Inventor Hopes to Generate More Power to the People

--Inventor Joe Newman, charging that the federal government has denied him a patent on a machine that will change the world, demonstrated his contraption to the press. While light bulbs studding the machine flashed, Newman said his invention, when patented and perfected, will produce electricity so cheaply that it will eliminate home utility bills. Newman insisted that even the 9,000-pound prototype on display at the Capital Centre in Landover, Md., produces 25 times more energy than it uses. Current physics teaching holds that is impossible. “Put this machine in your home and you’ll never have to pay utility bills again,” Newman told skeptics at a news conference. “Put one in your car and you’ll never have to buy any more gasoline.” The self-educated Newman, 48, was flanked by a half-dozen experts who stated that his machine does what he says it does, among them Roger Hastings, a physicist with Sperry Univac. “This is not a perpetual motion machine and Joe has never said it was,” said Hastings, who agreed that with “intensive development” Newman’s machine could “run a home or a car.”

--”Your majesty, I’m glad to see you, ma’am,” drawled Alabama Gov. George C. Wallace as Queen Mamohato of Lesotho visited him in Montgomery and was made an honorary Alabama citizen. Wallace, who once stood in a University of Alabama doorway to stop the first blacks from entering the school, received in turn a formal invitation to visit Lesotho, a predominantly black nation surrounded by South Africa. “You will be welcome anytime,” said the queen, who reigns with her husband, King Moshoeshoe II, in a ceremonial role over a country of 1.3 million.

--New York Mayor Edward I. Koch was on his way to the office in his car when he observed a man with a tool bag and a wire working on a parking meter. “I said to my aide, ‘Is he working for us or himself?’ ” Koch told reporters. He sent the aide to get a nearby policeman, who arrested Vincent Ferrer, 41. Koch told the arresting officer he would be happy to testify in court. When the mayor learned that Ferrer was a vagrant who lived in a city-run men’s shelter, he exclaimed: “The ingrate!”