TheEnd187
Banned
- Messages
- 1,732
The Engadget Interview: Sean McCarthy, CEO of Steorn - Engadget
Interview with Steorn CEO
Today's interview is a first for Engadget in a couple ways: we've never talked with an executive whose company doesn't actually make or sell something, nor have we talked with anyone whose technology is theoretically infeasible. Still, we've all had our chance to criticize Steorn for its scientifically heretical claim to the invention of a perpetual motion machine, its failed live demonstration of that machine, and so on. So now it's time to turn the mic over to Steorn's CEO Sean McCarthy, where he discusses his belief in the potential of Steorn's Orbo technology, his feelings about the scientific community and skeptics at large, and what happens next for the supposed free energy company.
Jul 17th 2007 12:12PM by Ryan Block
Thank you for taking the time to speak with us today. I'm sure that you're very busy, especially after the last couple of weeks--
I've had better weeks.
Yeah, I would imagine. But before we actually get started talking about the technology [Orbo] or anything like that I think that a lot of people would probably like to know a little bit more about the company. So what can you tell us about Steorn that we don't already know? I mean we know that it was a company that was founded not to break the laws of thermodynamics but rather technological means.
The company was founded by myself and three other guys back in 2000 and it was basically three of us had come from a company that I had been working with for a year and the Irish economy was doing well so we decided we'd set up a tech company with no real objective. We started working in the early days just helping people manage some of their big e-commerce spend. So it would primarily be contract management, so for example where corporate would be spending vast amounts of money on e-commerce projects.
But that day was over so we came in to restructure the contracts and try to manage them into a more realistic burn rate. So we did that with probably some of Ireland's biggest corporate e-commerce sites including people like Banks of Ireland and so on. In 2001 we were asked to get involved in the development of some anti-counterfeit technology for credit cards and basically that became the mainstay of our business both in terms of developing anti-counterfeit systems for optical disks and for plastic cards and also doing an awful lot of forensics and expert witnessing for law enforcements across Europe.
I see. So then you stumbled upon this technology by--
An awful lot of the work we would have done would have been done in ATM fraud, which is a very widespread fraud in the UK and in Ireland and across Europe, and from working with the police they have quite a different view on the crime than for example a bank, and the police's prime objective is to catch the bad guys. So we started looking at covert surveillance equipment to monitor high risk ATMs, because clearly what the law enforcement wanted to do was to get evidence of a person physically committing a crime and it was during the development of some covert CCTV cameras that we were looking at basically very mobile devices -- so we wanted wireless image transmission and also not to have to worry about wiring them up to anything. So we initially looked at solar cells and we looked at augmenting solar cells to extend the battery life of the system with winter at the top of these were lamp post sized devices. So it was during that we started really playing around with magnetic systems and that's where we began to notice some strange anomalies and got caught in this weird and wonderful world OU. [Over unity, aka free energy.] Sometimes we wish we hadn't but we have.
So we know you stumbled upon this supposed technology. How long did it take you guys to realize what you thought was going on here?
It took us an awful long time to be honest, because the first thing when you get an anomalous reading on a system in a lab, the first thing that you do is obviously question your test equipment. We obviously went out and we looked out and looked at the way we are testing it and systems we were using to make analysis and so on. And after a fairly extended period of testing in different ways -- I should make the point that when we discovered this we weren't generating, the systems didn't run away with themselves. What we noticed was at certain speeds the speed range for magnetic systems that we were getting substantially different energy results -- which is unexpected.
So we spent a good six months ourselves just looking at the systems and not full-time six months. We wouldn't jump on it and say, you know, this is the solution to the world's energy crisis. We did it in a fairly calm, rational manner and over a course of the six months we began to realize that hey this, these readings are not due to some measurement anomaly and that these readings are real. There are these energy anomalies at certain speed ranges with certain magnetic configurations and that's pretty much how we managed to convince ourselves that it was worth pursuing.
You just mentioned, to quote, that this is the solution to the world's energy crisis. Do you think that is actually the case? Do you think that this will end the world's energy crisis?
I don't... I mean... My own background just to explain to you is providing technology into the UK Royal and gas industries. So I know the energy industry pretty well. I don't think there is a single solution to the energy crisis. I think that certain energy demands have certain needs. We have no doubts that what we have can play a very significant role. However, there is one thing sitting in Dublin here with a claim on a technology that nobody believes. Making that a commercial reality is a long and difficult road. So we are not naive enough to say that we will have a massive impact in the short frame of time, but we can see that it's possible and that's what we're dedicated to.
It's interesting that you mention that it's a technology that no one believes and I've seen some of the videos where I think it was you or one of your colleagues refers to the technology as being "absolutely impossible."
That would be me. [laughs]
Why do you think that this is so difficult to pitch to people?
From the simple point, we're all believers up to the notch of pretty well qualified engineers. You know, we have very classical university training and we've worked months of our lives in a classical engineering and technology environment. And so, the only way I can describe how I would feel about this technology is that if I'd be looking at this technology from the outside I'd be going, "Hocum! This is complete and utter rubbish! This is the most incontrovertible law of physics and if this was untrue then the universe wouldn't work." So I understand the skepticism, I would be very much and like everybody else. I've seen these kind of claims come and go over the years. So I understand it and an awful lot of what we're about is to try and at least erode people's disbelief. Because we can't make this a viable commercial technology without obviously people accepting that it's real.
Right, and in the US the USPTO, our patent office, actually requires people to send in physical working samples of supposed perpetual motion machines because they have historically received so many claims for patents to this system.
[laughs] We work with a pretty large U.S. patent firm. We took the decision that because of the company, we have so many battles to fight, and the last thing we wanted to do was to fight a battle with a patent office. So from the patent perspective we don't make claims that would violate classic Newtonian dynamics. However we have constructed a portfolio of patents that do protect us. So we're making claims that protect the technology... So we're not concerned about our patent position or having to fight because even that statement about the patent office is not necessarily true according true according to our patent agents. But again, we haven't felt the necessity to make claims in our patents of you know overunity or anything that could be deemed scientifically controversial. That doesn't mean that we don't believe in the claim, it simply means that we can protect the technology without having to go through that step.