Secrets of Antigravity Propulsion

1.1 • TRAVELING TO THE STARS

Interstellar space travel has long captivated the imagination and longing of humankind.
Indeed, we have penetrated the cosmos and walked on the moon, while breakthroughs in long-range exploration, such as the Hubble Space Telescope, bring the farthest reaches of space tantalizingly close, rekindling our desire to travel beyond our galaxy.
As of yet, we are bound by the frustrating limits of conventional propulsion technology.
Skeptics remind us that a spacecraft powered by even the most advanced chemical rockets would need to carry so much fuel that travel over interstellar distances would be out of the question.
Alternatively, vehicles equipped with nuclear-powered ion thrusters would have a much greater range.
However, the fuel requirements would be such as to make a journey of even a few light-years quite impractical—basic physics tells us that a rocket-powered spacecraft would need a fuel mass that would far exceed the mass of the vehicle itself.

Is there a way to free ourselves of this fuel problem, using a totally different means of propulsion, one that does not require large quantities of mass to be jettisoned rearward for the craft to move forward?
Imagine a spaceship that could alter the ambient gravitational field, artificially producing a matter-attracting, gravity-potential well that was just beyond the ship’s bow.
The gravity well’s attractive force would tug the ship forward just as if a very massive, planet-sized body had been placed ahead of it.
The ship would begin to “fall” forward and, in doing so, would carry its self-generated gravity well along with it.
The gravity well would continually draw the ship forward, while always staying ahead.
Through such a carrot-and-stick effect, the ship could accelerate to nearly the speed of light, or maybe even beyond, with essentially no expenditure of energy other than that needed to generate the gravity well.

Is such gravity control possible?
Would it be possible to construct a spaceship with small enough propulsion power requirements that interstellar travel could be achieved?
The answer is yes.
For the past several decades, highly classified aerospace programs in the United States and in several other countries have been developing aircraft capable of defying gravity.
One form of this technology can loft a craft on matter-repelling energy beams.
This exotic technology falls under the relatively obscure field of research known as electrogravitics.

The origins of electrogravitics can be traced back to the turn of the twentieth century, to Nikola Tesla’s work with high-voltage shock discharges, and somewhat later to T.
Townsend Brown’s relatively unpublicized discovery that electrostatic and gravitational fields are closely intertwined.
Unfortunately, the electrogravitic effect has for the most part been ignored by mainstream academics, because the phenomenon isn’t anticipated by either classical electrostatics or general relativity, effectively preventing it from being taught in university courses such as physics and electrical engineering.
Rather, to unlock the secrets of electrogravitics, one must delve into popular science articles, patents, and relatively obscure technical reports that once held a classified status.
Perhaps the best place to begin is to review some of Brown’s seminal work.

1.2 • THE BIRTH OF ELECTROGRAVITICS

The American physicist and inventor Thomas Townsend Brown was born in 1905 to a well-to-do Zanesville, Ohio, family.
At an early age, he displayed a keen interest in space travel and dreamed of one day journeying into space himself.
His discovery of the electrogravitic phenomenon occurred during his high school years, when his interest in space travel led him to toying with a Coolidge tube—a high-voltage X-ray-emitting vacuum tube similar to that found in modern dental X-ray machines.
Brown had the insight to mount the tube on a delicate balance to investigate whether it might produce any thrust.
To his surprise, the tube moved every time it was turned on.
Ruling out X-rays as the cause of this mysterious force, he traced the effect to the high voltage he was applying to the tube’s plates.
He concluded that the tube had moved because its gravity field had somehow become affected by the plate’s high-voltage charge.
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Figure 1.1.
Thomas Townsend Brown at fifty-three years of age.
(Photo courtesy of the Townsend Brown Family and Qualight, L.L.C.)

After additional experiments, Brown eventually developed an electric capacitor device that he termed a
gravitator
(or, alternately,
gravitor
).
These units were very heavy.
One version consisted of a wooden box, 2 feet long and 4 inches square, that contained a series of massive, electrically conductive plates made of lead and separated from one another by electrically insulating sheets of glass, which served as the capacitor’s dielectric medium (a
dielectric
is a substance that does not conduct electric current).
Another version used a dielectric molded from a mixture of lead monoxide and beeswax encased in Bakelite.
The diagram in figure 1.2, which is reproduced from Brown’s 1928 patent, shows yet another version made with aluminum plates and paraffin.

When energized with up to 150,000 volts of direct current (DC), Brown’s gravitator developed a thrust in the direction of its positively charged end.
One such gravitator, which weighed 10 kilograms, was observed to generate a maximum thrust of 0.1 kilogram (1 newton), a force equal to about 1 percent of its weight.
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When oriented upright on a scale and energized, it proceeded to gain or lose that amount of weight depending upon how the charge polarity was applied.
It became lighter when its positive end faced up and heavier when its negative end faced up.

Figure 1.2.A cellular gravitator shown in perspective together with end- and side-view details of its plates.
(Brown, 1928)

Brown entered the California Institute of Technology in 1922.
He spent a good part of his freshman year attempting to win the friendship of his professors and to convince them of his abilities as a first-class “lab man.”
However, when he began mentioning his ideas about electrogravity, no one would listen.
At the end of the year, he had his laboratory equipment shipped from Ohio, set it up in his quarters, and sent invitations to several of his professors, including the renowned Dr.
Robert Millikan, to witness a demonstration of the new force he had discovered.
No one came.
Some time later, one of Brown’s friends tested Millikan by asking him whether he knew of anyone who had ever found a way of modifying or influencing the force of gravity.
Millikan is said to have replied brusquely, “Of course not; such a thing is impossible and out of the question.”

His feelings deeply hurt by the incident, Brown transferred to Kenyon College, in Gambier, Ohio, and the following year he transferred to Dennison University, in Granville, Ohio.
One of his physics professors at Dennison, Dr.
Paul A.
Biefeld, had also been interested in the movement of electric capacitors.
Brown had frequent conversations with Biefeld and came to refer to the electrogravitic phenomenon as the Biefeld-Brown effect, perhaps in respect to Biefeld’s own interest in the subject.
Still, it is not clear that Biefeld actively collaborated with Brown on his research.

For one of his experiments, Brown arranged a pair of gravitators, one at each end of an arm that was suspended from the laboratory ceiling by a long cord attached to the arm’s central fulcrum (figure 1.3).
When energized with between 75,000 and 300,000 volts DC, the connecting arm rotated as each gravitator moved in the direction of its positive pole.
This force occurred in the same fashion even when the capacitor was immersed in a tank of oil, thereby ruling out the possibility that the effect was produced by a wind of electric ions.
Brown’s gravitators could produce this motion with a power input of just 1 watt.
With each gravitator generating 100 grams of thrust, for a total thrust of 2 newtons, the thrust-to-power ratio of Brown’s electrogravitic thrusters calculates to 2,000 newtons per kilowatt.
This is 130 times the thrust-to-power ratio of a jet engine, or 10,000 times the thrust-to-power ratio of the space shuttle main engine.

Brown determined that the electrogravitic effect he observed depended on the amount of charge stored in his capacitors.
As the applied voltage was increased and a greater amount of charge was stored, the capacitors would respond with a greater amount of electrogravitic force.
Moreover, because the intensity of the effect depended upon the capacitor’s mass, he concluded that the induced motion must be due to the capacitor’s ability to generate a localized gravitational field.

Figure 1.3.
An experimental setup designed to measure the thrust produced by Thomas Townsend Brown’s gravitators.
(Photo courtesy of the Townsend Brown Family and Qualight, L.L.C.)

After he left Dennison, Brown conducted astrophysics research for four years, from 1926 to 1930, working at a private laboratory in his hometown of Zanesville and also at Ohio’s Swazey Observatory, where he was in contact with Dr.
Biefeld.
In a variation of his rotating gravitator experiment, Brown suspended a single gravitator from his laboratory ceiling by two wires (figure 1.4).
The gravitator was hung so that it would stay immersed in a tank of oil, so as to reduce the production of ions.
When energized, the pendulum would swing toward the gravitator’s positive pole.
Brown characterized this electrogravitic phenomenon as an impulse.
⁷
He noted that less than five seconds was required for the pendulum to reach the maximum amplitude of its swing, but then, even while he maintained the high-voltage potential, his pendulum would gradually return to its plumb position, taking from 30 to 80 seconds to return.
He noted further that on its return from maximum deflection, his pendulum would hesitate at definite levels or steps, but repeated trials showed that there were no consistent positions to these steps.

Brown also noted that he would have to give his gravitator a rest after each test to see the effect repeat once again.
He had to remove his charging potential for at least five minutes to allow his gravitator sufficient time to “recharge” itself so that it might regain its “former gravitic condition.”
He did not mention what might have been happening during this recharging process, probably because at that time he had no clear idea himself.
He saw that when the duration of the gravitic impulse had been greater, more time was needed off-line to allow the gravitator to refresh itself.

Figure 1.4.
Thomas Townsend Brown’s gravitator hung in pendulum fashion and was submersed in a tank of oil.
(Brown, 1929)

We may gain an understanding of why his gravitator would not hold its initial gravitic force by analyzing what was happening inside its dielectric.
Initially, before high voltage was applied, the dielectric would reside in an unpolarized state.
With the application of voltage, current would begin to flow and the gravitator’s plates would progressively charge up.
The electric field between the plates would exert an electrostatic force on the dielectric’s molecules, causing them to displace slightly—the positive molecular charges being tugged in the direction of the gravitator’s negative pole and the negative molecular charges being tugged toward its positive pole.
As a result, the dielectric would become polarized (see figure 1.5), its electric dipole moment pointing in a direction opposite to the direction of the applied electric field.

The dielectric does not polarize instantaneously in response to the applied voltage; it takes some time to reach full polarization.
This time lag is a common property of dielectrics known as
dielectric relaxation
.
It is analogous to the property of hysteresis observed when a transformer core is magnetically energized.
Most capacitor dielectrics used today have very short dielectric relaxation times—less than microseconds.
However, Brown’s capacitor must have had a very slow relaxation time, probably because it was rather long from end to end and because of the nature of the wax-litharge mixture of which it was composed.
The 30 to 80 seconds or so that the gravitator took to gradually return to its plumb position from its maximum deflection was likely the duration of its dielectric relaxation, the time required for its dielectric to become fully polarized.