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The Energy Machine of Joseph Newman : An Invention Whose Time Has Come
Book by Newman, Joseph Westley
Hardcover
First published January 1, 1984
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September 12, 2020
I give this work a mixed review and a detailed explanation that is necessarily autobiographical as well, as I knew the author as a child. I knew "Joe" as a boy, age 8-10. My mother seriously dated his younger brother prior to and after my father's suicide New Years Day 1978. She had met the man while on vacation in Daytona Florida with a friend, after her divorce from my father. Subsequently, we moved to Mobile Alabama to live with him. My first meeting with Joe Newman was while visiting my then de facto stepdad's and Joe's mother Marguerite Davis (remarried) as she often babysat my now deceased sister (R.I.P.) and I and was quite fond of us both, taking us in as her own grandchildren and greatly enriching our lives thereby. Marguerite deserves her own book truly, as she was a genuine local legend and quite a character. An avid huntress and marksman, always with a well stocked pantry and freezer and a great "down home" cook as well who made the best gumbo I have ever tasted - she had a writeup in the Mobile Register circa 1980 (I forget the date or even exact year now) titled "Mother of The Wind: A Modern Day Annie Oakley" or something very similar which was a 3 or 4 page affair, a full length feature article as I recall. Unfortunately I no longer possess a copy. On with the details of meeting Joe - my first encounter with Joe was very brief. He was with his then wife Ellen, who is notably omitted from any biographical accounts, other inconsistencies noted here as well... There is more to that, for later. So, my first meeting with Joseph Newman occurred on a Spring day 1979, a bit off and on drizzly as I recall. We had been planting in the field next to Marguerite's and Charlie Davis' country home in Theodore Alabama, a small town near Mobile. I recall working with cured cow dung with my hands and well avoiding the giant fire ant mound nearby, uncovering tunnels thereof and being stung to a degree that touched upon my dirty boyish curiosity of such messy and fleshly matters.. Actually, I was disobeying orders at that point and intentionally doing this. Marguerite had a side profession of manufacture of canine heart worm medicine for hunting hounds. Her lab, "At Last Laboratories" was a basic shed with metal drums and chemicals. I recall the intense sulfur smell in that space.. Sulfur was a main ingredient in the medicine. I also recall her drawing on siphons via mouth and spitting out any medicine that accidentally came through.. She was quite the tomboy even in her 70s (hahaha). I mention the dog medicine as it was also very effective in treating bug bites. So, I got a nice sulfur - swamp gas smelling medicinal perfuming after the fire ant bites, making it all, all the more piquant and sensational. But I am skipping way ahead here, that was later that evening. When I met Joe and his wife Ellen, joe had come to Marguerite's home to show her his new windshield rain deflecting device he had recently patented. I was a bit amazed as this device was merely a narrow band of some sort of plastic that could be manoeuvred at differing angles to provide shielding from rain, and adjusted according to speed, etc. I also recall being struck with how pretty his wife was. Then after a brief talk with Marguerite, they were off. I did not encounter Joe again until late that Summer. That is when he and I really interacted. Having an unusually high verbal intelligence at that age, I was able to draw him into interacting with me as an equal, and he as my mentor. He never "talked down" to me, even once and was very exceptional in this regard. The rapport was genuine as well. I recall the walk into the wooded trails on Marguerite's 11 acre property that also bordered a 400 acre pine forest at that time. There was a pond with fish on the property and such was our destination, to sit upon the small dock, fish and converse. At the mouth of the trail was a canine's grave for Joe's favorite boyhood dog, a German Shepherd named Sport. Upon said grave were young trees and some plants, species now unrecalled, planted there on a obvious mini-clearing of the otherwise fairly dense but certainly human planted vegetation in the natural landscape, an intermixture, before it was purely self-seeded forest and such. Joe and I paused at the dog's grave as he, Joe entered into a state that I could describe to this day as "inward looking" and projecting such outwardly or nearly so, at the same time. In this state he began to tell me of the radiant and sometimes tangible life forces emanating from plants and other living things. Whether it was "suggestion" or something else, he showed me how to feel the emanation of this force from the leaves of plants in the woods. Joe was also a mystic who relied on deep meditation and spontaneous intuition as part of his process of discovery and invention. He related as much to me and even purported a method of achieving this. Well, real phenomenon or not, I felt the energy as he described it and noted his method of seeking "revelation" as well, which was basically to concentrate on something, some problem intensely and then let it "sink in", permeate the intention until it becomes natural and even unconscious. Joe was indeed something of a mystic, in this sense at least. Then he claimed the "Eureka!" moments would arise in time, in a sort of sigilization of definite intention and subsequent manifestation of sensible, workable answers. This he said was "how" he arrived at certain key insights which he then tested by direct experimentation. Due to this very untamed wellspring of natural genius, and the fact Joe was a lifelong autodidact that kept up his independent explorations throughout his early education and until the end of his days, sometimes his terminologies and explications of his rather rough theoretical system sounded a bit "off" and out of synch with standard usages of the very same terms, when applied to the descriptions of his work, as contrasted with the scientific literature of the time. Even as a young boy I picked up on this flaw in his delivery as I was a voracious reader of popular scientific journals and books, a Carl Sagan fanatic, etc. and I sensed "gaps" and illogic in his explanations of certain matters that he could not answer to my satisfaction even though I KNEW his machine was a real overunity device and that his basic concepts were sound. How in the Hell I could be so aware of such nuances at that age I cannot begin to explain, as I mostly intuited all of this from materials I had read, but that is another matter...
as time passed we became family, with the occasional dinner, I recall an amazing meal of venison one evening, a standout, and long walks on his beautiful property just outside of Lucedale Mississippi, the spring-fed streams with fish swimming underfoot, deep enough to submerge in, narrow enough for a young boy to step over, and crystal clear to the bottom... & I can almost recall the freshness of the air..
It was on such a walk that he gave me visions of a "Biocentric" and Eco-technic future, of mag-lev trains in the cities and a renewed replanted countryside. These dovetailed in perfect synchrony and sympathy with my futuristic imagination and a bit of what I had read and seen, including comic books, television and films of course as these might have touched on such themes. In short, he fired my young imagination to a fever pitch of visionary futurism. Such promethean visions simmered for years under the psychic debris of the Cold War thermonuclear threat, my forced attendance in a strict fundamentalist "Christian" private school and a generally tormented childhood. As for Joe, his work consumed most of his time. His wife Ellen conceived and bore him a son, whom he named "Gyrimus" (sp.?), named after the gyroscopic effect described in his Theory.
The Tonight Show, with Johnny Carson -
Having not seen Joe for some time I recall getting a Christmas card from he and Ellen in 1980, I think, though this time is a bit vague for me, a miserable time wracked with agonizing headaches that lasted for days, visual tremors, nauseating sensations of night vertigo and shrinking to nothing, shattering like glass, on and on, and worse.. Religious nightmares, and daydreams of Hell.. I do recall the announcement my mother made of Joe's appearance on The Tonight Show and watching it on television, but not the date. Low resolution clips of this appearance are discoverable upon searching online.
Joe apparently went insane not too long after. He abandoned his wife and son, and no mention of them is to be found in any accounts extant. Other follies ensued, and many were outside my knowledge until I randomly stumbled upon a magazine article about him as a teen, in a 24 hour convenience store in a bad 'hood in Evansville Indiana while out messing around one night in late 1986 or maybe 1987, again, I am a bit jumbled on chronological matters here. Whatever the year, it was a late Summer night. There I stood, under the fluorescent lighting in the Fried Chicken joint / gas station, quite stoned on cannabis and looking through the magazine rack semi-scornfully when my eyes alighted on an issue of "SHRED" magazine. I thought it looked pretentious and trashy in one impression and it had my attention as novelty at least. I had to doublecheck to be sure, yes indeed, it had Joseph Newman and his Energy Machine listed on the magazine cover 'multi-headline whatever' layout. I picked it up to read it almost expecting it to dissolve as a dream in my hands, it seemed so weirdly out of place. Of course I had to obtain it. The girl cashier I had gotten stoned with let me steal it actually. I no longer have this item, having lost a major personal library to a basement flood some time ago. So it goes..
To the point and the summation of this rambling "review" -
I would attest, from personal observation, to say nothing of the sworn statements of respected scientists and engineers who were Joseph Newman's peers, that his engineering was genuine innovation and the machines could do what he claimed. His writing and theoretical descriptions may seem lacking to many academic scientists, but the engineering was sound. He was suppressed and likely targeted with 'god knows what' etc. I do know for a fact that his life and the lives of his wife and son were threatened. Subsequently, he dropped most familial contacts as well. These horrible turns of event and the criminal conspiracy against Joe's life work were certainly influential in his subsequent erratic behavior and compensatory grandiose claims. He was financially driven into the ground as well, ruined and lost everything, a thankless sacrifice for his genuine work to elevate all mankind with better and greater sources of utile power. With this final criticism in mind, I recommend this book to one and all.
as time passed we became family, with the occasional dinner, I recall an amazing meal of venison one evening, a standout, and long walks on his beautiful property just outside of Lucedale Mississippi, the spring-fed streams with fish swimming underfoot, deep enough to submerge in, narrow enough for a young boy to step over, and crystal clear to the bottom... & I can almost recall the freshness of the air..
It was on such a walk that he gave me visions of a "Biocentric" and Eco-technic future, of mag-lev trains in the cities and a renewed replanted countryside. These dovetailed in perfect synchrony and sympathy with my futuristic imagination and a bit of what I had read and seen, including comic books, television and films of course as these might have touched on such themes. In short, he fired my young imagination to a fever pitch of visionary futurism. Such promethean visions simmered for years under the psychic debris of the Cold War thermonuclear threat, my forced attendance in a strict fundamentalist "Christian" private school and a generally tormented childhood. As for Joe, his work consumed most of his time. His wife Ellen conceived and bore him a son, whom he named "Gyrimus" (sp.?), named after the gyroscopic effect described in his Theory.
The Tonight Show, with Johnny Carson -
Having not seen Joe for some time I recall getting a Christmas card from he and Ellen in 1980, I think, though this time is a bit vague for me, a miserable time wracked with agonizing headaches that lasted for days, visual tremors, nauseating sensations of night vertigo and shrinking to nothing, shattering like glass, on and on, and worse.. Religious nightmares, and daydreams of Hell.. I do recall the announcement my mother made of Joe's appearance on The Tonight Show and watching it on television, but not the date. Low resolution clips of this appearance are discoverable upon searching online.
Joe apparently went insane not too long after. He abandoned his wife and son, and no mention of them is to be found in any accounts extant. Other follies ensued, and many were outside my knowledge until I randomly stumbled upon a magazine article about him as a teen, in a 24 hour convenience store in a bad 'hood in Evansville Indiana while out messing around one night in late 1986 or maybe 1987, again, I am a bit jumbled on chronological matters here. Whatever the year, it was a late Summer night. There I stood, under the fluorescent lighting in the Fried Chicken joint / gas station, quite stoned on cannabis and looking through the magazine rack semi-scornfully when my eyes alighted on an issue of "SHRED" magazine. I thought it looked pretentious and trashy in one impression and it had my attention as novelty at least. I had to doublecheck to be sure, yes indeed, it had Joseph Newman and his Energy Machine listed on the magazine cover 'multi-headline whatever' layout. I picked it up to read it almost expecting it to dissolve as a dream in my hands, it seemed so weirdly out of place. Of course I had to obtain it. The girl cashier I had gotten stoned with let me steal it actually. I no longer have this item, having lost a major personal library to a basement flood some time ago. So it goes..
To the point and the summation of this rambling "review" -
I would attest, from personal observation, to say nothing of the sworn statements of respected scientists and engineers who were Joseph Newman's peers, that his engineering was genuine innovation and the machines could do what he claimed. His writing and theoretical descriptions may seem lacking to many academic scientists, but the engineering was sound. He was suppressed and likely targeted with 'god knows what' etc. I do know for a fact that his life and the lives of his wife and son were threatened. Subsequently, he dropped most familial contacts as well. These horrible turns of event and the criminal conspiracy against Joe's life work were certainly influential in his subsequent erratic behavior and compensatory grandiose claims. He was financially driven into the ground as well, ruined and lost everything, a thankless sacrifice for his genuine work to elevate all mankind with better and greater sources of utile power. With this final criticism in mind, I recommend this book to one and all.
June 17, 2012
Very interesting concepts. The only drawback is that the book reads like the author speaks. Joseph Newman has become a very bitter man over the years of fighting New Energy suppression. I can't say that I blame him, His struggle would likely have the same effect on anyone of us. In any case it is a good read.
June 25, 2020
uhhh. So does it work, or not? I just watched the Doc film and it's sort of confusing.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews