits a copper-sheathed canister the height and diameter of a fire hydrant. At the far end of the workshop, swaddled in miles of copper wire, is another machine, a 9,000-pound version the size of a five-person hot tub, its circular rim topped with a circle of light bulbs. These are two of Newman’s Revolutionary Energy Machines, which he knows will free the world from drudgery and make the First, Second, and Third World as one. It is these machines and others like them, using Newman’s same revolutionary theory, that Newman claims produce more energy than they consume. That would allow men to light cities for pennies, power cars without pollution or gasoline, drive machines to make salt water fresh. But it is his own government, represented by the National Bureau of Standards and the U.S. Patent Office, that Newman says is his and mankind’s foe. It is his own government that Newman claims has waged a seven-year war to keep his invention from improving the world. “All I am doing is opening doors,” Newman says. The government, through its unwillingness to grant him a patent, says Newman’s machine, which he has invested about $700,000 in developing and defending, does not do what he claims. “The NBS results show that the device behaves in a manner which is entirely consistent with the well-established laws of physics,” says the report, released June 26. The “well-established” laws of physics say a machine cannot put out more energy than it consumes.
Government report `a mockery of justice’
Newman says he knew what the NBS report would show. As a matter of fact, so certain was Newman that he issued a press release before the report became public saying it was a “mockery of justice.” The inventor says he is certain his machine works, can demonstrate that it works, and is willing to defend his machine in public debate against anyone from the NBS or the U.S. Patent Office or any university or anyone who claims to know what he is talking about. Newman has taken his Revolutionary Energy Machine on the road, demonstrating it in the Louisiana Superdome and in Atlanta. In each place he challenged an expert on physics to debate his theories in public. Nobody showed up. Newman, who was raised in Mobile, dropped out of high school and left home at 15, went in the armed services, roughnecked in the oil fields, got a degree in accounting and economics, and decided – in his early 20s, after casting around through several jobs – that he wanted to be an inventor. Over the course of the next two decades he registered patents for several inventions – a machine to pick oranges, plastic barbells, a new type of knife – and pursued his self-taught odyssey into electromagnetics. Etched in the concrete of Newman’s workshop walkway is “Question + Thinking = Truth.” Newman says that because he is not burdened by conventional teachings, his mind is free to challenge questions without the constraints conventional physicists place on themselves. Newman already has won over a number of physicists, electrical engineers and chemists who have seen his Revolutionary Energy Machine and heard his explanation. Dr. Roger Hastings, a physicist with Sperry-Univac Corp., has conducted hundreds of tests on Newman’s machine. His opinion? “The future of the human race may be drastically uplifted by the large-scale commercial development of this invention,” he says. And Nicholaos Tsoupas, a physicist who works at Brookhaven Laboratory in New York and once taught at Yale University, said, “I know for a fact that many scientists consider his invention unorthodox and unacceptable, possibly because his theories do not fully comport with today’s university teachings. However, Mr. Newman has demonstrated that his invention works the way it claims. The Patent Office should not have denied him a patent.” But the Patent Office did. Newman applied for a patent for his machine March 22, 1979. In January 1982 the Patent Office denied him the patent, claiming his invention “smacked of perpetual motion.” Newman appealed the ruling and in 1983 filed suit against the Patent Office. Federal District Judge Thomas Jackson, who was hearing the case, appointed a special master to evaluate Newman’s machine. The special master, William Schuyler Jr., a former commissioner of the U.S. Patent Office, concluded that the machine did what Newman claimed and recommended that a patent be granted.
Jackson, in an action that many people familiar with similar patent cases claim was almost unheard of, refused to accept the recommendation of Schuyler and sent the issue back to the Patent Office for more study. In October 1985, Jackson ordered Newman to turn his machine over to the NBS for testing. Jackson’s order also prevented Newman or any of his representatives from attending the tests. But when the 30-day period passed and the machine had not been tested, Newman’s attorney, John Flannery, attempted to retrieve the machine. Jackson ordered it impounded.
After finally testing it, the Patent Office on June 26 issued a report claiming that the machine does not do what Newman says it will. “The Bureau of Standards is coming into this tainted,” Newman says, noting that he still has not recovered the machine the NBS has had since 1985. “I have spent 21 years working on this machine and seven trying to get it patented. I am devoted to this.”
Why give away a billion-dollar theory?
So devoted is he that he has written a book outlining the secret of his machine. The red-covered, hard-bound book is titled in gold: “Joseph Newman’s Revolutionary Energy Machine.” Inside, the pages are packed with diagrams, equations, theories and philosophies on the power of electromagnetics. “Anyone with any knowledge of electromagnetic energy can read this book and build a machine,” Newman says. They also can study Newman’s theories about how the weather can be controlled by directing electromagnetic energy and how Newman believes the present educational system trains originality out of children. Why would someone develop a theory that he claims will change the world, a theory worth billions of dollars, and then give it away in a book? “Because the technical process is 10,000 times more important than the machine itself,” Newman says. He points to his head. “If I keep the knowledge up here, what will happen to it if something happens to me? If you understand the technical process, then you don’t just copy what I have done, you can apply it in many different ways.” Newman’s machine, if it works, truly could change the face of the world. Energy would be dirt cheap and non-centralized. Multinational oil cartels would be restructured or collapse. Utility companies that have invested billions in nuclear energy would see the plants as costly millstones, dragging them into bankruptcy. Great stockpiles of coal, as well as the companies that mine it, would lie almost useless. So it is little wonder that Newman, who says he has gotten mysterious, anonymous threatening telephone calls lately, thinks there is a tremendous conspiracy, worldwide in scope, to prevent his invention from coming into widespread usage. “My machine is a threat in terms of changing the financial structure and the power structure of the world,” he says calmly. “I believe this conspiracy goes all the way to the president.” Newman has written every president since Lyndon Johnson stating that this new energy technology was on the horizon. Most of his letters went unanswered, presumably ignored. However, in 1983 Newman sent Reagan a package of material about his machine. In a letter he asked the administration’s help “for the people of the world.” Included in the package was a videotape of the machine that had aired on a New Orleans television news show. Newman got the package back with a form letter indicating that it had not been opened. But when he opened the package to file the material, Newman found something he had not included. “There was a video review sheet from an office in the White House,” Newman says, showing the sheet. “It indicated that not only had the package been looked at, but it had been looked at rather closely.” The review sheet states, among other things: “Some scientists believe this invention could change the world.”
“When I called to find out what the review sheet was all about, the fellow at the White House was furious that I had seen it,” Newman says. “They wanted to know how I had gotten hold of a copy of that sheet.” A White House spokesman said hundreds of videos are received by the White House annually and that many of them are reviewed by volunteers. “What is on the review sheet is not the opinion of anyone on the White House staff,” the spokesman said. “It is merely a review of whatever is on the tape.”
`People are trained not to accept change’
But Newman is sure that a conspiracy exists. He leans back in a chair in his workshop and ruminates. “It’s strange that they are capping all these oil wells now,” he says. “The reasons they are giving, the dropping prices and such, are the same ones you’ve heard for three, four years. I don’t see one factual piece of evidence for this to be happening. “I’ll bet in the last two years, if you could find out who’s buying the copper mines, who’s buying material for magnets, . . . I’d bet you anything that when the wash is out, the oil companies have bought them.” Newman says his machine is not a perpetual motion machine and that it does not create energy, two claims that have hurt its image. Instead, it is a new way of tapping the electromagnetic energy field that is already there. Very simply put, the machine works like this: Power is used to rotate two magnets wrapped in copper wire. The rotating magnets and the atoms that align within the copper wire create an electromagnetic field that can be tapped. The revolutionary aspect of the machine is that the amount of energy needed to align the atoms and rotate the magnets creating the energy field is less than the energy created. So there is a net gain in power created. Theoretically, with Newman’s technology you could produce an unlimited, self-perpetuating source of pollution-free energy. “I expect to have one of these machines running a car within six months,” Newman says matter-of-factly. The fight for a patent for the Revolutionary Energy Machine has become more than a fight to get an invention patented. Newman says the battle with the government has given him a new insight into the way people are taught to think in this country. The battle has defined for Newman a philosophy. “People have been trained, are being trained, not to accept change,” he says. “My powers of reason are greater than many people’s because my feet are not bound by traditional thought. Newman sits back and looks out the window of his workshop, past his Revolutionary Energy Machine, out into the pine trees. “To be a good scientist, you have to be a humble person. You have to believe that you don’t know everything,” he says.