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1 day ago
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We think that we're converting time into energy... that's the engineering principle.
In the 1820s, stacks, ovens, and gasometers rose over the docklands of Dublin. The Hibernian Gas Company, one of several gasworks that would eventually occupy the land around the Grand Canal Docks, heated coal to produce town gas. That gas would soon supply thousands of lights on the streets of Dublin, a quiet revolution in municipal development that paved the way for electrification---both conceptually, as it proved the case for public lighting, and literally, as town gas fired the city's first small power plants.
Ireland's supply of coal became scarce during the Second World War; as part of rationing of the town gas supply most street lights were shut off. Town gas would never make a full recovery. By that time, electricity had proven its case for lighting. Although coal became plentiful after the war, imported from England and transported from the docks to the gasworks by horse teams, even into the 1960s---this form of energy had become obsolete. In the 1980s, the gasworks stoked their brick retorts for the last time. Natural gas had arrived. It was cheaper, cleaner, safer.
The Docklands still echo with the legacy of the town gas industry. The former site of the Hibernian gasworks is now the Bord Gáis Energy Theatre, a performing arts center named for the British-owned energy conglomerate that had once run Ireland's entire gas industry as a state monopoly. Metal poles, the Red Sticks, jut into the sky from the Grand Canal Square. They are an homage to the stacks that once loomed over the industrial docks. Today, those docks have turned over to gastropubs, offices, the European headquarters of Google.
Out on the water, a new form of energy once spun to life. In December of 2009, a man named Sean McCarthy booked the Waterways Ireland Visitors Centre for a press event. In the dockside event space, and around the world through a live stream, he invited the public to witness a demonstration of his life's work. The culmination of three years of hype, controversy, and no small amount of ridicule, this was his opportunity to prove what famed physicist Michio Kaku and his own hand-picked jury of scientists had called a sham.
He had invented a perpetual motion machine.
Sean McCarthy had his start in the energy industry. Graduating with an engineering degree in the 1980s, he took a software position with a company that quickly became part of European energy equipment giant ABB. By some route now lost to history, he made is way into sales. 1994 found McCarthy in Bahrain, managing sales for the Middle East.
McCarthy is clearly a strong salesman. In Bahrain, he takes credit for growing ABB's business by orders of magnitude. Next, ABB sent him to Houston, where he worked sales to Central and South America. In 1999, the company called him to Azerbaijan---but he chose otherwise, leaving ABB and returning to Dublin.
Contacts from the energy industry, and no doubt his start in software, brought Graham to the world of the internet. 1999 in Dublin was, like so many places, crowded with dotcom boom startups. McCarthy saw opportunity: not necessarily by joining the fray, but by selling expertise and experience to those who already had. With his brother-in-law, a lawyer, he formed Steorn.
The nature of Steorn's business during these early years is a bit hazy. As McCarthy recounts it, to Barry Whyte for the book The Impossible Dream, Steorn gathered some early support from the Dublin internet industry that connected him with both capital and clients. One of their most notable clients, attested by several sources, was dotcom wonder WorldOfFruit.com. The World of Fruit, a subsidiary of fruit importer Fyffes, was a web-based auction platform for wholesale import and export of fruit. I have not been able to clarify how exactly Steorn was involved in World Of Fruit, although it cannot be ignored that the aforementioned brother-in-law and cofounder, Francis Hackett, had been the general counsel of World Of Fruit before becoming involved in Steorn. As for the future of online fruit trading, it went about as well as most dotcom-era market platforms did, stumbling on for a few years before folding with millions of Euro lost.
Later, by McCarthy's telling, Steorn shifted its business more towards R&D. They worked on a project for a client fighting credit card fraud, which led to later work for Irish and British law enforcement organizations, mostly related to video surveillance and machine vision. For Ireland's DART commuter train, for example, Steorn attempted a system that would automatically detect aggressive behavior in platform surveillance video---though it was canceled before completion. These projects floated Steorn through the worst of the dotcom bust and supported an in-house R&D operation that trialed a variety of ideas, including something like an early version of California's modern electronic license plates.
I am not sure who well this account squares with Steorn's public presence. Steorn was incorporated in July of 2000, and when their website appeared in 2001 it advertised "programme management and technical assessment advice for European companies engaging in e-commerce projects." The main emphasis of the website was in the project management experience of McCarthy and the company's CTO, Sean Menzies, formerly of recruiting and staffing firm Zartis. The primary claim was that Steorn could oversee projects to develop and launch e-commerce websites, reducing the risk and expense of jumping into the world wide web.
Steorn has been formed by individuals with significant experience in this area who have recognised that there is an absence in the market of genuinely impartial and objective advice as to the best way of implementing e-commerce ideas.
A few months later, Steorn's business became a little more general: "Steorn is an expert in the field of technology risk management." In August of 2001, Steorn launched its first concrete product offering, one that is curiously absent from McCarthy's later stories of the company. Not only would Steorn supervise technology projects, it had partnered with an insurance company to underwrite surety bonds on the completion of those projects.
Steorn had a proprietary program management methodology which they called GUIDE. Frustratingly, although GUIDE is always styled in all caps, I have not found any indication that it stood for something. What I do know is that GUIDE "offers predictability, visibility, control and results," and that it has some relation to a project planning methodology called DIRECT.
In all truth, while Steorn's 2001 websites are laden with bespoke buzzwords, the project and risk management services they offer seem unremarkable in a good way. Probabalistic project scheduling models, checkpoints and interim deliverables, "an approach which is systematic yet sufficiently flexible." The only way that Steorn's services seem foolish is the extent to which these methods have been adopted by every technology project---or have become so dated or unfashionable as to appear obsolete.
This was 2001, though, and many established companies found themselves plunging into the deep end of the online economy for the first time. No doubt the guidance of an outside expert with experience in online projects could be valuable. But, then, I am a sympathetic audience: they were hiring technical architects. That's my day job! The benefits package was, they said, best in class. Alas, the conditions that may necessitate my own move to Dublin come more than twenty years too late.
Despite McCarthy's description of their multiple projects in security, surveillance, and machine vision, Steorn never seems to have advertised or publicized any work in those areas. In 2003, their website underwent a redesign that added "services for technology inventors" and advertised a subsidiary web hosting provider called HostsMe. Perhaps my view is too colored by the late-2000s context in which I came to understand the internet industry, but pivoting to the low barrier of entry, low chance of success shared hosting market feels like a move of desperation. In 2004, the website changed again, becoming a single page of broken links with a promise that it is "being redesigned."
For this entire period, from late 2001 after the announcement of their risk underwriting service to the company's complete swerve into energy from nothing, I can find no press mentions of Steorn or any of their projects. McCarthy seems to suggest that Steorn had a staff of engineers and technicians, but I struggle to find any names or details. Well, that was a long time ago, and of course the staff are not all listed on LinkedIn. On the other hand, one of McCarthy's investors, shown a laboratory full of white-coated scientists, later came to suspect they were temps hired only to create an appearance.
This is not to accuse McCarthy of lying. Some details definitely check out. For example, their project with Fraudhalt to detect tampering with ATMs via machine vision is the subject of a patent listing Sean McCarthy's name. But I do think that McCarthy is prone to exaggerating his successes and, in the process, muddling the details. When it comes to Steorn's most famous invention, McCarthy and early employee and project manager Michael Daly agree that it was an accidental discovery. Both tell detailed stories of a project for which Steorn purchased and modified small wind turbines. The trouble is that they are not describing the same project. Two different customers, two different contexts, two different objectives; but both lead to the Orbo.
Other attempts at checking into the particulars of Steorn's early business lead in more whimsical directions. To Whyte, McCarthy described a sort of joke project by Steorn to create an "online excuse exchange" called WhatsMyExcuse.com. I can't find any evidence of this project, although there's no particular reason I would. What I can say is that some ideas are evergreen: four months ago, a Reddit user posted that they "built a tiny excuse generator for fun." It's live right now, at whatsmyexcuse.com.
In any case, the nature of Steorn around 2003 remains mysterious to me. McCarthy's claims to have been a regional expert on credit card fraud are hard to square with the complete lack of any mention of this line of business on Steorn's website. On the other hand, Steorn had a confusing but clearly close relationship with Fraudhalt to such an extent that I think Steorn may have gone largely dormant as McCarthy spent his time with the other company.
After five years of near silence, a period that McCarthy characterized as modest success, Steorn captured the world's attention with what must be one of the boldest pivots of all time. An August 2006 full-page ad in the Economist began with a George Bernard Shaw quote, "all great truths begin as blasphemies." "Imagine," it reads below, "a world with an infinite supply of pure energy. Never having to recharge your phone. Never having to refuel your car."
Steorn's website underwent a complete redesign, now promoting the free energy device they dubbed the Orbo. A too-credulous press went wild with the story, especially in Ireland where Steorn's sudden prominence fit a narrative of a new Irish technology renaissance. The Irish Independent ran a photo of McCarthy kneeling on the floor beside a contraption of aluminum extrusion and wheels and wiring. "Irish firm claims to have solved energy crisis" is the headline. The photo caption reminds us that it "has been treated with some skepticism in the scientific community because it appears to contravene the laws of physics."
I will not devote much time to a detailed history of the development of the Orbo; that topic is much better addressed by Barry Whyte's book, which benefits greatly from interviews with McCarthy. The CliffsNotes go something like this: Steorn was working on some surveillance project and wanted to power the cameras with small wind turbines. The exact motivations here are confusing since, whichever version of the story you go with, the cameras were being installed in locations that already had readily available electrical service. It may have been simple greenwashing. In any case, the project lead Steorn to experimenting with modifications to off-the-shelf compact wind turbines.
At some point, presumably one or two years before 2006, it was discovered that a modified turbine seemed to produce more energy in output than it received as input. I have not been able to find enough detail on these experiments to understand what exactly was being done, so I am limited to this vague description. Steorn at first put it out of mind, but McCarthy later returned to this mystery and built a series of prototypes that further demonstrated the effect. A series of physicists and research teams were brought in to evaluate the device. This part of the story is complicated and details conflict, but an opinionated summary is that entrepreneurially-inclined technology development executives tended to find the Orbo promising while academic physicists found the whole thing so laughable that they declined to look at it. Trinity College contained both, and in 2005 McCarthy's discussions with a technology commercialization team there lead to a confrontation with physicist Michael Coey. From that point on, McCarthy viewed the scientific establishment as resistance to be overcome.
McCarthy determined that the only way to bring Orbo to the world was to definitively prove that it worked, and to do so largely without outside experience. For that, he would need equipment and a team. After long discussions with a venture capital firm, McCarthy seems to have balked at the amount of due diligence involved in such formal investment channels. Instead, he brought on a haphazard series of individuals, mostly farmers, who collectively put up about 20 million euro.
One of the curious things about the Orbo was Steorn's emphasis on cell phone batteries. I suppose it is understandable, in that ubiquitous mobile phones were new at the time and the hassle of keeping them charged was suddenly a familiar problem to all. It also feels like a remarkable failure of ambition. Having invented a source of unlimited free energy, most of what McCarthy had to say was that you wouldn't have to charge your phone any more. Sure, investment documents around Steorn laid out a timeline to portable generators, vehicles, standby generators for telecom applications... a practical set of concerns, sure, but one that is rather underwhelming from the creator of the first over-unity energy device.
It is also, when you think about it, a curious choice. McCarthy later talked about pitching the device to Apple's battery suppliers. The timeline here is a bit confusing, given that the iPhone launched after the period I think he was discussing, but still, it makes a good example. The first-generation iPhone was about a half inch thick, hefty by today's standards but a very far cry from Steorn's few publicized prototypes, which occupied perhaps two feet square. Miniaturization is a challenge for most technologies, with the result that pocket-portable devices are usually a late-stage application, not an early one. That's especially true for an electromechanical generator, one that involves bearings and electromagnets and a spinning rotor. Still, it was all about phones.
Steorn's trouble getting the attention of battery manufacturers lead them to seek independent validation. Turned away, as McCarthy tells it, by university physics departments and industrial laboratories, Steorn came up with an unconventional plan. In the 2006 Economist advertisement, they announced "The Challenge." Steorn was recruiting scientists and engineers to form a panel of independent jurors who would evaluate the technology. You could apply at steorn.com. Nearly 500 people did.
The steorn.com of the Orbo era is a fascinating artifact. It has a daily poll in a sidebar, just for some interactive fun. You could apply for the scientific jury, or just sign up to express your interest in the technology. Most intriguingly, though, there was a forum.
This is some intense mid-2000s internet. There was a time when it just made sense for every website to have a forum; I guess the collective internet industry hadn't yet learned that user-generated content is, on average, about as good as toxic waste, and that giving the general public the ability to publish their opinions under your brand is rarely a good business decision. Still, Steorn did, and what few threads of the steorn.com discussion forum survive in the Internet Archive are a journey through a bygone era. Users have the obvious arguments: is Orbo real, or a scam? They have the less obvious arguments, over each other's writing styles. There is a thread for testing BBCode. A few overactive users appear seemingly everywhere, always hostile and dismissive. An occasional thread will become suddenly, shockingly misogynistic. This is, of course, the soup we all grew up in.
The forum exemplifies one of the things that I find most strange about Steorn. The company was often obsessively secret, apparently working on the Orbo technology in quiet for years, but it was also incredibly bold, choosing a full-page ad for a publicity stunt as their first public announcement. McCarthy was well aware that the scientific establishment viewed him as a fraud, by this time individual investors seemed to be growing skeptical, and yet they had a discussion forum.
The late years of Steorn are best summarized as a period of humiliation. In 2007, the company promised a public demonstration of the Orbo at a science museum in London. I remember following this news in real time: the announcement of the demonstration triggered a new round of press coverage, and then it was canceled before it even began. Steorn claimed that the lighting in the museum had overheated the device and damaged it. The public mostly laughed.
In 2009, Steorn arranged a second public demonstration, the one at the Waterways Visitors Centre in Dublin. This one actually happened, but the device clearly incorporated a battery and Steorn didn't allow any meaningful level of inspection. The demonstration proved nothing but that Steorn could use a battery to make a wheel spin, hardly a world-changing innovation. Not even a way to charge a phone.
Later that same year, The Challenge came to its close. The independent jury of experts, after meetings, demonstrations, experiments, and investigations, returned its verdict. The news was not good. Jurors unanimously approved a statement that Steorn had not shown any evidence of energy production.
When something is as overhyped and underdeveloped as the Orbo, when a company claims the impossible and still attracts millions, you sort of expect a dramatic failure. Surely, you cannot just claim to have created a source of free energy and then wander on through life as usual. Or, perhaps you can. In 2010, steorn.com gained the Developer Community, where you could pay a licensing fee for access to information on the Steorn technology.
Even the mobile phones were not abandoned. In 2015, Steorn mounted another demonstration, of a sort. A small Orbo device, now apparently solid-state, was displayed supposedly charging a phone in a Dublin pub. A lot of big claims are made and tested in pubs, but few with so much financial backing. Steorn had been reduced to a story told over beer and the internet: at the end of 2015, McCarthy announced via Facebook that an Orbo phone and phone charger would soon go on sale. The charger, the Orbo Cube, ran €1,200 and was due to ship within the month.
As far as I can tell, these devices were actually completely unrelated to the original Orbo. The "solid-state Orbo" was completely novel design, to the extent that you would call it a design. Some units did ship, and reverse engineering efforts revealed an eccentric set of components including two alkaline 9v batteries and shrinkwrapped mystery cells that have the appearance of capacitors but are, supposedly, proprietary components relying on some kind of magnetic effect. It's hard to find much solid information about these devices, I think very few were made and they shipped mostly to "friendly" customers. It is said that many of them failed to work at all, the result of an acknowledged quality control problem with the clearly handmade interior. There is a lot of electrical tape involved. Like a lot. And some potting compound, but mostly electrical tape. The two I've found detailed accounts of failed to charge a phone even when new out of the box.
Through this whole period, Steorn was still McCarthy's day job, at least on paper. But he had turned towards a new way to make money: poker. Starting around 2015, McCarthy became a professional poker player, apparently his main form of income to this day. He announced that Steorn would be liquidated in 2017; it was finally dissolved in 2024.
History is replete with perpetual motion machines. There are rumors of some sort of machine in the 8th century, although questions about the historicity of these accounts lead to difficult questions around what makes a perpetual motion machine "real." Of the many putative free energy sources of history, many have involved some configuration of magnets. I can understand why: magnets offer just the right combination of the mysterious and the relatable. They seem to work as if by magic, and yet, they are physical objects that we can hold and manipulate. You can see how someone might develop an intuitive understanding of magnetic behavior, extend it to an impossible idea, and remain quite convinced of their discovery.
If perpetual motion machines are a dime a dozen, why does the story of Steorn so fascinate me? I think that it has many parallels to our situation today. The Orbo is not merely the product of a deluded inventor, it's the product of a period of Irish economic history. Whyte's book is focused primarily on this aspect of the story. He articulates how the overstuffed, overhyped Irish economy of the 2000s, a phenomenon known as the Celtic Tiger, created an environment in which just about any claim could raise millions---no matter how outlandish.
And here we are today, with some of the largest components of our economy run by people who fashion themselves as technical experts but have backgrounds mostly in business. They, too, are collecting money on the premise that they may build a world-changing technology---AGI.
Sure, this analogy is imperfect in many ways. But I think it is instructive. Sean McCarthy wrote of Steorn's early days:
It was just a gold rush: if you weren't doing web, you didn't exist. So, a banana import-export business needs to invest millions in e-commerce. They probably did need to invest, but it was driven, in my opinion, by all of these companies driving their share price up by doing something on the web rather than by any real business cases.
The dotcom boom and bust was an embarrassment to the computer industry, and it was also a pivotal moment in its growth. E-commerce, the graveyard of many '90s businesses, is one of the pillars of modern life. The good days of easy money can be an incubator for important ideas. They can also be an incubator for idiocy.
Whenever I read about some historic scam, I always wonder about the people at the top. Was Sean McCarthy a fraud, or was he deluded? Did he play up the Orbo to keep the money coming in, or did he really believe that he just needed one more demonstration?
Whyte's book takes a strong position for the latter, that McCarthy had the best intentions and got in over his head. He still believes in Orbo, to this day. Of course, Whyte is far more sympathetic than I find myself. The book is almost half written by McCarthy himself in the form of its lengthy excerpts from his statements. I am more cynical, I think that McCarthy must have known things were going sideways well before he shipped out broken power banks with nine volt batteries covered in electrical tape. I don't think he started out that way, though.
I think he started out with the best intentions: the leader of a moderately successful tech company, one that wasn't getting much business but had ready access to capital. He went fishing for ideas, for opportunities for growth, and he hooked the biggest of them all. A world-changing idea, one so profound that he himself struggled to understand its implications. An impossible dream of not having to charge his phone. To sustain the company, he had to bring in money. To bring in money, he had to double down. Perpetual motion was always just around the corner.
I believe that McCarthy is a con man, in that he has too much confidence. It's a trait that makes for a good poker player. McCarthy saw something remarkable, perhaps an error in measurement or an error in understanding. He placed a bet, and spent the next decade pushing more money into the pot, trying to make it work out. I would hope that our industry has learned to be more cautious, but then, we're only human. We watched the wheels spin, faster and faster, and we convince ourselves that they can spin forever.
