Perepiteia

Perepiteia is a claimed energy generating device built by the Canadian inventor Thane Heins, who filed a Canadian patent application for it in 2003 though no patent was ever granted, and who brought it to wider media attention around 2008. News coverage quickly labeled the device a perpetual motion machine, though Heins himself described it as an unusually efficient electric motor that exploited back electromotive force in an unconventional way rather than as a source of free energy. The claims met considerable skepticism because they appeared incompatible with established physics, and while a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor who examined the device acknowledged witnessing unusual phenomena, the same professor later said he could not understand how Heins could describe the device using the words perpetual motion. Heins has since expressed uncertainty about whether the machine actually produces net energy while continuing to maintain that the underlying effect is real and deserves mainstream attention.