He Spins His Wheel in Longtime Chase of an Elusive Dream

It looks like a Ferris wheel without seats.

It’s Charlie Spurlock’s “perpetual motion wheel,” a towering landmark in this small San Joaquin Valley farm center.

Spurlock, 75, has worked on and off for 37 years in his spare time trying to get the wheel to spin without stopping.

“It’s all a matter of getting it perfectly counterbalanced. I think I’ve been close, but close doesn’t count,” sighed Spurlock as he turned the wheel.

The retired home builder and lumberyard owner hasn’t given up, but he doesn’t spend much time with his dream now. He has been in poor health.

“Oh, I get out here and tinker with it now and then. Spin it. Check the weights. I still think somebody will come up with a perpetual motion device. I would like to be that person,” he insisted.

He’s convinced it will happen “because it says so in the Bible. Ezekiel in his prophesies said there would appear a perpetual motion wheel on Earth.” Although many would dispute Spurlock’s interpretation of Ezekiel 1:15-23, he has no doubts.

Wife Bewildered

His wife of 51 years, Doris, 71, just shakes her head in bewilderment. “He has spent at least $20,000 on it. In the beginning, two men helped him with it. He has tried all kinds of different ideas, trying to get it to work.

“He will never take it down. He will never sell this piece of property the wheel stands on.”

“If I ever get this to work,” Spurlock allowed, “people from all over the world will come to Planada to see it. Man, I could put motion in cars and everything else with no noise, with nothing to drive it.”

He said he kept on all these years “because I have faith. I’ve been laughed at but many great inventors were laughed at before they succeeded. I may be a fool, but fools can do wonders.”

“I have grown up watching Charlie work on that wheel,” said Lois Halstead, clerk in the Planada Post Office. “I was 4 years old when he first started. He is persistent.”

Jack Richards, 77, a retired garage owner who sits in his living room and looks out at Charlie Spurlock’s wheel, said half the people in town have always thought it would work and half thought it wouldn’t.

“Charlie’s a smart guy, a good engineer. He has a lot of confidence,” said Richards. “He poured a lot of time and money into the wheel. I have always had a hunch that maybe he was onto something, that maybe someday it would spin and just keep spinning on its own.”