How Did They Get This To Work?: Quoted below from sciencing .com

Surely it should be looked at again using ALL relevant new technology. Also: Who were the people? Did they have all the new facts to hand? How long ago? I have visions here of a driver still using a lever to advance and retard the distributor on his car engine in those days. Things have moved on since then.

Trying to Build a Perpetual Magnetic Generator

“When permanent magnets are used in a generator, you just have to turn the generator shaft to produce electricity. After these generators were first developed, people thought they could get the generator to power a motor that would then turn the generator. They thought if the motor and generator were matched exactly, they could build a magnetic power source that would run forever as a perpetual motion machine. Unfortunately, it didn’t work. Although such generators and motors are very efficient, they still have electric losses in the resistance of the wires, and there is friction in the shaft bearings. Even when the people doing the experiments got the generator-motor unit to run for a while, eventually it would stop because of the losses and the friction.”