Secrets of Antigravity Propulsion (3 page)

1.4 • ELECTROGRAVITIC MOTORS

In his 1928 British patent, Brown also introduced his invention of a gravitator motor.
This involved a series of gravitator cells arranged in a circle (figure 1.8).
By ensuring that the cells were spaced sufficiently far apart from one another and that the spacing medium was less dense than the dielectric medium within each cell, the cells would collectively generate unbalanced forces and hence produce rotation.
He noted that this motor may either be “independently excited,” that is, run by an external source of electric power, or be “self-excited,” that is, energized from electric power that it generates itself.

A later version of his gravitator motor was described in U.S.
patent 1,974,483, filed in February 1930 and which was issued to Brown in September 1934.
This used a rotor made from alternating sectors of marble and varnished wood, separated by copper-plate electrodes across which a high-voltage charge was applied (see figure 1.9).
In another variation, he used alternating sectors of lead oxide and paraffin wax; essentially he alternated a high-density dielectric with a low-density dielectric.

In his 1928 patent, where he discussed the possibility of powering his motor from electric power that the motor itself would produce, he pointed out that the electric power output generated by the motor could far exceed the electric input needed to run it.
He stated:

Figure 1.8.
A gravitator motor composed
of gravitator cells (F) positioned around the
circumference of a wheel.
(Brown, 1928)

Here it will be understood that the energy created by the operation of the motor may at times be vastly in excess of the energy required to operate the motor.
In some instances the ratio may be even as high as a million to one.
.
.
.
In said self-excited motors the energy necessary to overcome the friction or other resistance in the physical structure of the apparatus, and even to accelerate the motors against such resistance is believed to be derived solely from the gravitational field or the energy of gravitation.
¹⁴

In effect, Brown boldly states that his motor is a perpetuum mobile.
There is a question as to whether he was overstating this motor’s over-unity capability, for he makes no reference to experimental data.
Also, there is no evidence of anyone having reproduced this design and having obtained such high electrical or mechanical outputs.
Nevertheless, such a blatant violation of the first law of thermodynamics in principle is possible in cases in which a gravitational field is made to follow a circular path, as in Brown’s gravitator motor.
That is, because the gravitators mounted on the wheel’s periphery would generate a circumferentially oriented gravity field and carry this field along as the wheel turns, regardless of the wheel’s position, the induced gravity field would always cause further rotation.
In effect, the wheel would rotate in a state of circular free fall.
Just as a mass is able to fall forever in an infinitely deep pit, so too would this rotor be able to turn indefinitely without reaching the end of its potential energy supply.
All the while, power could be extracted from the wheel’s shaft at no cost, save that needed to power the gravitators.

Figure 1.9.
A rotor component for an electrostatic
motor built and patented by Thomas Townsend
Brown that used dielectric sectors of alternating high
and low density.
(Brown, 1930)

Such vortical gravity fields are rarely observed in nature, because Earth’s field is for the most part directed radially with respect to Earth’s center.
However, there may be marginal exceptions to this rule, as is the case in the vicinity of Argostoli Bay, on the island of Cephalonia, located off the northwest coast of Greece.
Several kilometers northwest of the coastal town of Argostoli, there is a place where water from the bay flows inland, runs downhill from sea level, and, after a few hundred meters, disappears into a fissure in the rock.
To find where this water goes, Austrian geologists added 350 pounds of a tracer dye to this inflow and, using sensitive equipment, two weeks later detected this same dye on the other side of the island fourteen kilometers to the east in a spring issuing from a subterranean cavern.
Curiously, the water in this cavern is situated several meters above sea level and eventually flows downhill, emptying back into the bay.
Thus, the water makes a complete circle!
One hundred years ago, local residents fashioned a channel for this inflowing water and built a waterwheel to harness its energy to produce electric power (see figure 1.10).

What causes water on the western side of this bay to flow downhill, below sea level, and then flow uphill toward the eastern side, returning once again to the bay?
Some have suggested that geothermal, subterranean hydrostatic pressures may be responsible for siphoning the water upward.
Because of the existence of several other unusual phenomena in the region, the Greek physicist Panagiotis Pappas believes that a gravitational field anomaly may instead be responsible.
For one thing, the water flow in Argostoli Bay changes its direction about every quarter of an hour.
This is most easily seen from the vantage point of the one-kilometer-long bridge that spans the shallow southern end of the bay.
There, one can see water flowing briskly under the bridge and passing through its arches at speeds of up to one meter per second, but after some minutes it slows to a stop, reverses, and begins to pick up speed in the opposite direction.
This effect is not at all related to lunar tides, which occur on a much longer, twelve-hour cycle.

Across the bay from Argostoli, near the village of Loukouri, lies a huge boulder that for many years was observed to very slowly sway back and forth.
Because of its motion it came to be called Kounopetra, meaning “rocking rock.”
If a sheet of paper was placed under one end of this rock, some time later we would find that the sheet was caught under the rock and could not be removed.
Later still, however, the rock’s center of gravity would shift and once again the paper could be removed.
Perhaps the boulder’s slow rocking, the gradual change in water-flow direction in the adjoining bay, and the gravitational anomaly responsible for propelling the subterranean flow of seawater uphill to its spring outlet all arise from the same cause—a vortical instability in the local gravitational field that causes motion tangential to Earth’s surface.
If so, the waterwheel at Argostoli may have been the first gravitational perpetual-motion machine built in modern times.

Figure 1.10.
Waterwheel on Cephalonia Island built over a sluiceway to generate electricity from inflowing water.
The water level drops about 2 meters below sea level by the time it reaches the waterwheel and thereafter drops several more meters before entering a fissure.
(Photo by the author)

1.5 • BROWN’S GRAVITO-ELECTRIC DISCOVERIES

Brown kept a sharp eye on the daily operation of his electrogravitic motor.
In the course of his studies, he found that the rate of rotation of his motor was not constant; it varied depending on the time of day.
Further observation revealed that its torque rose and fell according to the lunar and solar cycles.
A diurnal sidereal cycle was also present in which the gravitic torque changed as a result of the Earth’s rotation relative to a fixed point in space lying in the general direction of the galactic center.
He observed similar cyclic influences in his gravitator pendulum experiments in which the total duration of the pendulum’s developed impulse was seen to vary with cosmic conditions, such as the pendulum’s alignment with the sun and moon at times of conjunction or opposition.
Ruling out factors such as changes in temperature and supplied voltage, he concluded that the impulse was governed solely by the condition of the ambient gravity field potential.
He found that any number of different kinds of gravitators, operating simultaneously at very different voltages, revealed the same impulse duration at any given instant and underwent equal variations over extended periods of time.
The cause of these variations greatly intrigued him and became a focus of his gravity research throughout his life.

In 1930, Brown left Swazey Observatory and began working at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C., as a specialist in radiation, field physics, and spectroscopy.
From 1931 to 1933, the Naval Research Laboratory placed him in charge of a project whose stated purpose was to investigate certain unusual “electric” effects found in fluids and in massive high-K dielectrics.
Brown found that such massive high-K dielectrics exhibited the strongest electrogravitic coupling.
Again, he found that the magnitude of the electrogravitic thrust varied with the time of day.

Brown constructed expensive recording instruments, some of which resembled the electrostatically energized multisegmented rotor he had developed in the 1920s but which used massive dielectrics with much higher K values.
He called these
sidereal electrometers
.
For several years, he took continuous readings with them under carefully controlled conditions, keeping voltage and temperature constant and shielding his units from magnetic and electrostatic fields in the environment.
His sidereal electrometer rotor was typically 12 inches in diameter and was suspended from its center by a thin wire that allowed it to rotate under torque in a horizontal orientation.
A sequencer applied 11,000 volts for thirty seconds across the rotor segments, causing the rotor to turn by several degrees.
The power was then shut off for three minutes to allow the rotor to return to its relaxed, untorqued position.
The cycle would then repeat.
The rotor’s energized and relaxed angular positions were automatically recorded on a slowly advancing paper strip, and later the trends were statistically processed to check for possible cyclic correlations.
In 1973, Brown wrote the following about his findings:

There were pronounced correlations with mean solar time, sidereal time and lunar hour angle.
This seemed to prove beyond a doubt that the thrust of the “gravitators” varied with time in a way that related to solar and lunar tides and a sidereal correlation of unknown origin.
These automatic records, acquired in so many different locations over such a long period of time, appear to indicate that the electrogravitic coupling is subject to an extraterrestrial factor, possibly related to the universal gravitational potention or some other (as yet) unidentified cosmic variable.
¹⁵

In addition, Brown’s Naval Research Laboratory investigations unexpectedly revealed that the electric resistivities of certain high-density dielectrics also undergo cyclic changes correlated with solar and sidereal time.
He devised a resistance-sensing device that was able to measure these changes.
Unlike his sidereal electrometer, it had no moving parts.
He made observations with these two types of detectors, both in Washington and at sea on the Navy-Princeton International Gravity Expedition to the West Indies conducted on board the U.S.
submarine S-48.
Interestingly, Admiral Hyman Rickover, who was then a lieutenant, served as the executive officer (second in command) for this expedition.
Brown’s laboratory findings were summarized in a study titled “Anomalous Behavior of Massive High-K Dielectrics,” which, it seems, has yet to be declassified.
A Freedom of Information Act request was made to the Naval Research Laboratory in May 1995 to retrieve a copy of this document.
However, the response came back that the library had no record of it.
Either they did not do a thorough search or it was relocated and its existence and whereabouts are presently classified.

The results of these gravito-electric measurements were so encouraging that in 1937 a decision was made to extend the investigation and to establish another naval field station some distance west of Washington.
Measuring equipment was set up in a constant-temperature vault in the basement of Brown’s home in Zanesville, with provisions made for automation of the data-recording process.
These new measurements confirmed the Naval Research Laboratory findings.
The field station was moved the next year to the University of Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia.
The investigation was interrupted during World War II but was resumed again from 1944 to 1949 in California, at Laguna Beach and Los Angeles.
The project was sponsored by the Townsend Brown Foundation, a scientific research organization established by Brown’s parents in the mid-1920s.

In a letter he wrote in 1968 to the researcher Thomas Turman, Brown commented about the observed variations in electrogravitic force:

There are a number of mysteries concerning the nature of the [electrogravitic] force, largely the variations which it undergoes.
There appear to be at least three semi-diurnal cycles:

1. relating to mean solar time (with maxima at 4 AM and 4 PM)
   
2. relating to lunar hour angle with maxima approximately 2 hours after the upper and lower meridian transit of the moon, and
   
3. relating to sidereal time with a sharp peak at 16h S.T.
   [Greenwich sidereal time] and a minor maximum at 4h S.T.
   The reasons for these variations as well as the reasons for the almost continuous secular variations [are] completely unknown.
   ¹⁶
   

At sixteen hours Greenwich sidereal time, the western end of the Scorpius constellation was reaching its zenith, a sky position lying within 25 degrees of the galactic center.
Consequently, Brown theorized that the sidereal effect he was observing was due to some kind of radiation emanating from the center of our galaxy.
He concluded that these “sidereal rays” were not electromagnetic in nature and did not resemble cosmic rays.
They had no known ionizing power, were not disturbed by Earth’s magnetic field, and were highly penetrating.
He eventually came to feel that they must be high-frequency gravitational waves.

Figure 1.11.
Thomas Townsend Brown in his underground gravito-electric monitoring station at his home in Zanesville, Ohio.
(Photo courtesy of the Townsend Brown Family and Qualight, L.L.C., 1937)

Brown resumed his sidereal measurements in 1970 from an isolated site on Catalina, an island situated off the coast of Southern California.
Around this time, he discovered a new correlated effect.
He found that certain materials, including massive high-K ceramic dielectrics, certain kinds of resistors, complex silicates, and natural igneous rocks and clays, spontaneously generate DC electric potentials, with some materials producing as much as 0.7 volt.
Moreover, he found that this generated DC potential varied from hour to hour and from day to day in much the same way as the resistance variations he had observed in the Naval Research Laboratory experiments.
¹⁷
In a paper about his findings, he commented:

It has been found that certain basaltic and granitic rocks exhibit a self-potential which undergoes large cyclic variation not related to temperature, pressure, humidity or other local variables.
Long-time monitoring has revealed periods of the year when the self-potential correlates consistently with sidereal time, reaching maximum and minimum values vectoring on the Galactic center (17h 43m RA).
At other times, solar cycles predominate and [the] sidereal component disappears.
Even so, a circadian pattern nearly always exists which cannot be correlated with ambient laboratory conditions.
Hence, it is of interest not so much that a self-potential exists, but that it varies with a cosmic pattern.
¹⁸

Brown’s discovery that these variations were registered on two different kinds of detectors helped to support his hypothesis that the sidereal effect was due to an energy flux, as opposed to simply a potential gradient.
Whatever it was, this phenomenon apparently had the ability to input electric energy into certain dielectric materials, substances that he named
petrovoltaics
.
Because his measurements indicated that this flux could penetrate even to subterranean vaults, he concluded that it might be reasonably identified with high-frequency gravity wave radiation.
He found that, in addition to their DC voltage, petrovoltaics also generate alternating current (AC) electric noise, spanning a broad radio frequency band.
He theorized that this AC component may arise from cosmic gravity waves that constantly pass through the substance and impart some of their energy to it.
He speculated that the rock might act as a rectifier, converting a portion of these energy fluctuations into DC potential.

If electric energy is spontaneously generated in petrovoltaics, it is reasonable to expect that they would also be evolving heat.
In fact, in the 1920s, the American inventor and industrialist Charles Brush took measurements on petrovoltaics and demonstrated that they spontaneously gave off heat even though they were not radioactive.
¹⁹
He reported his findings in a
Physical Review
paper titled “Retardation of Gravitational Acceleration and the Spontaneous Evolution of Heat in Complex Silicates, Lavas, and Clays.”
His calorimetric results were subsequently confirmed by Dr.
Elmer Harrington, of the National Bureau of Standards.
²⁰
Probably because it was not well understood, the phenomenon received little attention from the scientific community.
If such heat evolution indeed exists, it is reasonable to speculate that a substantial portion of the geothermal flux originating from the Earth’s crust arises in this fashion.