by Terrence Aym

Created on: January 07, 2011

For more than three centuries inventors—usually crackpots—have sought the elusive fantasy of a perpetual motion machine.

Now investigators of an amazing object stuck in the dusty corners of an obscure Romanian museum may have found the next best thing: a perpetual battery.

Whether a battery that has operated continuously since 1950 without a recharge can be termed perpetual may be open to debate, yet the fact remains that the remarkable device has never ceased working and doesn't look like it's about to give up the ghost anytime soon.

The battery that's been pumping out electricity faithfully for 60 years was built by Vasile Karpen.

Karpen's Pile

The director of the Dimitrie Leonida National Technical Museum in Romania, Nicolae Diaconescu, when interviewed about the battery by the Romanian newspaper, ZIUA (The Day) said, "I admit it's also hard for me to advance the idea of an overunity generator without sounding ridiculous, even if the object exists."

That the battery—called "Karpen's Pile"—exists is indisputable.  

When Karpen built the battery he claimed it would function forever. Although decades ago engineers and physicists that studied it believed it would stop working soon it never has stopped.

Those engineers and physicists are now long dead, but the amazing "perpetual" battery keeps humming along.

Patented in 1922, most scientists that have studied it over the ensuing decades cannot fathom exactly how or why it works.

The Karpen's pile that sits in the director's office at the museum was a prototype built to Karpen's specifications. It has two series-connected electric piles that move a small galvanometric motor. That motor spins a blade that's connected to a switch. Every half rotation the blade opens and then closes the circuit during the second half of the rotation.

According to some engineers that have analyzed the ingenious device, the blade's rotation is exactly timed to allow the piles to recharge themselves and re-establish their polarity before the next rotation of the blade.

ZIUA also reported that a measurement of the current established a steady one volt output—exactly the same as when the battery was first activated in 1950.

During the interview with the newspaper, Diaconescu added that "unlike the lessons they teach you in the 7th grade physics class, the 'Karpen's Pile' has one of its electrodes made of gold, the other of platinum, and the electrolyte (the liquid that the two electrodes are immersed in), is high-purity

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