PowerPedia:Bruce De Palma
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Bruce Eldridge De Palma (1935–1997), was an electrical engineer and physicist.
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Biography
De Palma, son of noted orthopaedic surgeon Anthony DePalma and elder brother of film director Brian De Palma, was a well known figure in the Free energy suppression community. He claimed that his N-machine Homopolar generator, a device based on the Faraday disc, could produce five times the energy required to run it. According to mainstream physics, no such device is physically possible.
De Palma studied electrical engineering at MIT, leaving without a degree around 1958. He then returned to his home town of Philadelphia and worked at several electronics companies in the area including Dynadio on audio amplifiers and General Atronics on acoustic electronics for sono-bouys before returning to Cambridge MA for a job with Polaroid corporation. In the mid-1960s, he also obtained a teaching assistant position in the laboratory of Dr. Harold Edgerton, the renown inventor of stroboscopic photograpy.
Coincident with his return to Massachusetts, he became infatuated with phycho-active drugs and believed the mind altering effects he perceived opened up an entirely new way to pursue the study of physics. Unfortunately, this experimentation led to problems with his academic and corporate relationships and by 1970, he left both to strike out on his own and begin the full time pursuit of free energy machines that occupied the rest of his life. While he was thought to be quite brilliant by the many students he recruited to assist him, his addictions to hashish and LSD colored everything he wrote and conceived, and most invariably left within a few years when it became clear that despite his most sincere efforts, nothing he ever postulated could be scientifically verified. Undaunted, he recruited more as needed, invariably assisted by his willingness to share his psychedelics with the newcomers.
Bruce De Palma's development of the N-machine concept in 1977, among his other anomalous devices (at least one of which, De Palma claimed, displayed anti-gravity characteristics) and the claims surrounding them, set him on a collision course with his more mainstream peers. His claims of "free energy" were vigorously refuted over the course of twenty years, by conventional scientists and some members of the alternative energy community alike.
His search for financial backing for the construction of a marketable N-machine saw him relocate from Santa Barbara, California to Australia c. 1994, and then New Zealand in 1996.
Probably his greatest ally in his conviction that the N-machine could solve the world's energy and environmental crisis was Paramahamsa Tewari, a Project Director with the Indian Nuclear Power Corporation, with whom he corresponded regularly over many years. Tewari's Space Power Generator, claimed to be 200% efficient, is based on the same theoretical foundations as the N-machine.
De Palma's death in New Zealand in October 1997 put an end to his most ambitious free energy project, and occurred only weeks prior to the official testing of a device constructed over the course of 6 months in an Auckland workshop. The test was attended by, among others, the project's financial backer, Bruce Bornholdt, a prominent Wellington barrister, as well as the pioneering developer of the Adams motor, Robert Adams (now deceased) (http://peswiki.com/index.php/Obituary:Robert_Adams), who observed the operation of, and measured electrical output from, the N-machine. This single test failed to demonstrate the over-unity potential of the N-machine - most of the output energy being lost as heat - and the project was immediately dissolved.
Related concepts
External links & references
- THE HOME OF PRIMORDIAL ENERGY (http://depalma.pair.com/index.html), De Palma's website with numerous articles. <http://depalma.pair.com>
- Bruce E. De Palma: N-Machine (http://www.rexresearch.com/depalma/depalma.htm), 3 Articles by De Palma <http://www.rexresearch.com>
- Free Energy - The N-Machine (http://www.mufor.org/nmachine.html) <http://www.mufor.org>
- Wikipedia contributors (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Recentchanges), Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. Wikimedia Foundation. <http://en.wikipedia.org>.
