Secrets of Antigravity Propulsion (12 page)

It is unlikely that an industrialist as prominent as Lear would make such a strong statement unless he himself had seen concrete evidence that such an electrogravitic effect was possible.
Bell, whose company in Buffalo had built the first piloted aircraft in history to fly faster than sound, also was optimistic about the results of gravity research then in progress.
The New York Herald Tribune
quoted him as saying, “Aviation as we know it is on the threshold of amazing new concepts.
The United States aircraft industry already is working with nuclear fuels and equipment to cancel out gravity instead of fighting it.”
⁴⁰

Grover Loening, the first engineer hired by the Wright brothers and whose forty-year career in aircraft design, construction, and consulting had been decorated by the U.S.
Air Force, told Talbert, “I firmly believe that before long man will acquire the ability to build an electromagnetic contra-gravity mechanism that works.
Much the same line of reasoning that enabled scientists to split up atomic structures also will enable them to learn the nature of gravitational attraction and ways to counter it.”
⁴¹

Trimble’s company, Glenn Martin, was the first in the United States to investigate electrogravitational propulsion.
⁴²
This is not surprising given that Brown worked for Martin as early as 1939.
The New York Herald Tribune
said that, under Trimble’s initiative, Martin Aircraft was building a laboratory between Baltimore and Washington to house the new Research Institute for Advanced Study, which would be committed to investigating the theoretical basis of electrogravitics and to conducting programs in applied research.
Regarding the development of this new technology, the
Herald Tribune
quoted Trimble as saying, “I think we could do the job in about the time that it actually required to build the first atomic bomb if enough trained scientific brain-power simultaneously began thinking about and working towards a solution.
Actually the biggest deterrent to scientific progress is a refusal of some people, including scientists, to believe that things which seem amazing can really happen.”
⁴³

Dudley Clarke, president of Clarke Electronics, was also reported to be optimistic about gravity control.
In an article dated November 22, Talbert stated, “Mr.
Clarke notes that the force of gravity is powerful enough to generate many thousand times more electricity than now is generated at Niagara Falls and every other water-power center in the world—if it can be harnessed.
This impending event, he maintains, will make heat and power needed by one family for an indefinite period.”
⁴⁴

Two weeks after the
Herald Tribune
story came out,
Aviation Report
stated:

E
LECTRO-GRAVITICS
E
FFORT
W
IDENING

Companies studying the implications of gravitics are said in a new statement, to include Glenn Martin, Convair, Sperry-Rand, Sikorsky, Bell, Lear Inc.
and Clark[e] Electronics.
Other companies who have previously evinced interest include Lockheed, Douglas and Hiller.
The remainder are not disinterested, but have not given public support to the new science—which is widening all the time.
The approach in the U.S.
is in a sense more ambitious than might have been expected.

Aviation Report
, December 9, 1955
⁴⁵

Of these companies, Brown had particularly strong ties with Lockheed, having worked there just ten years earlier.
The Aviation Studies’ “Electrogravitic Systems” report, issued two months after the December 9 article quoted above, noted the increasing number of U.S.
aviation companies that were expressing interest in antigravity propulsion technology:

One of the difficulties in 1954 and 1955 was to get aviation to take electrogravitics seriously.
The name alone was enough to put people off.
However, in the trade much progress has been made and now most major companies in the United States are interested in counterbary.
Groups are being organized to study electrostatic and electromagnetic phenomena.
Most of the industry’s leaders have made some reference to it.
Douglas has now stated that it has counterbary on its work agenda but does not expect results yet awhile.
Hiller has referred to new forms of flying platform, Glenn Martin say gravity control could be achieved in six years, but they add that it would entail a Manhattan District type of effort to bring it about.
Sikorsky, one of the pioneers, more or less agrees with the Douglas verdict and says that gravity is tangible and formidable, but there must be a physical carrier for this immense trans-spatial force.
This implies that where a physical manifestation exists, a physical device can be developed for creating a similar force moving in the opposite direction to cancel it.
Clarke Electronics state they have a rig, and add that in their view the source of gravity’s force will be understood sooner than some people think.
General Electric is working on the use of electronic rigs designed to make adjustments to gravity—this line of attack has the advantage of using rigs already in existence for other defence work.
Bell also has an experimental rig intended, as the company puts it, to cancel out gravity, and Lawrence Bell has said he is convinced that practical hardware will emerge from current programs.
Grover Leoning is certain that what he referred to as an electro-magnetic contra-gravity mechanism will be developed for practical use.
Convair is extensively committed to the work with several rigs.
Lear Inc., autopilot and electronic engineers have a division of the company working on gravity research and so also has the Sperry division of Sperry-Rand.
This list embraces most of the U.S.
aircraft industry.
The remainder, Curtis-Wright, Lockheed, Boeing and North American have not yet declared themselves, but all these four are known to be in various stages of study with and without rigs.
⁴⁶

The report added that a certain amount of antigravity work was also going on in Europe.
It mentioned two French companies getting involved and several private ventures developing rigs in Britain.
It also mentioned that one Swedish company, two Canadian companies, and several German companies were also making studies.
The Airplane Corporation and Gluhareff Helicopter were among the foreign companies that had recently joined the growing gravity research club.

The report extrapolated that it should be possible to produce a Mach 3 fighter disc by electrifying the craft with million-volt potentials and using surface coatings having K-values of more than 10,000.
By that time, K figures of 6,000 had been obtained from some ceramic materials, and researchers had demonstrated 30 percent weight reductions in some energized devices.
Moreover, there were prospects of synthesizing ceramics with K figures as high as 30,000.
Thus it was felt that an operational manned aircraft could be built simply by scaling up what was then already in existence.

The emphasis on using high-K dielectric materials for the craft’s hull indicates that its designers planned to achieve gravity control primarily by electrically charging the craft’s surface rather than depending entirely on the gravitic effect of external ion clouds.
Nevertheless, since this vehicle was to obtain its high-voltage power from a flame-jet generator, its designers probably planned to make beneficial use of such auxiliary ion cloud effects.

One month after the February 1956 Aviation Studies report was released,
Interavia
magazine echoed similar optimism regarding the practical application of Brown’s electrogravitic technology:

Such a [gravitic] force raised exponentially to levels capable of pushing man-carrying vehicles through the air—or outer space—at ultrahigh speeds is now the object of concerted effort in several countries.
Once achieved, it will eliminate most of the structural difficulties now encountered in the construction of high-speed aircraft .
.
.
The force is not a physical one acting initially at a specific point in the vehicle that needs then to be translated to all the other parts.
It is an electrogravitic field acting on all parts simultaneously.
Changes in direction and speed of flight would be effected by merely altering the intensity, polarity and direction of the charge.
⁴⁷

In December 1956, Aviation Studies issued a second progress report that pointed out the military advantages of the technology and mentioned that government funding was being continued:

Electrostatic discs can provide lift without speed .
.
.
This could be an important advance over all forms of airfoil which require induced flow; and (lift without airflow) is a development that deserves to be followed up in its own right, and one that for military purposes is already envisaged by the users as applicable to all three services (Army, Navy, & Air Force).
This point has been appreciated in the United States and a program in hand may now ensure that development of large sized disks will be continued.
This is backed by the U.S.
Government, but it is something that will be pursued on a small scale.
This acceptance follows Brown’s original suggestion embodied in Project Winterhaven.
⁴⁸

The report also made the following revealing assessment of the electrogravitics industry situation:

Already companies are specializing in evolution of particular components of an electrogravitics disk.
This implies that the science is in the same state as the ICBM, namely that no new breakthroughs are needed, only intensive development engineering.
This may be an optimistic reading of the situation; it is true that materials are now available for the condensers giving higher K figures than were postulated in Winterhaven as necessary, and all the ingredients necessary for the disks appear to be available.
But industry is still some way from having an adequate power source, and possessing any practical experience of running such equipment.
⁴⁹

The report suggests that other companies were duplicating Brown’s flying disc experiment and similarly obtaining speeds in the range of hundreds of miles per hour.
It states, “High speeds in electrostatic propulsion of small discs will be worth keeping track of (by high speed one means hundreds of mph) and some of these results are beginning to filter through for general evaluation.”
⁵⁰
Interest in the subject of antigravity continued to accelerate in the following years.
In January 1957, the Institute of Field Physics at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill held a weeklong scientific conference on the role of gravitation in physics.
The conference was attended by forty-five physicists from the United States and seven other countries.
Brown was undoubtedly among them.
Interestingly, the Wright Air Development Center of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base was one of the sponsors of the meeting and was also in charge of publishing the conference proceedings.
⁵¹
That same year, J.
E.
Surrat Jr., vice president of the Society of Aeronautical Weight Engineers, said that Wright-Patterson was equipped with a multimillion-dollar installation designed for the research and study of antigravity forces.
⁵²

A.
V.
Cleaver, who worked as assistant chief engineer at the Aero Engine Division of Rolls-Royce, assessed the status of electrogravitics in a February 1957 article published in the prestigious
Journal of the British Interplanetary Society.
⁵³
He estimated that government and industry in the United States were spending on the order of $5 million annually on fundamental research on electrogravitics and noted that firms in France, Italy, and Japan may also have been researching the phenomenon.

Nevertheless, unknown to the many newcomers being indoctrinated into the field of electrogravitics, this multicompany R&D effort was merely supplementing a highly classified effort that had already been in progress since the end of World War II.
This preexisting project, known as Project Skyvault, was actually ahead in achieving the goal of a manned antigravity craft.
Yet before examining this project, let us study subsequent developments made by Brown that greatly improved the propulsion force of his technology.

3.1 • THE PARIS EXPERIMENTS

Skeptics had claimed that Brown’s flying discs were propelled entirely by ion wind pressure and would lose their propulsive force if tested in a vacuum chamber where few air molecules would be present, but in 1955 and 1956, they were proved wrong.
Under the sponsorship of the French government, Brown conducted a series of vacuum chamber experiments at facilities made available by Société Nationale du Constructions Aeronautiques du Sud-Ouest, a Paris-based aeronautical corporation.
There, he successfully flew a pair of miniature saucer airfoils in a high vacuum of less than one billionth of an atmosphere.
Not only did the discs propel themselves more efficiently, but they also sped faster, since, without ion leakage, they could be energized with greater voltages.
The tests used a 200-watt power source to supply DC potentials ranging from 70 to 220 kilovolts.
¹
Few details are known about these tests because the results were considered a confidential matter.
However, it appears the discs measured about 4 to 5 inches in diameter and had a central body made of solid aluminum.
^2,
 
3
By comparison, the 1.5- and 3foot-diameter discs that Brown had tested in his carousel demonstration were made of Plexiglas and lightweight sheet aluminum.

In addition to these miniature airfoils, Brown conducted vacuum chamber tests of a rotor apparatus.
(Appendix D presents one of his reports on this experiment.
⁴
) The apparatus consisted of an arm that rotated about a central bearing and that was fitted at each end with a pair of electrodes (figure 3.1).
When the electrodes were oppositely charged, the rotor spun like a pinwheel, revolving around its axis in the negative-to-positive direction.
It was found that the torque increased in an exponential fashion with applied voltage.
At times when a stream of electrons would discharge from the negative to the positive plate, the rotor would acquire a momentary burst of forward thrust.
At around 150 kilovolts, the rate of rotation became so great after four or five discharges that the voltage had to be reduced for fear that the rotor might fly apart and shatter its glass bell-jar enclosure.
Moreover, Brown found that the thrust persisted even when the capacitor elements were each surrounded by Plexiglas enclosures in the manner shown in figure 3.1.
Since there was no way that ions could escape from the enclosures, ion thrust could be ruled out as a motive force.
He also used asymmetrical capacitors having electrodes of differing sizes in which either the positive plate was larger than the negative or the negative plate was larger than the positive.
However, neither of these geometries had any appreciable effect on the amount of thrust generated by the discharge events.

In February 1973, Dr.
Rolf Schaffranke, who wrote the book
Ether Technology
under the pseudonym Rho Sigma, received a letter from Brown responding to inquiries he had made about Brown’s Paris experiments.
⁵
In that letter Brown disclosed that the thrust on the rotor was several orders of magnitude larger than ion thrust could account for.
He also related to Schaffranke that he had obtained a greater thrust when a massive high-K dielectric such as barium titanate was placed between the capacitor plates.
He also acknowledged that a residual thrust was obtained even when there were no discharges, clear evidence of the existence of a Biefeld-Brown electrogravitic effect.

Figure 3.1.
Top view of the electrogravitic rotor used in Thomas Townsend Brown’s Paris vacuum chamber experiments.
(After T.
Brown.)

Several effects could explain why very large thrusts accompanied each discharge event.
As one possibility, the volley of high-energy electrons that formed the spark discharge could have delivered an electrogravitic impulse to the positive electrode.
The electron burst would have moved from the negative to the positive electrode of the sparking rotor capacitor at close to the speed of light.
That is, in the prevailing hard vacuum, electrons accelerated by a 150-kilovolt potential would have attained a velocity of about 82 percent of the speed of light.
Subquantum kinetics predicts that these free electrons would have generated a local gravity potential hill, and as they flew toward the positive electrode, they would have carried this gravity potential hill with them.
In the rotor rest frame, this would have appeared as a forward-propagating gravity potential wave.
The sharp potential rise at the leading edge of this wave would have had a matter-repelling effect, which would have given a thrust impulse in the negative-to-positive direction as it momentarily passed through the positive electrode mass and any intervening dielectric.
This electrogravitic impulse effect is further discussed in chapter 6 in connection with the gravity beam experiments of the Russian materials scientist Eugene Podkletnov.

The nonlinear field gradient associated with each spark could also have contributed to the thrust.
Brown observed that the discharges were emitted from a point on his negative electrode and fanned out to produce a broad luminescence on his positive electrode.
In other words, regardless of the size of his positive electrode, whether it was a 4-inch disc or a half-inch sphere, the field produced from the discharge would have fanned out from a small high-flux-density region to a larger low-density region.
The fanning geometry of the discharge and the sudden onset of the discharge would momentarily have produced a nonlinear electric field between the capacitor plates.
This in turn would have generated a large virtual-charge gradient between the capacitor electrodes along with an accompanying gravity potential gradient that would have momentarily induced a large thrust on the capacitor dielectric in the direction of the positive electrode, where the field’s flux density would have been lowest.
We will defer further discussion of such virtual charge electrogravitic effects until section 4.2 of the next chapter.

Brown’s work as a consulting physicist for Société Nationale de Constructions Aeronautiques du Sud-Ouest came to an end in 1956, when the company merged with a larger company, Sud Est, that apparently had no interest in electrogravitics.
That summer he returned to the United States with all his papers and took up residence in Washington, D.C.
^*6
There, he contacted the Navy, hoping to show them his Paris data, which proved that their earlier ion wind theory was wrong.
He was met by Admiral Rickover, but instead of showing interest in Brown’s results, the admiral sternly advised him not to take his electrogravitics work any further, that it would be best if he dropped it.
⁶
Nevertheless, by the end of 1956, the Pentagon had begun sponsoring electrogravitics research that was then in progress at some of the major aerospace firms and had apparently elevated the matter to a top-secret status.
Was Brown, the father of this amazing technology, to be excluded from the inner circle of companies chosen to develop his ideas?

Brown was unwilling to give up that easily.
He continued his work under the sponsorship of a Delaware company he had formed called Whitehall-Rand Corporation, which had offices in both Washington and London.
He probably chose the name Whitehall to allude to the executive branch of the British government, which is based largely on Whitehall Street in London.
In July 1957, while serving as its director of research and development, he protected his electric disc and flame-jet-driven aircraft ideas by applying for three U.S.
patents (2,949,550; 3,018,394; and 3,022,430).
When these were issued, in 1960 and 1962, they were assigned to Whitehall-Rand.
Brown was the only contributor of patents to this company.

3.2 • OVERUNITY LEVITATION

In the fall of 1957, Brown teamed up with Dr.
Frank King and Agnew Bahnson Jr., who also had a strong interest in antigravity research.
Bahnson, an industrialist from Winston-Salem, North Carolina, had in 1956 played an instrumental role in establishing the Institute of Field Physics at the University of North Carolina, an organization dedicated to the study of gravitation.
Having a longtime interest in Brown’s electrostatic antigravity propulsion work, Bahnson constructed a well-equipped private laboratory in Winston-Salem and invited Brown down as consultant to work with himself and King.
Beginning in November 1957 and continuing for several years, the three carried out electrogravitics research on various kinds of “ballistic electrode” saucer models.
Bahnson kept a record of their work in a series of laboratory notebooks, and some of this was reviewed by Charles Yost in the second issue of
Electric Spacecraft Journal.
⁷
This work led Brown and Bahnson to file a series of U.S.
patent applications in May 1958: an “electrokinetic apparatus” patent awarded to Brown in June 1965 (3,187,206) and two “electrical thrust producing device” patents awarded to Bahnson in 1960 and 1966 (2,958,790 and 3,263,102).

That same year, Brown and his friends organized a company called Rand International Limited, with Brown serving as its president.
Together, they carried on electrogravitics experiments and applied for more than seventy-five patents in twelve major countries (the United States, Australia, Canada, France, Belgium, Great Britain, Germany, Holland, Italy, Japan, Sweden, and Switzerland).

It was around this time that Brown succeeded in developing a 15inch-diameter, dome-shaped saucer that was capable of levitating its own weight!
Kitselman, Brown’s mathematician friend, related that he had contacted Brown after being out of touch with him for several years and was told, “The lift isn’t just 1 percent any longer; the apparatus will now lift 110 percent of its own weight!”
Kitselman and his wife immediately flew to Washington and with their own eyes saw a moderately heavy gadget made of metal and Pyrex lift itself right up when 50 kilovolts of electricity were applied and float steadily when a slightly lower voltage was used.
⁸

In an April 1973 letter to Schaffranke, Brown confirmed that he had performed this demonstration but indicated that he had conducted experiments throughout the entire voltage range from 50 to 250 kilovolts DC.
Illustrating his letter with the sketch depicted in figure 3.2, Brown wrote:

Mr.
Kitselman witnessed an experiment utilizing a 15" circular, dome-shaped aluminum electrode, wired and energized as in the attached sketch.
When the high voltage was applied, this device, although tethered by wires from the high voltage equipment, did rise in the air, lifting not only its own weight but also a small balance weight which was attached to it on the underside.
It is true that this apparatus would exert a force of upward of 110% of its weight.
⁹

In a November 1, 1971, letter written to electrical engineer Tom Turman to respond to some of Turman’s questions, Brown described tests on an 18-inch-diameter disc that lifted 125 percent of its weight:

We used a triarcuate ballistic electrode as the anode and a small electrode underneath as the cathode .
.
.
The large electrode was made of a balsa umbrella-like frame with aluminum foil covering.
A thin glass stand-off insulator mounted the cathode as shown in the drawing [drawing shown in appendix A].
The lift of this unit at 170 kv was about 125 grams.
The electrode structure itself weighed only about 100 grams, so it was actually self-levitating.
¹⁰

Figure 3.2.
A cross-sectional view of a model electrogravitic saucer that was capable of sustained levitation.
(Brown, April 5, 1973, letter written to R.
Schaffranke)

The report titled “Electrohydrodynamics,” issued in March 1960 by the Electrokinetics Corporation, presents a diagram of this 18-inch-diameter test model that shows that a toroidal air current vortex was generated beneath the arcuate electrode when the electrode was electrified (figure 3.3).
¹¹
It notes that this vortex was an effective aerodynamic pattern for inducing lift, although vacuum chamber tests that were conducted showed that any momentum that may have been imparted by this ion wind would have been many orders of magnitude too small to account for the observed thrust.
The report notes that hydrostatic pressure exerted against the entire inner surface of the large arcuate electrode resulted in a lift force.

In a second letter to Turman, Brown drew cross-sectional views showing how the hydrostatic air pressure is distributed beneath the positively charged electrode for differing inclinations of the negative electrode (see figure 3.4).
¹²
The pressure was found to be up to 0.25-inch water gauge (~0.64 gram per cm
²
) and more positive below the electrode than in the disc’s immediate surroundings.
Estimating from Brown’s sketch, the positive pressure beneath the positive electrode would have averaged about 0.1 inch water gauge, or about 0.25 gram per cm
²
.
An 18-inch-diameter saucer would have had a cross-sectional area of 1640 cm
²
; hence, this pressure would have imparted an upward force of up to 400 grams, more than enough to support the 125-gram weight.

Commenting on various means of steering or stabilizing the flight of such a saucer, Brown wrote:

Figure 3.3.
Thomas Townsend Brown’s 18-inch-diameter triarcuate ballistic electrode and its generation of a toroidal airflow vortex.
(Courtesy of the Townsend Brown Family and Qualight, L.L.C.)

Figure 3.4.
The pressure profile under Brown’s vertical lift triarcuate ballistic electrode.
(Drawing from a 1971 letter from T.
T.
Brown to T.
Turman; see
appendix A
, letter 3)

It was found that, by canting the center electrode, the pressures could be unbalanced so that one side or the other could be lifted.
This could provide horizontal stability in a large prototype.
An alternate way of doing this is to provide three independent electrodes in triangular configuration instead of one center electrode.
These electrodes can be differently charged in order to change the electric field configuration under the ballistic canopy and this did away with the necessity for a mechanical moving part.
Horizontal stability could be maintained entirely electrically.
¹³

Brown recognized that the forces involved may not be just electrogravitic, but may also involve a more conventional electrostatic force phenomenon such as electrophoresis (the force exerted on a charged particle in the presence of electric fields) or dielectrophoresis (the force exerted on dielectric materials in the presence of nonuniform electric fields).
He referred to this new field of study generally as
electrohydrodynamics
—the study of high-intensity electric field phenomena and their influence on nonconducting (dielectric) media.
He regarded this area of investigation to be the counterpart to the more widely known field of magnetohydrodynamics.
Electrokinetics Corporation’s “Electrohydrodynamics” report also describes vacuum chamber tests in which a 6-inch-diameter ballistic electrode saucer was made to levitate when energized at 150 kilovolts DC, the lift force reaching a detectable level above 10 kilovolts.
The graph reproduced in figure 3.5 indicates how thrust and input electric current were found to vary as air pressure was decreased, with the supplied DC voltage being kept constant.
¹⁴
The report notes that when the pressure fell moderately below one atmosphere, current rose catastrophically and went off-scale when the pressure had decreased to about a hundredth of an atmosphere (10 mm of mercury).
At these low pressures, the air spontaneously ionized, producing a glow discharge that shorted out the electrodes.
As a result, the electrogravitic thrust plummeted, only to reappear when the pressure had dropped to the very low value of 4 × 10
^-6
atmospheres (0.003 mm of mercury).
At and below this hard vacuum pressure, the glow discharge diminished, along with a precipitous drop in current to the device.
Significantly, the graph demonstrates that
thrust remained constant at 17 grams (0.6 g/cm
²
), despite the major drop in supplied current
.
The report states:

A significant feature of the curves is that, except for this limitation [the glow discharge gap], thrust remains constant with the reduction in pressure to 10
^-6
mm of Hg, while current consumption falls off sharply—demonstrating the system’s improved efficiency as a hard vacuum is approached.

For this reason the strong indication remains that thrust results primarily from electrostatic field stresses, rather than plasma flow.
Thus electrohydrodynamics may prove more efficient in a hard vacuum (10
^-12
mm of Hg) than in air where the induced plasma actually seems to result in unnecessary power consumption.
¹⁵