Actions

Virginio Florio

From Kook Science

Virginio Florio was an Italian inventor resident at Turin, it was reported by U.S.-based newspapers in July 1913, who claimed to have built a perpetual motion machine based on heat exchange, transforming solar caloric energy[i] to produce mechanical energy. It was further reported in 1914 by British and Australian sources that Florio's machine had been demonstrated to Marcellin Berthelot, Camille Flammarion, and others at an unnamed Paris newspaper office, an event that would have had to have taken place at least seven years prior to the reporting.[ii]

Selected Patents

  • Florio, Virginio. Apparecchio per utilizzare il calore solare come forza motrice. 7 Sep. 1907.[iii]
  • Florio, Virginio. Apparecchio per il comando a distanza di lampadine elettriche.
  • Florio, Virginio. Generatore elettrico di vapore a regolazione. 1912.

Press Coverage

Notes

  1. English-language newspapers of 1913 used the term "caloric" in their coverage, translating the Italian calore ("heat"), in reference to the hypothetical caloric, a perpetuating medium for heat that was long obsolete in conventional systems of thermodynamics and physics by 1913, avering to the observations of Joule, et. al. Florio, for his part, likely did not intend any such association.
  2. As Berthelot had died in March 1907.
  3. Appears in Bollettino della proprieta intellettuale under "Proprieta Industriale, Attestati di privativa industriale rilasciati nella seconda quindicina di febbraio 1908," sub-heading "Generatori di vapore, macchine diverse ed organi delle macchine," p. 213, Google Books link, https://www.google.com/books/edition/Bollettino_della_proprieta_intellettuale/g_21SpLnwpIC?hl=en&gbpv=1&pg=PA214 .