John Bedini was an audio engineer and inventor who approached electricity the way a studio engineer approaches sound: transients, timing, and ringing matter as much as steady state levels. According to Bedini, the “so-called vacuum” was alive with energy, and the trick to capturing it lay in the precise timing of zero-point field (Source Field) disruption.
One of his most famous demonstrations used a large rotating wheel carrying permanent magnets around its rim. As each magnet swept past a stationary coil, the circuit switched the coil on only for a narrow interval—long enough to “grab” the rotor and then release it. When the current through an inductor is interrupted, the magnetic field collapses rapidly and produces a sharp, high voltage flyback transient (the classic inductive “kick”). Bedini understood this collapse spike as a brief pressure wave in the electrical medium, a momentary imbalance that could be redirected into storage. In his preferred wiring, the drive battery powers the pulsing coil while a separate charge path routes the collapse spikes—often through diode gating—into a second battery or capacitor bank, so the wheel continues turning as the secondary store accumulates charge.
In his early write-up (signed and dated April 9, 1984), he emphasizes that the “ringing” characteristics of the pulse matter: the battery and electrolyte behave like a system that can be driven into oscillation by a sharp impulse. He illustrates this as ions being pushed into an unusual motion, with the warning that the magnitude and duration of the spike are not negotiable—too much voltage or the wrong pulse timing can destroy the battery (including violent failure), while the wrong pulse width produces no meaningful charge recovery.
Bedini’s “vacuum energy” claims remain controversial, but his inventions inspired other daring engineers and visionaries to look beyond protocol for a solution to the free energy problem. He highlighted how gating, collapse transients, and timing windows are critical in determining whether energy is captured by the battery or redistributed to the environment. Before his unexpected death in 2016, he had worked to educate the public about his methods and encouraged engineers to adopt the understanding that “energy is free, the cost is in programming the timed collapses.” Much of his work is still available for free to the public on the internet.
When I first started looking into free energy, I was extremely discouraged. Google said it was impossible. MIT’s approach in an online opencourseware class was to find ways to use less power. Then I stumbled across Bedini’s energy from the vacuum series. I highly recommend that anyone who is new to the subject start here:
https://youtu.be/VHKP9xV-2QY?si=ixZMdzLR5KLspw0T&t=570
He also published a book with Tom Bearden, which is available free to the public here:
https://archive.org/details/free-energy-generation-tom-bearden-john-bedini
More information about John Bedini:
https://johnbedini.net