Steorn

» see steorn.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Steorn was a dot-com before it was anything else. Set up in Dublin in 2000 by the engineer Shaun McCarthy with Mike Daly, the solicitor Francis Hackett and Shaun Menzies of the recruitment firm Zartis, it built e-commerce platforms, and its own website in October 2001 called it "a specialist service company providing programme management and technical assessment advice". One of its builds was WorldofFruit.com, a fruit trading exchange for Fyffes that lost close to €5 million in its first year. The company name is a Norse word meaning to guide or to manage.

The story Steorn told about its own discovery starts with a cash machine. A bank had hired the firm to build an anti-skimming rig, sixteen miniature CCTV cameras to photograph whoever was tampering with an ATM, and McCarthy wanted the cameras independently powered. The firm tried small wind generators, found them running at only 60 to 70 percent efficiency, and started rearranging the configurations to improve that. By McCarthy's account one of his engineers came in one day and said they had a problem, because they appeared to be getting out more than they were putting in.

Everything from there is one company trying to get the world to confirm a measurement. The technology was named Orbo, and it spent a decade in front of scientists and then, when the scientists had finished with it, in front of paying customers. A letter to shareholders in June 2016 said expectations had not been met and that McCarthy was being replaced as chief executive, with close to €1 million a year going out just to keep the doors open. By November the staff were gone and the facility was shut, nearly €23 million of investor money spent.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the economist ad ~

In August 2006 McCarthy bought a full page in The Economist for what he said was £75,000. The headline was a George Bernard Shaw line, "All great truths begin as blasphemies". The body claimed a technology that "produces free, clean and constant energy", independently validated by engineers and scientists "always behind closed doors, always off the record". Then it made the move that turned a crank claim into an eight-year news story. "We are seeking a jury of 12," the advert said. "The most qualified and the most cynical."

Four hundred and twenty scientists got in touch within thirty six hours. That number measures something real: a standing offer of free energy, printed in a magazine read by people who know it is impossible, still pulls hundreds of qualified volunteers who would like to be the one holding the meter. Michio Kaku called the device a fraud before anybody had tested it, telling ABC News it was "just a simple magnet machine".

~ the jury of twenty two ~

The jury that formed was twenty two scientists rather than twelve, headed by Ian MacDonald, emeritus professor of electrical engineering at the University of Alberta, announced on 1 December 2006 and starting work that February. Conservation of energy is first-year material on any engineering course, which makes that magazine's readership the worst possible audience to pitch free energy at. The advert was not written to fool the credulous. It was written to recruit the one reader certain to say no, which is either a very expensive bluff or a man who could not read his own instruments. In June 2009 the jury published one sentence and stopped: "Steorn's attempts to demonstrate the claim have not shown the production of energy."

~ the cube and the phone ~

There had already been a public failure. In July 2007 an early Orbo prototype was supposed to run at the Kinetica Museum in London and did not, which Steorn blamed on heat from the display lighting. "I screwed up," McCarthy said afterward. "It was a mistake entirely of my making ... I have to take it on the chin." A second run of demonstrations followed in Dublin from December 2009 into February 2010, a motor turning on a battery with an oscilloscope beside it, and no independent evidence that any excess energy existed.

So the scientists got cut out. In late 2015 Steorn started taking orders for the OCube, a self-charging USB charger at €1,200, and the O-Phone, a mobile that never needed plugging in, at €480. The Irish Times visited the East Wall headquarters in January 2016 to see the production line, and McCarthy called it "a self-resolving controversy" which would be settled "by consumers, not by us". He had stopped engaging with the scientific community and was not himself sure how the effect worked. His explanation was that "we think that we're converting time into energy", and that nobody understands gravity either. By July 2016 both products were off sale, because too many of the shipped units did not work.

~ what deloitte was left with ~

The money came from roughly four hundred private investors over ten years: about €3 million in share allotments to October 2005, then €8.1 million of loans in 2006 that were converted into shares. The last recorded share transfer was April 2013, a €1.74 million stake going to something called The Steorn Orbo Trust. Accounts for 2014 show a loss of €88,600 against accumulated losses above €20.5 million. McCarthy's description of the end was that his investors never stopped being willing, "but their capability to give support just kept diminishing".

The liquidator, from Deloitte, closed the file in May 2024. Creditors were owed €344,000 and there was €80,000 of assets to meet it with. No missing investor money ever turned up and nobody bid for the patents. McCarthy said in late 2016 that he expected to make a living at online poker and that Steorn had made him unemployable, which fits the reading Professor Sir Eric Ash reached in July 2007: having examined the rotor and its magnets, Ash formed the view that McCarthy was truly convinced of his own invention, and that the conviction was a case of prolonged self-deception.

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