Fluids Motor of Tromelin

So a couple days ago, I was watching a video from the Youtube channel The Action Lab about Telekinesis, and I immediately remembered something similar to his apparatus -if not equivalant- in this part of a 1987 french science communication magazine called "Science & Vie" that I had sitting around -for almost a year now after I bought it from a flea market- where it talks about "moteur à fluide" or fluid motor in english and how this fluid is thought to be spiritual in nature and stuff like that..

The magazine had pretty much the same conclusions The Action Lab had, and here are some bullet points -mainly translations- of what was spoken about in that magazine (put in mind I don't understand some of it, and I also didn't mention some points because I wasn't able to find them anywhere in the internet):

·     The phenomenon might be caused by the hand palm electric field (which exists and is measurable), but testing that with static electricity from a plastic ruler rubbed on wool showed that the cylinder rotates half-way and stops because the field isn’t alternative. Meaning that the first hypothesis is ruled out!

·     The phenomenon is mainly caused by the flow of the exhaled air. And if you blow on it very hard it will not actually move.

·     Air fraction is bigger than pivot fraction.

·     Flow of viscous fluids.

·     The presence of the hand tightens the passage of the continuity equation.

·     Bernoulli’s Theorem (Bernoulli's principle).

·     Acceleration of a gas vein in a tube whose diameter progressively narrows in a funnel aka Venturi phenomenon (Venturi effect).

·     Getting far from that apparatus and turning your face 90° from it will still cause rotation, but a smaller one, in this case the effect is caused by the laws of thermodynamics where the air gets hot when in contact with the hand palm, meaning the air inflates and became slight and goes up vertically before it gets flattened horizontally by the thumb and causes the cylinder’s rotation.

·     Cavendish balance torsion (aka The Cavendish experiment or The Cavendish gravity experiment).

Then after looking up this cylinder on the internet, I've found that it's called Tromelin Fluid Motor and that it's probably made by a french guy in the 18^th or 19^th century (see here and here and optionally see here). In fact, looking at the first link in this paragraph it can be noticed that some of the other iterations apparatus looks like the famous -or infamous- Psi wheel, which means that it debunks the claim on the Psi Wheel Wikipedia page that says that the Psi Wheel's first appearance was in the 1968 sci-fi thriller The Power. In fact, I've found that from the 18^th century to the beginning of the 20^th century, there were a lot of apparatuses like Tromelin’s one such as that of Doctor Baraduc to quantify "Vital Energy" or the Sthenometer, etc, .... But apparently Fluid Motor of Tromelin is more known since its parts aren't complicated, nor metallic or magnetized -to suspect them as scams- like most apparutuses from that era.

 

I also found that a guy in a video making the Tromelin cylinder in a simpler form than in the magazine, with the measures to replicate it his website .

PERSONAL THOUGHTS:

·        First of all, even if The Action Lab and the French magazine says that blowing hard on the apparatus doesn’t rotate it, but testing a small Fluid Motor of Tromelin showed that it may slightly rotate faster if the blowing is done gradually, from a distance, and in a tangent, but in general I think their point is still valid.

·        From watching The Action Lab and reading afterward the article in the retro French magazine, I can say for sure that air causes 90-95% of this phenomenon. In fact as you may notice I didn’t read the article until I watched The Action Lab because I already established in my mind that the cylinder’s rotation in the magazine is caused by small air currents after testing the Psi Wheel back in the 2012-2013 in my high school and couldn’t move it because I closed the windows and minimized my airways flow.

       And to even further prove that blowing is used as a claim of psychic phenomenon (intentionally or not), here is the famous video of The Amazing James Randi allegedly showcasing that Telekinesis claimed by James Hydrick was just him blowing on objects. There is even a version of that at 22:44 in The Mentalist series S1E1.

·        If we know that most of the rotation is caused by airflow, I would wish if a combination of slow motion and Schlieren Imaging -in color of course- can be done by The Action Lab in another video to better understand the phenomenon, I would bet that such video will trend like the the Schlieren imaging videos of SmarterEveryDay and that of Veritasium, a collaboration may also be done (e.g w/ Applied Science or The Thought Emporium ) for such thing like that collaboration SmarterEveryDay  and Veritasium did about the toilet swirl (which I think it's still questionable because they didn't do the experiment more than one time to eliminate luck)

·        And speaking of the Earth’s rotation potentially causing miniscule movement differences in water rotation, the devil is in the details, and my intuition tells me that 5-10% of the Fluids Motor rotation can be caused by other things, for once:

Ø    The french magazine attributed a small portion of the rotation to an effect similar -if not equivalent- to that causing tornados.

Ø    The French magazine also talked about human’s electricity, and even tough they ruled it out as a reason, but I wouldn’t mind seeing someone -like The Action lab who doesn’t shy away from anything interesting even if it’s complicated- doing Kirlian photography to see if it can in the 1^st place detect static electricity, if so then use it to see if it can capture the interaction of the plastic ruler static electricity half-rotating the cylinder, and then see if the hand palm may also have such effect.

      Doing such thing might be tricky since a lot of electric and electromagnetic fields coming from the Kirlian photography device will be present around the Fluid Motor of Tromelin. There would be a merite in trying it on the fake hand too as it has too its own coronal discharges.

Ø    In some of the cases where The Action Lab couldn’t rotate his wheel, there was no shadow like in the cases where he rotated it, so perhaps such asymmetric distribution of photons causes the photons from the unblocked side to move the wheel.

Ø    Perhaps just like with the toilet swirl, Earth’s rotation around itself, it’s rotation around the sun, and the tidal force may all have small contributions on such rotation, the question is if it can be measured or not.

Ø    Or maybe a little bit of diamagnetism is at play too (?) 

·        And Finally, if this post ever reach The Action Lab, I really hope he can one day investigate how the hell did this scientist achieved Telekinetic effect using science! Everyone in the comments and the internet is stunned & puzzled for years now -including myself ofc- on how he did it with that range of atomically different objects.