Here:

http://www.thestar.com/News/article/233540

Has a nice brief history of the pursuit of the perpetual motion machine,
which goes WAY back.

To quote:

Shortly after it started, a note was posted on the company's website, advising that it was "experiencing some technical difficulties with the demo unit in London." Steorn chalked it up to "the intense heat from the camera lighting."

On Friday morning, Steorn CEO Sean McCarthy posted another note saying they had made the "unfortunate decision" to defer the demonstration for an unspecified period of time, adding they would explain what had happened later.

According to Brian Baigrie, who teaches the history and philosophy of science at the University of Toronto, perpetual motion is an idea that gives some groups a way of defining themselves against accepted norms – much, he points out, like arguments for intelligent design.

"The interest in rational design as an account of the creation of species wasn't that high prior to Darwin, although most individuals (before then) would have described themselves as theists," he says, adding that perpetual motion saw a parallel rise in popularity after the laws of thermodynamics were established in the 1860s.

"The scientific community really celebrated the rise of the science of thermodynamics as a great achievement, and this in itself has been an incentive to eccentrics and inventors to find a way to violate it."