Eric, I've modified the post marginally to give it context and to clarify 

some points. You may forward it to your email list at your discretion.



You do maintain an interesting page. I've bookmarked it for futher 

exploration when I have more time.



Paul



Paul.Bernhardt@m.cc.utah.edu wrote:



The following is in reference the recent cablecast on A&E Television 

(USA), Scams, Schemes and Scoundrels. All is my personal opinion soley 

and not that of my employers, past or present, or the University of Utah.



I felt they were too sympathetic with him. All I could think of was what 

another skeptic poster (to Skeptic list) asked, "Why not ask him to plug 

his machine's input into it's output and it should run itself into 

oblivion?" They made it look a bit like the patent office was incapable 

of understanding what some folks bring in (probably true) and how that 

implies they may not understand his machine (probably not true). The 

others were really good exposures of the scams, but they made that 

segment look too much like the big bad government is beating up on this 

poor guy.



My understanding on lots of these things (free energy machines) is they 

simply change the shape of the alternating current wave form such that 

the measurement devices are misrepresenting the output. In the two 

extremes of periodic outputs are triangular and square waves. If you put 

a triangle wave through a meter that expects a sinusoidal wave, it will 

get the output wrong (too low) because it calcualtes a root mean square 

value for the output. If you put in a square wave you will often get an 

over-estimate of power for the same reason. It is also to fool in a more 

subtle way, by marginal changes in the shape of the output wave form that 

will still appear sinuasoidal-ish but is actually not a sinusoidal wave. 

These can also result in over-estimation of the power output.



Paul Bernhardt, M.S. (Psychology)

Mr. Bernhardt is also a licensed Professional Engineer in the state of 

Georgia, USA, and is ombudsman for the Usenet newsgroup 

sci.psychology.psychotherapy.moderated.