Three patents does not a Perpetual Motion Machine make

Just reading around on Huffington Post I saw yet another add for a perpetual motion machine. What I found most entertaining about this claim (outside of the LULZ inherent in this kind of flapdoodle) was this: The “HoJo Motor” is the only device that produces “Free Energy” that has 3 U.S. Patents!

1.                 
2. Produce Free Electricity For Your Home and Appliances in Just 48 Hours With The "Howard Johnson Motor" (HoJo Motor) - The only "Free Energy Device" to have 3 U.S. Patents! | HoJo Motor
3. http://www.hojomotor.com/vid

It’s important to note here that the US Patent Office does not actually certify that the device produces ‘free energy’. The US government granted a patent not because the motor produces free energy. Rather, it granted a patent because the it is a working electric motor. The person is relying on the reader sucker not realizing this fact.

1. >Produce Free electricity for your home and appliances in just 2 days!<
3. No, you won’t be able to do this.
5. >Fire the Greedy electric companies and supply more of your own electricity!<
7. NO, you won’t be doing that either. Rather, you’ll be giving the greedy, self-deluding scam peddler lots of money as well as your greedy electric company.
9. >Reduce your carbon footprint and help the environment!<
10. Get a bicycle, it will actually work.

In case you are wondering how I can be so absolutely certain that this device doesn’t do what it claims to--and I’m certain it doesn’t--it requires invoking the thermodynamics.

Perpetual motion machines (and all ‘free energy’ devices are perpetual motion machines) violate either the first law of thermodynamics (conservation of energy) or the second law of thermodynamics (conservation of work).

The first law states that in a closed system you cannot create new energy. This device, the Johnson motor, appears to violate the first law. The claim is that you can generate work without having to input energy. The argument is essentially this: you give an initial impetus to the device and then, once it is going, it will continue to generate more energy than is needed to keep it going.

The second law states that in a closed system, whenever work is done *some* energy is loss to friction etc. In other words, you cannot have an engine that is *so* efficient that 100% of the energy input into the system is used.

The argument against all forms of free energy is this:

1) You cannot get free energy. In other words, you cannot get *more* energy out of a system than you put into it (1st law)
2) In any system where work is done (e.g. a change of states happens because of energy put into the system) some will be loss because of inefficiencies.
3) Therefore, you cannot make a machine that makes enough energy that it can either keep itself going without an external input or get out more energy than you put in.

All ‘free energy’ advertisements are scams don’t fall for ‘em!