Let's All Prepare For Energy Independence With The Perpetual Energy Wasting Machine

In light of the US presidential debate season (which we’ve been diligently following with the assistance of
Sosolimited’s ReConstitution), we’ve been inundated with talk of energy, how we’re using it, where it’s going to come from, where it’s going, and how much of it will we need to operate the flying cars we will soon be driving (piloting?). We understand the critical nature of this issue and what it means for our children, grandchildren, and cyborg great-grandchildren. And from what it sounds like, if we’re going to be using brand new sources of energy, we better finish up the old energy we’ve got first. The way we figure it, the world’s energy infrastructure is basically a giant iPhone, and if we learned anything from the self-important manchild we recently consulted with at the Apple store, you gotta drain the thing before you recharge it or else you will be cursed with shitty battery life. And we don’t want the world suddenly running out of a charge right when our cyborg great-grandchildren are about to make some coltan-infused Pillsbury Toaster Strudels.

Thankfully, thinkers like Niklas Roy, whose “useless things” we’ve told you about before, are way ahead of us. Roy has designed an incredibly efficient method of wasting energy which is currently installed at WRO Art Center in Wroclaw, Poland. While at this very moment, a since forgotten stream of tasteless jokes targeting the Polish and their poorly thought out inventions is re-emerging in your mind (racist!), Poland is in fact far ahead of the curve in this respect.

As you can see in the GIF above, Roy’s Perpetual Energy Wasting Machine uses a system of mechanical ropes and pulleys to connect the elevator between the first and second floors of the building. When the door opens on the first floor, it triggers an action pushing the call button on the second floor. Once the elevator responds to that and its doors open on the second floor, the call button on the first floor is pushed. So if you’re one of those folks who’s too lazy to take one flight of stairs (come on!), Perpetual Energy Wasting Machine should successfully make getting up there a royal pain in the ass. And that’s not the end of this energy efficiency prank…

The component above is a calculator that fastidiously tallies up exactly how much energy is being expended in kilojoules. It then prints the results of this tally and deposits them directly into a trash can below the mechanism, because no one actually has the time to go through all that data, and it would be inefficient practice to store so much physical paper.

The early sketch below details the basic concept behind the Perpetual Energy Wasting Machine. Even though you’ve already gotten a good idea of how this all works from the video, GIF, and all the text I’ve written above re-explaining them (which was a pretty wasteful use of my energy), go ahead and read through the sketch, y’know, in the spirit of wasting energy. You’ll like to know that the final project is a bit different than how it appears in this sketch, so you’re wasting just a tiny bit of extra brain space by learning about it.

@ImYourKid