The search for free energy

Many people have dreamt of being able to produce energy from nowhere. In The Search for free energy Keith Tutt recounts the stories of attempts to achieve this supposedly impossible feat. He looks at cold fusion and at Tesla's attempts to send energy through the air as well as many others. It's a good read, but I felt that Tutt wasn't sufficiently critical of the devices he was describing. When money was involved he (rightly) saw it as a scam, but he didn't seem to accept that people can also push crazy schemes for non-financial reasons. My feeling is that I'll believe in free energy when I see a commercial device.

Again and again we see a machine developed, with a few people reporting that is produces over unity results. Often patents are granted - so other people should be able to reproduce the results - but they never can. In the following decades there are always problems - financial, technical, personal - which prevent a commercial power supply from being built. Of course the real reason that it can't be built is that it's impossible. But people still go on believing.

Vacuum energy seems to be a popular source for free energy devices, but since their designs have little to do with quantum field theory one might just as well say that the energy appears by magic.