The Bedini SSG Energizer: Patents, Replications and the Inventor's Disclaimer

The Bedini SSG ("Simplified School Girl") energizer is a monopole mechanical oscillator built around a rotor carrying magnets of a single polarity, a stator wound with power, trigger and recovery coils, and a switching element that fires the coils as the rotor passes. The device is presented as a battery charger that recovers energy from the collapsing magnetic field of its own coils and returns it to a battery. The name is said to derive from a nine-year-old girl who built one of Bedini's motors and won a science award, which is why the design is described as "simplified" and "school girl" in the source literature.

The material gathered here is a mixture of patent abstracts, third-party replication write-ups, and a direct statement attributed to the inventor. The most consequential item is not a performance claim but a disclaimer: John C. Bedini is quoted as saying that his systems do not capture back EMF at all, and that the patent language describing back-EMF capture was chosen only because it was the sole claim the Patent Office would accept. That statement sits in direct tension with the patents reproduced alongside it, and it is the central interpretive problem of the dossier.

The patent record

Three US patents form the documentary core.

US6392370 — Device and Method of a Back EMF Permanent Electromagnetic Motor Generator. The abstract describes a rotor whose magnets all share the same polarity, a timing wheel positioned next to a magnetic Hall-effect pickup switch, and a stator made of two bars joined by a permanent magnet, with magnetized pole pieces at one end of each bar. Input and output coils are formed by wrapping each bar with a conductor such as copper wire. Energy from the output coils is routed to a recovery rectifier or diode. The rotor magnets and the timing wheel share a shaft, and the rotor magnets face the magnetized pole pieces of the two bars. The patent states that the device operates through a process it calls "regauging": the flux fields produced by the coils collapse because the magnetic field in the pole pieces reverses, which the patent says permits capture of "available back EMF energy." The captured energy may be used to re-energize the battery, sent elsewhere as work, or dissipated into the system. A figure accompanying the abstract shows the rotor, timing wheel and stator arrangement.

US6545444 — Device and Method for Utilizing a Monopole Motor to Create Back-EMF to Charge Batteries. Here the rotor again carries magnets of one polarity, brought into momentary apposition with a magnetized pole piece of the same polarity on the stator. The stator coil has three windings: a power winding, a trigger winding and a recovery winding. Back EMF is rectified through a high-voltage bridge, transferred to a high-voltage capacitor, and stored in a recovery battery. The stored charge is then discharged across the recovery battery through a contact rotor switch. The accompanying figure is described as a perspective side view of a monopole back-EMF motor with a single stator and a single rotor.

US6677730 — Device and Method for Pulse Charging a Battery. This is a two-phase solid-state charger rather than a motor. It can accept input from AC, a battery, a DC generator, a DC-to-DC inverter, solar cells or another compatible source. Phase I is the charge phase and Phase II the discharge phase; a dual timing switch controls two independent channels dividing the phases, governed by a logic chip or pulse-width modulator. A potential builds in a capacitor bank, the bank is then disconnected from the input source, and the charge is pulsed into the battery at high voltage. The patent states that the momentary disconnection allows a "free-floating potential charge" in the capacitor. After discharging into the battery, the capacitor reconnects to the source, completing the cycle.

These three documents describe claimed mechanisms and claimed circuits. They are evidence that the designs were filed and granted, not evidence that the devices deliver more energy than they consume.

The inventor's own account

The dossier reproduces a statement attributed to Bedini in a forum exchange. In it he rejects the framing his own patents use. He states plainly that these systems do not capture back EMF and that back EMF is not capturable, defining the term in its conventional electrical sense: the counter-voltage generated by a motor as it speeds up, which opposes the applied current and reduces current draw in a traction motor. He says his systems do not use that process.

What he says they do instead is tap what he calls radiant energy, a term he attributes to Tesla. In his description, the systems produce a series of high-voltage spikes with no associated current, and voltage without current is the nature of radiant energy. He calls this "reactive power" because it does not represent voltage and current simultaneously in a way that could be measured as watts. He states that this reactive power will charge batteries and light bulbs but does not meter as real power, and he explicitly denies that any free electricity is produced in these systems or in any other system he knows of. He also states that he gave permission for a public replication project of the "School Girl Motor" and complains that people asking for full disclosure had declined the first step he offered.

This is a striking position: the inventor disclaims the very mechanism named in his patent titles, while still asserting that the devices do something useful that ordinary metering does not capture. The disclaimer removes the over-unity reading from his own stated framework, but it replaces it with a claim about a form of energy that is, by his own description, not measurable as power.

Replication reports and third-party studies

The dossier collects several replication and study items, none of which independently establishes a coefficient of performance greater than one.

A forum poster identified as John34 reports that "useless" batteries were charging faster than the source battery was discharging, and that the batteries would not previously accept a charge to that level. The same report notes that no load test had been performed because the batteries were still charging, and that the effect appeared to increase after a four-magnet rotor was replaced. This is a self-reported observation without a completed measurement.

A student final-year project by Gay, Zheng Jie sets out to study the working principle of the SSG and to test the COP>1 claim attributed to Bedini. The abstract frames the goal as receiving free energy by creating COP>1 during charging and discharging, and notes that the process is also said to produce rotating mechanical power from the rotor. The project is framed as a test of the claim, not a confirmation of it.

An IEEE paper by Shahrel Fakhrurrazey and co-authors compares two variants of the Bedini SSG — the original monopole mechanical oscillator energizer and a four-pole neodymium magnet version — and describes the device as a self-battery charger based on what the paper calls zero-point technology. The paper's stated purpose is a performance comparison of the two builds, including battery coefficient of performance.

Two further replication items are listed: an Instructables build titled "Bedini Monopole Mechanical Oscillator" by petercd, and a YouTube video by electronicsNmore presenting a Bedini SSG battery charger and desulfator. The video's own description states that the circuit uses a 12 V battery to charge other 12 V batteries to a higher voltage, that according to Bedini more comes out than goes in, and that the presenter has not proven that claim. The video attributes the high charging voltage to back EMF from the coil — the framing Bedini himself rejects.

A document titled "Experiments with a Kromrey & a Brandt-Tesla Converter Built by John Bedini with Comments by Tom Bearden" is also referenced, placing the SSG work in a wider context of Bedini's converter experiments with commentary by Tom Bearden.

What the evidence supports and what it does not

The patent abstracts are documentary and can be read as statements of what was claimed and granted. They describe circuits and mechanisms, not measured outputs. The replication accounts are anecdotal, self-reported, and in at least one case explicitly unverified by the person reporting it. The student project and the IEEE paper are framed as investigations of the claim rather than demonstrations of it. Nothing in the dossier provides an independent measurement establishing that the device charges batteries faster than the source battery discharges, and the source contains no calorimetric or metered energy balance.

The most important unresolved question is whether any independent measurement of COP>1 exists outside the self-reported accounts. The dossier does not supply one. A second unresolved question is terminological: "back EMF" appears in two incompatible senses — the patent's capture mechanism and Bedini's conventional definition of a counter-voltage that reduces current draw. Because the inventor rejects the patent's own framing, the patent titles cannot be read as a description of what he says the device does.

Related material

The SSG sits alongside other back-EMF and permanent-magnet arguments in this collection, including the Aspden material on power from magnetism and over-unity claims, and the broader free-energy replication literature around Moray and Hendershot. The recurring pattern across these dossiers is a patent or press record asserting a mechanism, followed by replication reports that are self-reported and unverified, and in this case an inventor who distances himself from the mechanism his patents name.