Hi there. Hubbie here again. It’s Saturday but Pauline has a deadline so she had to go to the office. That means I have Daddy Duty. Not too bad today. The bed clothes are in the washer and Lewy has had his breakfast and is sleeping in his recliner. Yesterday Lewy had a pretty good day but after dinner he needed to toilet and was not doing so well walking with his cane. I got his walker for him and with that he made the trip pretty well. The odd part was that rather than using a walker in the normal fashion Lewy gripped it by one side and pushed it along in front of him. It looked kinda weird but it worked for Lewy. Watching him use the walker like no one else took me back to a time before the Lewy Body took over Lewy’s body.
If you have read Pauline’s short biography of Lewy then you know that he was raised dirt poor during the depression so he was only able to go to school through the eighth grade. Then he went to work and then he went to war. I have to wonder what he would have done if he was born later or had more education because, just like his different way of using the walker, Lewy had a unique way of looking at looking at lots of mechanical systems. He could rebuild engines, built racing boats before it was a sport and once, in an emergency, turned a motor boat into a sail boat using an umbrella. And back in the 70’s he became convinced that he could build a machine that would generate energy.
At that point in time I was a smart ass young punk in college. Pauline was in Knoxville too and in the summers I worked for Lewy. One Sunday afternoon at his house Lewy began to tell me of his plans for a grand machine. He described a giant cam shaft with buckets attached and a pool of water below. As the cam rotated a pump would fill the buckets at the top with water from the pool. The weight of that water would pull the buckets down and rotate the shaft. At the bottom of their rotation the buckets would dump the water into the pool and rise to collect the water for the trip down. The rotation of the shaft would power an electric generator. That generator would supply the electricity for the pump to fill the buckets. The machine would go on forever.
Of course having already completed freshman engineering courses I felt obligated to explain to Lewy the error of his ways. I carefully explained the loss of energy that would result no matter how friction free the bearings were in his machine. I reviewed the laws of thermodynamics and suggested that his time would be better spent on other endeavors. I was in no way condescending. Yeah right!.
I went back to school at that fall and continued my education. More tough classes; Advanced Partying and How To Schedule Classes So You Can Sleep Till Noon.
The next summer I came back and Lewy gave me a job again. One day at his house Lewy asked me to come out to his work shop and look at something. He opened the door and there before me was a large scale mock-up of his machine. The cam shaft was made of two inch pipe and rotated in a five foot arch. There were buckets attached. The buckets had drop panels connected to devices that allowed them to drop their load of water at the bottom and rise to be filled from a tube at the top of the machine. The end of the rotating shaft turned a small electric generator and connected to that generator was a small light bulb. The light bulb was glowing. It wasn’t very bright but by God it was glowing.
I followed Lewy into the shop and began to examine the machine. It was large. The pool of water was four feet by eight feet. The top of the cam shaft had an operational diameter of six feet. Each bucket held two gallons of water, sixteen pounds. They filled with water at the top and pulled down turning the shaft. The rotating shaft had no bearings, just steel straps to hold it to the supports yet it turned fairly quietly and did so fast enough to power the generator. The light bulb glowed.
Then I looked closer and saw it. The buckets were being filled by a small water pumped plugged into a wall outlet. I turned to Lewy and pointed out, with full college educated inflection in my voice, that it the bulb would be much brighter if he just unplugged the pump and plugged the light into the wall.
Lewy watched the machine turn and said, “Yeah but this is just the mock-up. The real machine will have ball bearings.”
“But Lewy, the laws of thermodynamics state that……………………………………. Cool machine.”
I went back to school at the end of the summer. The next summer the machine was gone. Lewy never brought it up again and neither did I. Sometimes I still wonder what Lewy would have done if he had the opportunities I had. I bet he would have astounded his professors. I’m certain he would have made them stop and think.
Go to go now. Lewy is ready for lunch and he headed for the kitchen.
He is pushing the walker sideways in front of him.
I smile.