Inventor Hopes to Generate More Power to the People

--Inventor Joe Newman, charging that the federal government has denied him a patent on a machine that will change the world, demonstrated his contraption to the press. While light bulbs studding the machine flashed, Newman said his invention, when patented and perfected, will produce electricity so cheaply that it will eliminate home utility bills. Newman insisted that even the 9,000-pound prototype on display at the Capital Centre in Landover, Md., produces 25 times more energy than it uses. Current physics teaching holds that is impossible. "Put this machine in your home and you'll never have to pay utility bills again," Newman told skeptics at a news conference. "Put one in your car and you'll never have to buy any more gasoline." The self-educated Newman, 48, was flanked by a half-dozen experts who stated that his machine does what he says it does, among them Roger Hastings, a physicist with Sperry Univac. "This is not a perpetual motion machine and Joe has never said it was," said Hastings, who agreed that with "intensive development" Newman's machine could "run a home or a car."