The map
What powered the world before, what runs it now, and what people are still chasing, with the companies, labs and inventors behind each. Every source carries an honest read of the evidence. Some of the inventors here also appear on Disappeared, and the frontier claims connect to experiments you can run yourself.
Bigger dots have more people listed. Tap a source to jump to it.
What powered the world before, and the claims of its era.
Early twentieth century claims of devices that drew power from the surroundings, with nothing visible feeding them.
A Gilded Age machine said to run on vibrations of the ether, which drew investors for decades.
An engine that ignites fuel by compressing air, efficient enough to run on many fuels.
Drilled petroleum replaced whale oil for light, then fuelled the century of the engine.
Direct current against alternating current in the 1880s and 1890s. AC won, and still runs the grid.
Burning fuel to boil water and drive pistons powered the Industrial Revolution, and steam turbines still make most thermal electricity.
What runs the grid and the road today.
Photovoltaic panels turn sunlight straight into electricity; the fastest-growing source of new power.
Turbines on land and offshore, now a major share of power in several countries.
Falling water through turbines; the largest renewable source for most of the last century.
Splitting heavy atoms for heat. Large plants run today; smaller modular reactors are being built.
Heat from inside the earth. New drilling methods aim to make it work almost anywhere.
Not a source, but what lets sun and wind run at night: grid batteries and long-duration storage.
A carrier, not a source: splitting water takes more energy than burning the hydrogen gives back.
Physics in progress, bold claims, and garage builds.
Joining light atoms, the sun's own process. Ignition has been reached in a lab; a power plant has not.
Low-energy nuclear reactions: claims of nuclear heat at room temperature since 1989. Still not reliably reproduced, still funded at the margins.
A claimed lower energy state of hydrogen. Mainstream physicists reject the underlying theory.
Collecting sunlight in orbit, where it never sets, and beaming the power down.
Sending electricity without wires. Works at short range today; Tesla dreamed of the whole planet.
Tuned coils and resonant circuits, the thread through much of the free-energy patent record. Our own experiments test the claims.
No one listed yet.
The vacuum is never quite empty, and the Casimir effect is real. Drawing useful net power from it has never been shown.
The densest energy store physics allows, but making it costs vastly more energy than it returns.
Motors said to run forever on permanent magnets. More energy out than in would break conservation of energy, and no claim has survived independent testing. People keep building them, which is why our experiments measure rather than argue.
Cars said to run on water alone. Splitting water takes at least as much energy as the hydrogen returns.
People building and filming energy devices today, on YouTube, TikTok and forums. Added as we find them, each with a link to their own work. Listing someone here records what they show, not that it works.
No one listed yet.
Links last checked 24 October 2026.