Bruce DePalma

Bruce DePalma (born Bruno James DePalma) (October 2, 1935-October 1997), son of orthopaedic surgeon Anthony DePalma and elder brother of film director Brian De Palma claimed to have invented a a perpetual motion machine.
Biography
De Palma studied electrical engineering at MIT, leaving without a degree around 1958. DePalma worked in weapons electronics at General Atronics Corporation in Philadelphia following his under-graduate years at MIT before returning the Boston area for a job at Polaroid in Cambridge MA. In the mid-1960s he also obtained a teaching assistant position in the laboratory of Dr. Harold Edgerton, the renowned inventor of stroboscopic photography.
Coincident with his return to Massachusetts, he became infatuated with psycho-active drugs and believed the mind altering effects he perceived opened 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 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.
Inventions
Bruce De Palma's N-machine concept of 1977, his other anomalous devices (some alleged to display anti-gravity characteristics) and the claims for them, set him on a collision course with mainstream scientists who contradicted his claims of "free energy" over the course of twenty years, as did some members of the alternative energy community. De Palma claimed that his N-machine, a Homopolar generator based on the Faraday disc, could produce five times the energy required to run it. The principle of conservation of energy states no such device is possible.
His search for financial backing for the construction of a marketable N-machine led him to move from Santa Barbara, California to Australia around 1994 and on to 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 over many years. Tewari's Space Power Generator, claimed to be 200% efficient, is based on the same alleged theoretical considerations 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 during 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), who observed the operation of, and measured electrical output from, the N-machine. The test demonstrated no over-unity potential of the N-machine - most of the output energy was lost as heat - and the project was abandoned.

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