Butch LaFonte
Butch LaFonte | |
|---|---|
| Known for | Attempts to build a self-sustaining permanent magnet motor |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Free-energy research, permanent magnet motors |
Butch LaFonte is an amateur inventor and experimenter in the "free energy" community, known for his attempts to design and build a self-sustaining permanent magnet motor. He is listed in The Worldwide List of Dissident Scientists.
Work
LaFonte is associated with the LaFonte Research Group, a collaborative effort to design and test permanent magnet motors intended to run without an external energy input. His designs sought to exploit the natural repulsion of permanent magnets to produce continuous rotation, including work described as a replication of an "OC-MPMM" magnet motor. Documentation of the group's experiments has been shared through online free-energy communities, and by the group's own account the builders were unable to achieve sustained acceleration or self-running operation.
His magnet-motor concepts have circulated in alternative-energy sources such as KeelyNet and Patrick Kelly's compilation A Practical Guide to Free Energy Devices. Claims that permanent magnets alone can drive a motor without an external energy source lie outside mainstream physics, which holds that a static magnetic field stores no extractable net energy and cannot power a perpetual motion device.