Re: something interesting

Posted by Georg Künstler (217.2.165.252) on September 28, 2003 at 02:11:21:

In Reply to: something interesting posted by Michael on September 27, 2003 at 17:40:45:

: copied again from same board.

: The Incredible Genius
: Of Eric Laithwaite
: ©2003 Richard Milton
: www.alternativescience.com
: 9-22-3

: The Royal Institution is Not Amused

: Few people visit the Royal Institution, in London's Albemarle
: Street, for amusement. There are not many laughs at Britain's second oldest
: scientific institution, founded in 1799, where Sir Humphry Davy demonstrated
: his discovery of the elements sodium and potassium and where Michael Faraday
: discovered electromagnetic induction. It's true there have been some lighter
: moments in the famous circular lecture theatre, especially since Sir William
: Bragg introduced Christmas Lectures for Children in the 1920s. But, on the
: whole, this is stuffed shirt territory.

: One night in 1973 the stuffed shirts got a shock from which they
: have still not recovered. It was an experience at which, like Queen
: Victoria, they were not amused. Indeed it was so unamusing for them that it
: is the only occasion in the Royal Institution's two hundred year history
: that it has failed to publish a proceedings of a major lecture, or 'evening
: discourse'. The cause of this unique case of scientific censorship was the
: maverick professor of electrical engineering of Imperial College, London,
: Eric Laithwaite.

: Laithwaite was no stranger to controversy even before his shadow
: fell across so distinguished an institutional threshold. In the 1960s,
: Laithwaite invented the linear electric motor, a device that can power a
: passenger train. In the 1970s, he and his colleagues combined the linear
: motor with the latest hovercraft technology to create a British experimental
: high speed train. This was a highly novel, but perfectly orthodox
: technology.

: The advantages of such a tracked hovercraft are obvious to anyone
: who sees a hover-rail train running along,suspended in the air above the
: track -- it is quiet, has no moving parts to wear out and is practically
: maintenance-free. The significance of this last point quickly becomes clear
: when you learn that more than 80 per cent of the annual running costs of any
: railway system is spent on maintenance of track and rolling stock because of
: daily wear. The British government at first invested in the development of
: his device but later, after a series of budget cuts, pulled out pleading the
: need for economy. Laithwaite, a blunt-speaking Lancashire man who did not
: shrink from speaking unpopular truths, told the Government and its
: scientific bureaucrats the mistake they were making in no uncertain terms,
: but its decision to cancel was unchanged.

: Laithwaite refused to be beaten and took his invention one step
: further. He designed an even better kind of hover train -- one in which his
: linear motor was levitated by electromagnetism giving a rapid transit system
: that not only provides quiet, efficient magnetic suspension over a
: maintenance-free track, but which generates the electricity to power the
: magnetic lift of the track from the movement of the train.

: Speaking in the early 1970s, Laithwaite said of his new 'Maglev'
: system, 'We've designed a motor to propel [the train] that gives you the
: lift and guidance for nothing -- literally for nothing: for no additional
: equipment and no additional power input. This is beyond my wildest dreams --
: that I should ever see that sort of thing.'

: Laithwaite's Maglev design was not quite perpetual motion, but
: certainly sounded enough like something-for-nothing to make the scientific
: establishment turn its nose up in suspicion. But this project, too, was
: cancelled by the government and further development was halted. Today,
: Maglev trains are being built in Germany and Japan but Britain continues to
: spend 80 per cent of its railway budget on maintenance of conventional
: transport systems -- several hundred millions every year.

: With the Maglev project cance on in puzzled amazement, Jones started the
: gyroscope spinning and then allowed it to swing from side to side. The
: wooden box moved along the bench top on its wheels although there was no
: drive to the wheels and no external thrust of any kind -- something that
: shouldn't happen according to the laws of physics.

: 'When Alex switched his machine on,' recalled Laithwaite, 'it was
: quite disturbing to one's upbringing. The gyroscope appeared to be producing
: a force without a reaction. I thought I'd seen something that was
: impossible.'

: 'Like everyone else I was brought up on Newton's laws of motion, and
: the third law says that for every action there's an equal and opposite
: reaction, therefore you cannot propel a body outside its own dimensions.
: This thing apparently did.'

: Laithwaite started some gyroscope experiments of his own, making
: large spinning tops with most of the mass in the rim of the wheel, and he
: found that, 'these very definitely did something that seemed impossible.'

: It was at this critical point in his career that he was invited by
: Sir George Porter, president of the august Royal Institution, to deliver a
: Friday Evening Discourse.

: In retrospect it might seem to be rather risky for Sir George to
: have invited a blunt-speaking and controversial figure to address the
: Institution. But, until then, Laithwaite's clashes with the government and
: scientific bureaucrats over the development of his Maglev train had been a
: conflict over money and over innovation: not over scientific principles. He
: had fought the same kind of battle as most senior scientists in Britain for
: scarce resources. He may have been the sort of outspoken individualist who
: finds himself in the headlines, but he was still a distinguished
: professional scientist, still a member of the club.

: It was against this background that the Royal Institution invited
: him to deliver the lecture. But the Friday Evening Discourse is no ordinary
: lecture. It is a black tie affair, preceded by dinner amidst the polished
: silver and mahogany of the Institution's elegant Georgian dining room, under
: the intimidating gaze of portraits of the giants of science from the
: eighteenth and nineteenth century, staring down from the panelled walls.

: When you are invited to be thus feted by your fellow members of the
: Royal Institution and to deliver a Discourse from the spot where Faraday and
: Davy stood, it is usually the prelude to collecting the rewards of a
: lifetime of distinguished public service: Fellowship of the Royal Society;
: Gold Medals; perhaps even a Knighthood. In keeping with such a conservative
: occasion, those invited to speak generally choose some worthy topic on which
: to discourse -- the future of science, perhaps, or the glorious achievements
: of the past.

: But Laithwaite chose not to discourse on some worthy, painless topic
: but instead to demonstrate to the assembled bigwigs that Newton's laws of
: motion -- the very cornerstone of physics and the primary article of faith
: of all the distinguished names gathered in that room -- were in doubt.

: Standing in the circular well of the Institution's lecture theatre,
: Laithwaite showed his audience a large gyroscope he had constructed -- an
: apparatus resembling a motorcycle wheel on the end of a three foot pole
: (which, is precisely what it was). The wheel could be spun up to high speed
: on a low-friction bearing driven by a small but powerful electrical motor.

: Laithwaite first demonstrated that the apparatus was very heavy --
: in fact it weighed more than 50 pounds. It took all his strength and both
: hands to raise the pole with its wheel much above waist level. When he
: started to rotate the wheel at high speed, however, the apparatus suddenly
: became so light that he could raise it easily over his head with just one
: hand and with no obvious sign of effort.

: What on earth w investigating. I hope I've got sufficient reputation in
: electrical engineering not to be written off as a crank. So when I tell you
: this, I hope you'll listen." But they didn't want to.'

: 'After the Royal Institution lecture all hell broke loose, primarily
: as a result of an article in the New Scientist, followed up by articles in
: the daily press with headlines such as "Laithwaite defies Newton". The press
: is always excited by the possibility of an anti-gravity machine, because of
: space ships and science fiction, and the minute you say you can make
: something rise against gravity, then you've "made an antigravity machine".
: And then the flood gates are unleashed on you especially from the
: establishment. You've brought science into disrepute or you're apparently
: trying to because you've done something that is against the run of the
: tide.'

: The resounding silence of his audience continued long after that
: fateful evening. There was to be no Fellowship of the Royal Society, no gold
: medal, no 'Arise, Sir Eric'. And, for the first time in two hundred years,
: there was to be no published 'proceedings' recording Laithwaite's
: astonishing lecture. In an unprecedented act of academic Stalinism, the
: Royal Institution simply banished the memory of Professor Laithwaite, his
: gyroscopes that became lighter, his lecture, even his existence.

: Newton's Laws were restored to their sacrosanct position on the
: altar of science. Laithwaite was a non-person, and all was right with the
: world once more.

: For the next twenty years, Laithwaite carried on investigating the
: anomalous behaviour of gyroscopes in the laboratory; at first in Imperial
: College and later, after his retirement, wherever he could find a
: sympathetic institution to provide bench space and laboratory apparatus.

: By the mid-1980 -- what he called 'the most depressing time' --
: Laithwaite had conducted enough empirical research to demonstrate that the
: skeptics were right when they said that there were no forces to be had from
: gyroscopes.

: 'The mathematics said there were no forces and that was correct',
: Laithwaite recalled. 'The thing that wouldn't go away was: can I lift a 50
: pound weight with one hand or can't I? Of all the critics that I showed
: lifting the big wheel, none of them ever tried to explain it to me. So I
: decided I had to follow Faraday's example and do the experiments.'

: After retiring from Imperial College, laithwaite began a long series
: of detailed experiments. Sussex University offered him a laboratory and he
: formed a partnership with fellow engineer and inventor, Bill Dawson, who
: also funded the research. Laithwaite and Dawson spent three years from 1991
: to 1994, investigating in detail the strange phenomena that had unnerved the
: Royal Institution.

: 'The first thing I wanted to find out was how I could lift a 50
: pound wheel in one hand. So we set out to try to reproduce this as a
: hands-off experiment. Then we tackled the problem of lack of centrifugal
: force and the experiments were telling us that there was less centrifugal
: force than there should be. Meanwhile I started to do the theory. We devised
: more and more sophisticated experiments until, not long ago, we cracked it.'

: The real breakthrough came, said Laithwaite, when they realised that
: a precessing gyroscope could move mass through space. 'The spinning top
: showed us that all the time, but we couldn't see it. If the gyroscope does
: not produce the full amount of centrifugal force on its pivot in the centre
: then indeed you have produced mass transfer.'

: 'It became more exciting than ever now because I could explain the
: unexplainable. Gyroscopes became absolutely in accordance with Newton's
: laws. We were now not challenging any sacred laws at all. We were sticking
: strictly to the rules that everyone would approve of, but getting the same
: result -- a forc reactionless drive is an extraordinary machine; a
: machine that orthodox science said could never be built and would never
: work. But though it may well eventually prove of great value -- perhaps even
: providing an anti-gravity lifting device -- it is a net consumer of energy,
: just like Griggs's Hydrosonic pump. There is no evidence at present that it
: is an over-unity device -- merely a novel means of propulsion that proves
: there are more things in heaven and earth than are currently dreamed of by
: scientific rationalism.

: But there are other Laithwaites, and there are other engines: some
: even more extraordinary than the reactionless drive.

: Laithwaite's patent filed for his gyroscopic 'propulsion and
: positioning
: system' for a vehicle.

: Click Here for PDF

:
: Townsend Brown And Gravity

: Comment
: From Hsing Lee
: lee8798||s...
: 9-25-3

:
: Over the last several years, I've made note of a number of claims in
: various periodicals relating to the 'discovery' of anti-gravitic principles
: using gyroscopes and high rpm devices, most of which are powered by
: electromagnets. I've noted that people in the UFO and Area 51 watch
: community have speculated that the government may already have developed
: propulsions systems based on these principles. I've also noted that very few
: of the people making these claims choose to reveal where the ideas for the
: various devices they've 'invented' originally came from.

: And that pisses me off. So, I'm writing this blurb to set the record
: straight, and give credit where credit is due.

: In the 1920's a young scientist named Townsend Brown became enamored
: with Electromagnetism. He spend the next 50 years doing this research, most
: of that time spent in obscurity, at the fringes of the mainstream scientific
: community. In the 1940's, the US government considered Mr. Brown an
: invaluable asset. But something happened. Conspiracy theories abound, most
: of them relating to the Philadelphia Experiment.

: I'm not going to speculate on what happened, because I don't know,
: and until we can get some government documents declassified in the future,
: we'll probably never know. Besides, none of this is of importance.

: What IS important is the work Townsend Brown did with
: electrogravitation - gravity and electromagnetism.

: In 1929, Townsend Brown and his professor Dr. Biefield jointly
: published a paper on what came to be known as the Biefield-Brown effect. It
: was Brown who first observed the effect in 1923, and who continued the work
: in this field until his death in 1985.

: Brown discovered an effect he called electrogravitation, which
: differs from electromagnetism. What he originally observed was that by
: placing a condenser between two magnetic poles and changing the polarity, he
: could make the condenser thrust up or down.

: Over the years, he noted that he was able to change the mass of an
: object through these means, and that there appeared to be a direct
: correlation between RPMS and the change in mass. He did his first propulsion
: experiments on water, with great success.

: Eventually, he moved on to using the Biefield-Brown effect to
: levitate objects. He even created his own electrogravitic discs, mini flying
: saucers, which can be seen here:

:
: www.soteria.com/brown/pi
: ctures/bahnson6.jpg

: A wealth of information on Brown and his work can be found here:

:
: www.soteria.com/brown/docs/inde
: x.htm

: The gyroscopic principals being utilized by inventors today are NOT
: the original work of these individuals. It all stems from the work done by
: Townsend Brown a generation prior to the work being done today.

: The man was marginalized by the government and scientific community
: for most of his adult life. Now that he's dead, I see no reason why we
: shoul resonance.
It is no difference between a Besslerwheel or a Repulsine.
It is the same technic.

Best regards

Georg

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