My father spent at least 40 years of his life working to develop an internally-driven perpetual motion machine. And I was a true believer, at least up until college. My father held no stock in supposed refutations by mathematicians and physicists of the possibility of such a perpetual motion machine. He disagreed that such a machine would violate one or more of the laws of motion and thermodynamics, and firmly held that in the early 1700s Johann Bessler (better known under the pseudonym “Orffyre