It is an invention that David Babb Sr. has called his “burden.”@@you’re going to want to check the style for where the commas go or don’t go for “sr.”@@
It has haunted him for the past 50 years, lasted through two marriages, passed along through four generations of his family and has undergone more than 35 different modifications since it was first discovered nearly 80 years ago at the height of the Great Depression.
Today, Springfield resident David Babb Sr., a 56-year-old unemployed veteran, is still attempting to perfect the invention many researchers and professionals have deemed impossible.
There are no sketches or diagrams of the machine that would rewrite modern physics books and defy two main laws of thermodynamics that have withstood more than 150 years of scrutiny and hundreds, if not thousands, of documented experiments to disprove it. Instead, most of the information into how the machine was first created exists in a memory that has been passed down from David’s grandfather to his father and his father to him on each of their deathbeds.
“It was the wrong timing for society”
In 1931, Babb said his grandfather, Thomas D. Babb, serendipitously came across the idea for the machine at the age of 30 during a backyard accident in which he snapped a strand of baling wire that had been attached to the wooden spokes of two cars that were being repaired. As a result, Thomas Babb became interested in the power that the two wheels generated and began to play with different ways in which he could use this power.
Nearly a year later, David Babb claims that Thomas created a perpetual motion machine that ran all night on its own power using the force of gravity. @@This is the first mention of the nature of the invention: a perpetual motion device. Earlier reference needed?@@In fact, David Babb said the amount of power generated by the machine was great enough to snap a broomstick in half, which had been used to stop the machine from spinning.
David Babb said his grandfather “turned white in the face” once he found out what he had created and immediately decided to disassemble it in order to protect his family from any the invention’s future repercussions.
“My grandfather was always suspicious of the government and big business,” Babb said. “He figured that they’ll pop a cap in him or drown him to prevent it from coming out. He was afraid that it was the wrong timing for society. He was just frightened because he didn’t have an education, and it was just a scary world back then.”
“It’s almost been a haunting kind of thing”
At the time, Thomas Babb and his brother made a pact to never build the machine again in their lifetimes. They never did. But that certainly did not stop them from talking about it. Nearly 30 years after Thomas Babb’s discovery, his son and David Babb’s father, Lester Thomas Babb, decided to replicate the machine again in the 1960s. Finding the right time to continue the work that his father had begun so many years before proved to be a challenging one.
“He was exhausted a lot, so I can see how it was easy for him to let go of his projects,” Lester’s daughter, Deborah Babb, said. “I think the reason why it has taken so long is a lack of finances and trying to raise families in our family, but the dreams have always come.”
For Deborah, it was a struggle at times to watch her dad work on the machine while balancing his life at work as a logger and a salesman and his life at home as a father of five children. Through the years that he worked on the machine, Deborah estimates that her father had attempted various modifications to no avail.
“I think a lot of the struggle has been me watching my dad,” Deborah said. “It’s almost been a haunting kind of thing in the family. I think the passion comes from Dad seeing for his own eyes that this works, so it haunted him to where he couldn’t let it go.”
“This thing needs to get built”
For David Babb Sr., it is this same haunting feeling that fuels his indefatigable perseverance, despite the constant scrutiny he has endured and the large amount of rejections he has received over the past half a century.
“I’ve had a lot of friends and family tell me that I’m never going to get this thing made and to keep my mouth shut or I’ll lose my rights to it, but I can’t be there anymore,” David Babb Sr. said. “This thing needs to get built.”
Babb said he funds his ambitious endeavor with his own money, but also said that he does not want to achieve the impossible for his own gain.
“For years, I’ve had friends and colleagues tell me, ‘Dave, don’t tell anyone about this; they’ll steal it from you,’ but I hope they do,” Babb said. “If that’s what it comes down to, I hope the world does steal this from me, because the world needs this.”
Although David Babb Sr. is worried about the invention falling into the wrong hands, he said he wanted his device to revolutionize the way in which the world harnesses energy, because his method would supposedly emit no negative byproducts and have no destructive repercussions.
“As long as you have nuclear plants on this planet, not only is there a danger, but there is also an excuse to make nuclear bombs,” Babb said. “If it can get rid of the excuse, why not this? I don’t want it to be a negative thing; I want it to be for good, creating clean energy for the world and lots of nice jobs.”
On his deathbed, Lester Thomas Babb said the machine would be important to the human civilization and may take longer than his son’s lifetime to be actualized, but that is one risk that David Babb Sr. is willing to take.
“I’m going to keep going with it until it’s running,” Babb said. “It’s my life mission; this thing needs to happen.”